My phone IS reading my mind!

[Darkdiamond]

I posted about this a few years ago with some examples of what I eventually just thought were coincidence; I would be silently thinking about something and a video or ad for it would come up in my algorithm. Mumsnet told me not to be so silly. My husband just told me that our phones know us better than we know ourselves, and the content it produces is based on what it knows we are interested in.

Well. Tonight, I was (silently) putting something into the bin and had a very quick thought that American people pronounced the word 'been' as 'bin' . Then I started thinking about English actors doing American accents, and how they probably work with dialect coaches who probably tell them to say 'bin' instead of 'been' as part of their coaching.

So then around 2 hours later I was on youtube shorts for some dopamine and up comes a video from a dialect coach. She is explaining to non native English speakers how they can speak with a US accent. She goes over three words and explains how they are pronounced differently. One is what, another of and the final one 'been'.

I instantly remembered my silent thought from before and it just all seemed really weird.

Anyone else have similar stories? It was just so specific!

Yes and yes!
I have had this suspicion for a while now but was met with disbelief from DH

I have absolutely no idea how it could work. I mean logically it seems insane but its always really random things that I have thought, not even said!

I have thought mine does too at points but how could it?

Yes!!!! Me and my partner agree and I always joke saying we've been chipped. Sometimes it's completely and utterly random I've been thinking and not necessarily anything in my life currently and I'll get an advert or something come up for it. Very odd. But I've experienced it quite a lot.

My phone definitely listens in to conversations. All the time my husband and I will be talking about booking a holiday or buying an appliance for the house, didn't search on my phone or anything, but the same day an advert will be on Facebook about what we've talked about.

Its funny that you say that because I thought my YouTube shorts seem very personalised these days. Shorts are coming up that seem spookily related to my current life

To be honest it sounds like attention bias combined with highly accurate profiling. Every day, there are millions of potential coincidences that you never notice because they don't trigger a memory. However the bin/been thing got flagged up because you happened to think of it and saw the same thing on social media soon after. Statistically, it's really not unlikely for one of the thousands of bits of content you see on social media to coincide with one of the millions of thoughts you had in recent weeks.

The algorithms can't literally read your mind but they can profile people's personalities to an absolutely spooky degree. This is solely based on huge volumes of data they have from people who are extremely similar to you (overlapping gender, demographics, living location, interests, hobbies etc). So they can narrow down the likelihood of serving you content that overlap with something you thought about because thousands of people exactly like you have also interacted with very similar videos. This is often why you might have thought of trying something out or visiting a certain place, and then suddenly get ads for that. It's not magic but just massive amounts of data from other people with similar lifestyles and interests who have already tried out that thing. It's not really far fetched or sorcery because human behaviour is hugely predictable.

My amazon account tries however it decided I wanted hunting equipment just after trumps latest peace effort 🙄 and im now thinking 🤔 what does it know that I dont 😂

Your phone is isn't reading your mind and if you truly think that you need to speak to your doctor.
What is more likely happening is similar to dreaming - you've scrolled something unconsciously, then later your brain has processed it and then it's come up again in your feed or similar.

Someone in an interview explained that it's actually far too expensive for ad companies to actively monitor and store audio data. Imagine the sheer volume of storage and bandwidth needed if they had to "listen in" on people's conversations 24 hours a day. Not to mention the technology or staffing they would have to pay to filter out useful ad leads from boring everyday conversations. It would be like having a phone call going at all hours and it would also drain the batteries extremely quickly,

However the much easier explanation is that they simply profiled thousands of similar families and can easily predict the sort of holidays, appliance or brands you might be interested in. There are hundreds of families just like yours, but 10 years older. Everything they've done is essentially a blueprint for what you are expected to do and the ad companies simply serve you the relevant ads when the time comes along. It's also not hard to predict lifecycles of when people need to make big appliance purchases, especially based on major life events like buying a house, having a baby etc. That's easily obtainable information based on search records, purchase history etc.

Imagine if we had technology to read people's minds and all we did with it was use it for targeted advertising?!

As others have said, it's either a confirmation bias, like when you decide on a holiday destination or a name for your baby and then start hearing it all the time, or else you have subconsciously seen something similar before that put the thought in your head.

Last year I was staying for one night in the Cotswolds and was walking around the town, alone, looking in all the shop windows. I paused at one window as it was jammed full of knickknacks, clothes, ornaments etc. in the centre was a pair of waterproof welly type shoes that looked interesting, never seen them before and I thought to myself that I’d look them up when I got home.
I forgot all about it and in any case I forgot the brand name. When I got home the following day and looked at facebook, there was an advert for the very same shoes. One hell of a coincidence!

Could it be that the phone is subliminally manipulating you to think a certain way and that's why you had the thought, without realising?

All I know is that i saw my kitchen bin and it made me think of how Americans say bin instead of been. Not sure what prior programming I would have needed first

And yet it can’t tell when I’ve already bought the damn thing. Adverts for weeks!

I know that the phone listens to conversations and responds on Youtube. During lockdown was discussing with a friend on the phone how we kept fit, and she mentioned Keep Fit teacher with a very specific name. Later that day, this teacher came up on my feed, though I hadn't looked for her. Recently, i was at the library asking the librarian about a book by Stefan Zweig....his life story came up on my feed. I have many instances of this

But I agree that some things are really uncanny. A Chinese film that I saw in the 90s came up on my feed. It was a film that made an impression on me. I have never googled it or searched or discussed it since then. Never thought about Chinese films or or China or Chinese politics or anything.....but blow me, it came up on my feed! There's so many Chinese films. Why that film,and why now?!!!! It is a film in my memory.

The people you might know on FB definitely does
i was outside work, someone I have never met stopped his car and asked me for directions. I had FB open and so did he (I could see his phone)
later that day I was at home and open FB, he pops up on people you may know
apparently it’s a Meta thing if you have apps open at the same time

Are you sure you don't talk out loud to yourself sometimes? (I do!) I don't think ad companies record but I do think they listen in and pick up on key words...

This is probably not a coincidence . About ten years ago my partner was working for a company working with this very technology, you’d stand near an item and it would have some sort of tag/ chip in the display/ product that , if you lingered, would send targeted advertising to your phone later. I’m sure it’s very advanced now.
As I wandered round superdrug yesterday my phone kept pinging messages from superdrug reminding me of offers in store, which happens in lots of places .

Yes my phone definitely listens to my conversations! Too many coincidences with the advertising on FB ! Ie talking to friend about getting a dog buggy and suddenly adds on FB about dog strollers.

Op- I completely get this. So much so that I asked a relative who works in tech about it- as we all know our phones listen, but I noticed connections to things I had thought about, but not searched for or said out loud.

I can’t explain it very well, but I was told it’s obviously not tech reading your mind, but something to do with what you notice when it’s merely a coincidence, but your brain connects the dots and makes a pattern e.g. let’s say you spot a nice t shirt, but you don’t buy it, for the rest of that day you’ll notice t shirts people are wearing, T shirts in shop windows, T shirts on social media, whereas the day before you may not have had even one single thought about a T shirt.
So you may have been served the ‘talk in a US accent’ video before, maybe many times, based on other things about the USA you’ve looked up, even your news interests, but you’ve never noticed it, except the day you thought about the bin pronunciation you did notice that video about the dialect coach and you made a connection. In reverse, you are more likely to be thinking about US accents in the first place due to the news at the moment, so you thought it about the bin where you might normally have not thought about US accents at all.

I still think there’s some other social media dark arts or a chip involved

I go with friends to a pub quiz regularly. The losing team have to nominate a subject for the following week’s quiz. One time I went to see Warhorse at the theatre. On the way home, I was thinking ‘ooh, fictional horse names. That would make a good picture round in the pub quiz.’ You could have Joey from Warhorse, and Black Beauty and Champion the Wonder Horse and Artax……’ I never had this conversation with anyone, and I never googled anything. It was just an idea in my head whilst driving home. When I got home I brought Facebook up on my phone and the first thing it showed me was a photo of Artax!

Facebook reads your mind.

I've known my phone has been listening to my conversations for years now, but recently, the last month or too, there very much seems to be an element of mind-reading going on, yes!

Same relative explained though that some is advertising- say you have bought a product that based on average use will run out in 3 months, in three months time you’ll see an advert for it, just around the time you’re due a top up. So you’ve been thinking ‘ooh my product is running out, I must buy some more’ then if you see the ad or you’re served offers/deals on it the next day, it will feel as though they’ve read your mind!

I have definitely thought this. I know your phone will listen to you but sometimes I swear if shows me things that have just popped in to my head when it relates to nothing I’ve said. Bizarre.