Is your phone really listening to you? Do you feel like a conspiracy theorist asking that question? Are you still convinced it eavesdrops all the time, no matter how paranoid it makes you sound?

For the record, I’m the furthest thing from a conspiracy theorist; in fact, I’ve written multiple articles explaining why conspiracy theories are generally bunk. But honestly, I’m this close when it comes to my frickin’ phone listening in on conversations.

Allow me to illustrate:

Two ‘coincidences’ that are definitely not coincidences

Last night, my husband and I FaceTimed with our daughter, who goes to college six hours away. During our conversation, she told us a woman in her community was giving away clothes, including beautiful traditional Indian outfits. She also told us about a class assignment that involved logical fallacies.

This morning, when I opened Facebook, I saw this ad first thing:

I had not Googled. I had not Amazoned. I’d in no way searched for Indian clothing. All I did was listen to my daughter share this story from the other side of the state.

Later this morning, my husband said he’d been reading an interesting article about logical fallacies.

“Did you look up something about logical fallacies?” I asked him, “Or did it just come through your feed?”

“No, it just came through my feed,” he said.

This isn’t the first time real-life conversation topics have shown up in my feed. But the blatantness of these “coincidences” irked me. So I decided to dig in and do a bit of research.

Researching whether phones eavesdrop made me feel like I’m crazy

In Googling all of this, I sort of expected an affirmative response,........

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