'Your Social Media Apps are Not Listening to You': Tech Worker Explains Data Privacy in Viral Twitter Thread
On 5/26/21 at 12:56 PM EDT
Privacy tech worker Robert G. Reeve took to Twitter on Tuesday to share that he'd been served an ad for a brand of toothpaste his mother uses. Coincidence? Definitely not.
Reeve had just returned from a weeklong stay at her home. But before people could use this as yet another example of phones listening in on conversations, Reeve put together a now-viral Twitter thread explaining how digital ads really work.
"I'm back from a week at my mom's house and now I'm getting ads for her toothpaste brand, the brand I've been putting in my mouth for a week," he tweeted. "We never talked about this brand or googled it or anything like that. As a privacy tech worker, let me explain why this is happening."