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My sister's phone guessed she was pregnant before she told anyone, and I can't stop thinking about it | Algorithmic Anxiety - Thought Shares

wesleyb20•5d ago

My sister's phone guessed she was pregnant before she told anyone, and I can't stop thinking about it

My sister called me two weeks ago from Portland and said her phone started showing her baby ads before she told a single person she was expecting. She had only searched a few things late at night, and somehow the ads lined up fast. Part of me says it is just math, lots of people search that stuff, and the apps have no clue who she is. But another part says our phones know our bodies and moods better than we do, and nobody ever said yes to that. Where do you all land on this one, is it just ad targeting or is something bigger going on?

2 comments

2 Comments

michaeltorres2d ago

The part about "nobody ever said yes to that" is what gets me, because that is the real thing here. It is not one phone guessing one pregnancy, it is the whole slow drift where we hand over little bits of ourselves and never get asked, just kind of shrug and keep scrolling. I see it everywhere now, my weather app wants my location always on, my grocery store card knows I buy the same stuff every Tuesday, the insurance mail somehow arrives right when I am stressed about money. Each piece alone looks like nothing, like math, like a million other people searched the same thing. But stack them all up over ten years and it stops feeling like math and starts feeling like being watched by something that never blinks. So yeah I lean toward it being ad targeting, but ad targeting that has gotten so good we basically live inside it without agreeing to it, and that is the part worth being weirded out by.

robin5912d ago

Watching your phone turn into a psychic is both funny and creepy at the same time, like congrats, your pocket spy just beat your sister to her own announcement. But @michaeltorres nailed the part that actually bugs me, it is the stacking that gets you, not any one ad. A single baby ad could be random, but add up years of location pings, late night searches, shopping habits and suddenly the thing knows your life before your family does. Here is the boring truth though, it is probably not reading her body, it is reading the tiny clues we all drop without thinking, like a change in what she googled at 2am or how long she paused on some post. Still, "it is just math" stops being comforting when the math is better at guessing your secrets than your own sister. Nobody signed up to be predicted, we just clicked accept on stuff we never read and kept scrolling.