The witches in the sky

For the first time in my life, two weeks ago, Facebook recommended a driving school to me.

I was completely shocked.

This is what happened:

That day, a friend successfully completed his driving test after about five attempts. He came home, and we were all excited. I told him, “Hand over the baton to me so that I can start the theory too.”

Everyone was like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, you are next. You can start it now that you don’t really need a car. This way, you won’t have to do it under pressure.”

About an hour later, I came to Facebook, and lo and behold, the first ad I saw was for a driving school.

“What type of nonsense is this?” I said.

“What’s the problem?” he asked.

“See, Facebook is recommending a driving school for me just because we talked about driving.”- I told him

Ordinarily, there would be no better explanation for this than concluding that “Facebook is recording everything we are saying.”

But we know, practically, that is not possible. No single company currently has the infrastructure and processing power to record every conversation happening. It doesn’t even make economic sense to record every conversation everyone is having.

So how did Facebook manage to know we talked about a driving license?

We don’t know exactly, but we deliberated on some options.

First of all, we are both on the same network (Internet). We are both using the same gateway (IP). That is data that is easy for Facebook to get, and I would be surprised if they don’t log that already.

Second of all, the person is in my WhatsApp contacts.

Now, the IP + our connection on WhatsApp is a strong indicator to Facebook that I am in that guy’s circle.

Now, how did Facebook manage to know that the guy has passed his driving test?

That is easy, because the driving school or company might be advertising on Facebook or probably using some marketing tool to get customers that requires him to accept data sharing terms and conditions.

When we put all these pieces together, we came to the conclusion that, yes, it is possible for Facebook to know that my close friend has completed his test and that I may be interested too. Without recording our conversation.