Please tell me why my own social media feed has been trolling me?!
Yesss, I do get it. It hears me, and it probably sees me too. Alright cool.
But the Internet is getting too good at knowing what you want.
Hear me out though, this is what’s going on…
The old internet waited for you to type your requests into your preferred search engine. The new internet watches patterns and tries to answer the question before you even get to ask it. Now, you do not have to explicitly say “I like this” because your clicks, pauses, rewatches, scrolling speed, purchases, and viewing habits can communicate that for you. The algorithm is smart.
The thing is, if a system becomes very good at predicting what you would possibly want, it also becomes increasingly capable of shaping what you might most likely want next.
Do you think your phone listens to everything you say?
Your phone would not record your conversations and upload them to third parties. Your phone doesn’t capture when you say you need an iPhone 17 Pro Max, but it has memories of the websites you visit, the videos you might have watched till the end or almost, what you click, apps you use, interests inferred from your behavior.
Now it combines those signals and sums up what it thinks you’re interested in as a person. Well, there's little good evidence that mainstream advertising systems routinely need to record your conversations to explain targeted ads, and there are other, much more mundane data signals that can explain the coincidence.
What happens when you click “Allow App to Track”?
On iPhone, for example, “Allow Tracking” allows an app to track your activity across other apps and websites for the sake of advertising or for measuring advertising effectiveness.
It's about cross-website tracking.
Without tracking permissions and restrictions, apps can potentially connect more of those activities together or use identifiers or signals to recognize that the activity belongs to the same person or device.
That creates a much richer picture of your interests. A big question is, if an algorithm becomes good enough at predicting what we're going to want, can it eventually start influencing what we want in the first place?
Research says it is sheer prediction based on our patterns; we say we are being spied on. Just like you, I am a student searching for answers.
Maybe my phone didn't hear me.
Maybe the algorithm simply knew me well enough to predict me.
And honestly, I'm not sure which one is more unsettling.