I used to say the same thing, but now I have some serious test cases that are very, very, compelling.

As in: a subject never before broached verbally by me or my friend (or anyone I know, and I don't associate with many people), was discussed by me and my friend in the car, with exactly 2 phones in the car, one of which is de-googled (i.e. Runs a non-Google OS with no Google Play, etc).

Both of us receive ads for that subject the next day.

Mind, neither of us had even thought about that subject before, and it was something way out of left field for both of us - as in not at all related to anything in our lives, and was a complete "shower thought" moment for me.

I get there's a lot of predictive analysis out there, but you're talking predicting something for two people with vastly different lives (we're decades apart in age, for example, in very different fields).

And this ad had nothing to do with our common ground either.

I simply can't buy the predictive analysis on this one.

I've never used any of the usual social media nonsense (it always bothered me, the invasiveness was obvious - Lemmy is my first, and only perhaps a year ago and this particular event was 3 years ago), have zero social presence online - no photo storage, etc, have always kept things separated as much as I can (since the 90's, because we saw the data mining coming back then). And neither of us did any search for the subject, because there was no need - it was a throwaway kind of thought.