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Could it just be confirmation bias? Or could it be that the correlation is the other way around: You see something online, decide to pick that as your topic with your partner (unconciously) and the ads show up because of the initial location you have seen the topic.
While that's possible, the more plausible explanation is Meta reading your messages imo.
WhatsApp Privacy Policy: How We Work With Other Meta Companies As part of the Meta Companies, WhatsApp receives information from, and shares information (see here) with, the other Meta Companies. We may use the information we receive from them, and they may use the information we share with them, to help operate, provide, improve, understand, customize, support, and market our Services and their offerings, including…
(All this is just a guess based on OP's report and the above quote.)
Just because that the messages might be sent end-to-end encrypted from Sue to Joe does not mean Meta cannot read them. Meta has control over the app Sue uses. So they could send them to Meta unencrypted in addition to sending them to Joe in an encrypted fashion. Or they just extract the relevant terms: Sue->Joe: "Hello Joe, I'm so excited! We are going to have a baby! Let's call it Dingbert. You're not the father! Ji…
I've always suspected them of recording conversations, also why I think Android has gradually tightened permissions and visibilty around speech to text/microphone/camera use.
IANAL of course, but you should read the ToS carefully and you will probably find something that allows them to read your messages anyway. e2e encryption doesn't forbid to read the messages as you type or read them or read a screenshot of the screen or whatever they can do inside an app :P They were caught activating your camera by "error" a while ago https://www.macrumors.com/2019/11/12/facebook-bug-camera-bac... As…
We are seeing the same thing. More so, my wife sent me a picture of my daughter working on a puzzle. Less than 24 hours later, her Instagram was showing ads for a store that was selling the same type of puzzle as the one my daughter was playing with. So it's not just terms but images too.
There's no reason you'd have noticed an ad about the puzzle in the wash of content and other types of ads.
Tangental aside; it still confounds me where the business opportunity of WhatsApp resides for Meta if they "can't" get access to the data.
Can someone working on WhatsApp weigh in on this or are there very restrictive NDA's? I would expect it's an interpretation of the TOS, so WhatsApp should be able to communicate if this is a possibility or not.
guess nobody from meta could comment on this without a legal writing the answer for them
Some options: 1. Nobody is reading your WA messages, the same topics can be learned from your browsing activity or other msgs, eg. by reading your sms texts. 2. Meta is reading your messages directly in-transit, server-side. 3. Meta is not reading your messages server-side, but the Meta apps extract keywords from your conversations and request relevant ads from the ad servers. 4. Another non-Meta app is doing the abo…
Another option would be that META created a small model that could be run client-side and picked the right selection of ads to show elsewhere without even exfiltrating keywords.