when a new ad comes up on social media and you backtrack to what your phone must have spied on for it to "find" you

As people have pointed out upthread, it's bizarre how once you've bought something, the algorithm seems to think you want to buy the same thing all over again. For weeks after I bought a plane ticket to Thailand, I was getting ads for special deals on flights to Thailand. But I've already booked the flight, why would I need another one? They're literally targeting the one person who would have absolutely zero interest in booking a flight to Thailand!

Target sends me an email advertising cat food about an hour after I get home from buying cat food

oh no i lingered over a photo of a christmas sweater with the stranger things logo on it except it was "manger things" and a nativity scene and now i'm detecting a rapid influx of christmas ads being served to me. this post probably isn't helping me out here.

maybe google "hajj 2023" "how to convert to judaism" and "diwali candles" ?

not a bad idea

there was a web privacy app I read about years ago that instead of engaging in the arms race of protecting you from profilers, it silently did lots of random searches to make your data meaningless

It's still out there: https://github.com/essandess/isp-data-pollution