My phone must be listening to me

I awoke at 8:32 AM with a unexplainable pain in the lower left side of my back. The kind of unexplainable pain I assume comes with getting older. Going to bed I was absolutely fine, so it must have happened while I was asleep. Embarrassing, I know.

At around 10:00 AM I asked my parents if we had any ibuprofen (we did) or deep heat (we did not).

Not once did I approach my phone or the wider internet with this situation.

Lunch time rolls around and I whack a podcast on while making my food. The first advert on the podcast? An ad for a nearby medical clinic that specialises in treating back pain.

I’d never heard the advert before. But today, on the day I have this mystery back pain, I get an advert for treating back pain.

Is that a coincidence?

I surely miss many adverts throughout week because they simply didn’t resonate with me. I wasn’t the target person, and so it just turns into background noise.

So maybe I was just paying attention for once.

But unlike a billboard in the street or an ad read out by a podcast host, this was digitally placed. These are delivered to an individual based on information the podcast app or phone manufacturer collects on them.

So, I hear an advert for a back pain clinic on the same exact day I wake up with back pain.

It doesn’t seem like a coincidence.

I didn’t Google, Youtube, or Reddit it. I didn’t enter anything in a health tracker or note taker. I didn’t text, email or Whatsapp anyone about it.

It must be listening to me.

My phone must be listening to me.

It must have heard me talk about back pain. It then shared that information with the apps I used, who then delivered me highly personalised adverts. It’s not even a particularly radical notion anymore. I think everyone kind of knows it - that our phones listen to us and these companies know everything about us. We conceded this personal information years ago, and we concede it everyday, every time we agree to a T&C agreement or download a new app.

META’s Threads is under scrutiny for this exact thing. Below is all information required by META/Threads if you download the app from the App Store, copied directly from the Store:

Third-party advertising:

Developer's advertising or marketing:

Analytics:

Product Personalization:

App functionality:

Other purposes:

I won’t pretend to know what a lot of that entails, but bloody hell that’s a lot of bullet points.

Should we be more worried about this than we are? Is it just not worth worrying about? Is this the new paradigm for our online and digital experience?