Okay Facebook, It's Getting Creepy

Some of you may be familiar with Clifton StrengthsFinder? I like this tool--and the whole psychology behind it--quite a lot. (I've written about it here on the blog in the past too...check out this, and this, and this for a look into the past.)

My wife works in the Career Development Center here on our campus, and they use StrengthsFinder as one tool to support discerning students trying to figure out "What should I do with my life??" It's helpful for that sort of thing. And, like many couples, we sometimes wind up talking about work at home. And so it happened that last night, we had a conversation about Strengths, which isn't wildly out of the ordinary, but it also isn't something that we talk about all that often.

And I know I haven't looked up the StrengthsFinder website on my computer or phone anytime recently--probably for a couple of years, actually, until today when I searched it up as was writing this post.

But here's why I'm thinking about this right now. Earlier today I had this ad show up in my Facebook feed:

Hmmm...this feels a little (lot) bit creepy, Facebook.

Now, I don't want to sound like a conspiracy theorist or anything...but the truth is, my phone was setting next to me on the side table by the chair I was sitting in when my wife and I were talking about StrengthsFinder last night.

I want to reemphasize that I haven't been searching online for anything related to Strengths any time recently, so it's not like Facebook is grabbing my recent search history data from my browser or anything like that.

So...it just feels a little creepy that today I suddenly get an add for the topic of our conversation last night. Perhaps just a little too serendipitous to believe this happened because I fit a certain profile for advertising? At the risk of sounding a little paranoid, it sure seems to me that Facebook is listening in through my phone.

I've heard it said that privacy in the 21st Century is an illusion. That might be true...but if so, maybe we've done it to ourselves with all of the technology we've welcomed into our lives. Are we embracing big technology companies a little too easily?