General Discussion

So here's the context: Usually the ads I get on FR are from Hiveworks Comics, which I assume have an independent partnership with fr - whenever google isn't tailoring my ads, I get hiveworks. Because I clear my cookies on mobile, I pretty much always get hiveworks because google has nothing to work off of.

Now the situation: My mom is moving and we are emptying her cabinets. I put my phone aside to help with the kitchen. My dad mentions a kitchen cabinet with liquors and drinks.
I come back to FR.
I get not one, but two ads for liquors.
Mind you: this is a pg13 website, I do not drink, I have never looked up a liquor on google in my life. The only possible explanation for getting liquor ads is that my phone was listening in on my dad.

So you are def not paranoid, this happens.
You guys have any stories with "my phone is listening in" incidents?

I don't have one personally, but that story with the murder and the Smart Home Device really gets me. Apparently someone was murdered in their home, and police didn't really have any idea or leads, but they noticed the person had like an Alexa or Google Home thing, so they asked the company if they could access the records, and apparently the device had recordings saved within it or they were able to pull out recognized speech from prior times to assist in the investigation.


It's kind of cool that it could help in that situation, but it's also really troublesome to hear that I could be constantly listened to and recorded. I don't have any of those assistant or voice features enable on my phone, but I don't think that stops it.

I think my I-Pad listens in, too. I am pretty used to it by now, and if anything it just makes me laugh. I once cracked a couple of jokes about anime maids. After that, me and my unfortunate brother were swarmed with anime maid ads for a couple of days.

Yeah. I didn’t even ever say anything about this, I just was thinking ‘hm. I think I might want to buy a new hoodie’ and then boom tons of hoodie ads.

That's a bit creepy, not gonna lie. D:

My dad bought me a Venus fly-trap for my birthday one day and I was thanking him, I went onto google to tell all my internet friends because I have no real friends and everywhere. EVERYWHERE. before I had said to ANYONE there were hundreds of ads for the Venus fly-trap. And my mom was getting ads on her Facebook acc too, which was super spooky
long and short of it, this 5yr old fly trap (named Fly Guy because I'm an unoriginal Mario nerd) still shows up on my ads every so often

The good news is that voice-recognition won't work for somebody like me because I'm constantly saying weird stuff. Trying to work out what ads to present to me would give the system an aneurysm.

Plus, I use ad block on everything sooooo lol.

If I remember correctly, my mom said that one of her friends had an incident like this. Might've not been algorithm, might've been.

The friend was talking over Facebook via text (keep that in mind!) about wedding dresses. She wasn't going to get married.

Well, someday later she got a mysterious phone call where someone was trying to sell her wedding dresses. I'm not sure how they got her phone number. To my understanding, she didn't have her number up on her profile.

oh definitely. it happens to me all the time. i saw someone somewhere say that the government/corporations wouldn't do something ridiculous like...implant chips in us through vaccines (cough cough) because smartphones do that job already