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Next day, Harmonica ads.
People jump through amazing cognitive hoops to try to rationalise it away. The ads were directly correlated with a conversation.
WhatsApp, this place & a couple of motorbike forums are as close as I get to so called Social Media, but its a trade off.
My phones all have location services off unless rarely needed for GPS navigating & all iPhone/Android apps have microphone access modified & limited.
All phone voice activated functions are disabled & there are no 'Digital Assistant' type device in the house, as I simply do not want or need the 'functionality'.
I'm aware of how this might read, but rampant paranoia has not yet set in & I don't have a franchise in a tinfoil hat company
Or, have a look here for some interesting stuff
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palantir_Technologies
https://www.fastcompany.com/40567706/heres-how-to-see-the-data-that-tech-giants-have-about-you%20
* Also, if you are bothered, all browsers allow you to get rid of your browsing/search history, even 'for all time' as Chrome apocryphally states
Edit: https://www.thefretboard.co.uk/discussion/159547/microsoft-word-censorship#latest
Still think 'they' aren't listening
That is exactly what all FaceBook & similar data is
All these systems do is make links between data and subjects (ie people). So...
Subject A spends some time researching harmonicas, harmonica music etc.
Subject B visits subject A (your phone logging in to their wi-fi, for example, and using the same IP address - or simply logs GPS activity at the same place for a while)
Subject B might be interested in similar things to subject A.
Link subjects A and B.
Show subject B some harmonica ads that would be appropriate to subject A, and see if they click on them (as a link test).
Subject A doesn't click the ads, consider the link a failure. Don't show harmonica ads any more.
Add in the possibility that other subjects (C, D, E etc) might've visited and thought, "I might get a harmonica, looks cool..." and immediately logged searches for them, and there's an even stronger link that the model will try to explore.
This is not only trivial for these machine-learning models, it's precisely what they're designed to do.
Hrm. Hrrmmmmm. HRRRRMMMMMM!!
That's not strictly true, is it Ed (and I know you know this). Publicly accessible geographic information about a specific public IP address is often wildly inaccurate due to how blocks are registered, re-sold, sub-let and so on amongst ISPs. Generally speaking you're only really revealing the device's location to the ISP, with a small chance it might be broadly accurate on a general search if you then log into a service that logs the accessing public IP and bothers do such a search.
And of course if you fire up a VPN to somewhere else, then all bets are off (unless you can't trust your VPN provider).
It really pisses me off the lazy cop show tech stuff about "I've got his IP, I'm sending you the location now, it's the third bedroom down the corridor on the 7th floor when you get out of the elevators at the right-hand end of the building" because it's such total and utter bollocks.