Comment by nickpadge

I suspect this occurred to me multiple times over the last few years. I would seem to have ads on YouTube specifically related to vocal conversations I had with coworkers or family members, and far enough outside of my interests where the ads raised suspicion.

I was considering performing experiments to test if this was the case, but never got around to it. I wanted to be certain it wasn’t an instance of the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon.

More to the point, this is an incredible breach of privacy. The amounts noted in the article are pathetically small for such an intrusion, especially over the period of 10 years for impacted users.