I recently got home from a business trip where I was away for six days. I had my usual dog-sitter come and stay with my dog.

Isn’t she cute?

Anyway. I was standing in the living room while the sitter was giving me the download and she mentioned that she (the sitter) was having hot flashes. Not four hours later, I was on Reddit, and the first ad I got was for anti-hot-flash medication. I’ve never searched for it, never typed anything about it, never really talked about it. But my phone heard someone new talking about it and BOOM! there it was.

The most amusing example of this I have is a few years ago, pre-COVID. I was trying to find a new pair of gloves, so I said it several times in the vicinity of my phone. No ads for gloves. But one night I was out to dinner with some friends and one of them mentioned (in context) that he’d had a hernia operation some time back. That night on Instagram I started getting ads for hernia mesh lawsuits.

I’m sure somewhere in the T&C that none of us read is permission for our phones to spy on us. It’s a cost of doing business these days. If the service is free, you’re the product.

This whole post was just an excuse to post a picture of my dog, I think.