And yet they still insist your phone doesn't listen to you. Happened more times than I care to remember - indeed I swear on occasion I've just had the thought about something, not even spoken about the idea or searched for it and yet somehow a related advert comes up.
Your phone doesn't listen to you. The amount of voice data being sent back would use up all of peoples data within a week (assuming you don't have unlimited data). Your phone would also be constantly hot, as anyone who has used one of those face changing apps can demonstrate.
I seem to remember the whole point of Google's advertising system in the beginning was that it was different, less obtrusive and more pleasant. There we go.
Reminds me of Facebook… in 2004, Zuckerberg said 'It might be nice to get some ads going to offset the cost of the servers.' How things change.
Google and Facebook probably know more about you than you know yourself about you. It can only be a matter of time before you can type into Google what's my inside leg measurement and it'll come back 30" or whatever, in the actual result even though you never told Google that...
I was once talking to a colleague at work about going to FriendsFest, we were talking about the show at lunch as it was a mutual interest. Soon as i load up Facebook on my phone low and behold there's adverts for the upcoming event we had just been discussing.
The explanation is your colleague will have googled FriendsFest, your phone will have detected his phone and thus Facebook determinated mutual interest and shown you the advert.