Is my phone listening to me?

Yes. Or, rather, it was.

For the longest time I would experience these weird coincidences — I would talk about something, and soon after I would see an Instagram ad about that thing. Am I crazy? Paranoid? Are these just coincidences? Once an accident, twice a coincidence, three times a pattern. How about three hundred times?

These occurrences were proven beyond doubt when I spent a week away from home with family. In the course of a week three witnesses confirmed what I have been experiencing for months. We would even run tests — talk about a brand or generic product, and the Instagram ad would pop up within minutes. It was disconcerting how quickly the ads appeared.

I got a new phone. Unlike previous upgrades, I did not copy all my stuff (data, apps, settings) from the old phone to the new. I set up the new phone from a clean slate. I did not activate Google Assistant or voice typing (voice-to-text), and restricted microphone access.

The “coincidences” stopped.

Is my phone still listening to me? If it is, it’s not tipping its hand…