Is my phone spying on me or am I just too predictable?

IT was raining. I had an excuse for a lazy Saturday morning browsing the papers. I was engrossed by Caitlin Moran’s column on Framing Britney Spears – a New York Times documentary I’d watched the week before on the awful treatment of a popstar I’d grown up with.

I read a worrying interview with the author of American Dirt, Jeanine Cummins – a book I’d devoured last year – in which she described the abuse and threats she’d received in the wake of her bestselling novel about Mexican immigrants.

And I revelled in an interview with Arsenal footballer Hector Bellerin, instantly proclaiming to my footballmad husband that he was my favourite player ever as I learnt for the first time about this vegan, electric car driving, fashionista and gay rights campaigner who plants 1,000 trees every time his team wins.

A couple of minutes later I picked up my phone and casually scrolled through Twitter. There, almost at the top of my feed, was Senor Bellerin – a player I’d barely heard of 20 minutes previously. Maybe he just happened to be all over Twitter because he was in the Sunday Times. But it felt like more than a coincidence. And of course, a short scroll down and there was Caitlin Moran. Only Jeanine Cummins failed to appear in my social media feeds that day – and I think she’s pretty much eschewed Twitter after being attacked by trolls.

The next day I was out running with a friend. I admired her leggings. “Stronger”, she said, referring to the Scandinavian brand that made them. By the time I got home, there was an almost identical pair of leggings being advertised in my Facebook feed. In fact, it seems every time I’ve admired a friend’s clothes they’ve cropped up on social media within hours.

There is a widely held belief that Facebook and Instagram listen in to users through their smartphones and then serve advertisements based on what those users have said aloud. Facebook has repeatedly denied this. In a statement in 2016, it said it didn’t use the microphone to target ads, but instead it would predict what you might be thinking about based on age, location, interests and device usage.

That might just about explain how Facebook seemed to know I was pregnant before I did. Weeks before I realised I was having my first baby, ads started appearing all over my Facebook feed for pregnancy tests and maternity wear. I hadn’t been searching for anything of the sort but I guess my age and recent wedding could have piqued the antennae of social media’s algorithms. So I dismissed that as clever marketing rather than eavesdropping.

When Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified in front of US Congress in 2018, he was asked whether the social media platform was listening. He denied it outright and dismissed it as a conspiracy theory.

He’s unlikely to have lied, given the ramifications that would have if he was ever found out. So if they’re not listening, how do my private conversations seem to turn so quickly into targeted advertising on my feeds?

Sadly, I’m probably just more predictable than I think. In the summer, I buy sandals. When I’m running I buy leggings. When I got married, I had a baby. Let’s face it, the problem is me and my phone addiction, not Facebook and its perceived eavesdropping devices. If I wasn’t spending too much time scrolling through social media, I wouldn’t see the adverts. Time to switch off and read the paper I think.