Stop us if you've heard this one before.

You're talking about something random like, say, pensions or a new jacket you bought in a particular shop. You then open up Instagram or Facebook and see an advert relating specifically to what you were just talking about appear in your timeline. You're then utterly freaked out, resolve to delete your app, destroy your phone, and live in the wilderness - or you shrug, chalk it up to the Baader-Meinhof complex (it's a thing, look it up), and move on with your day.

Youssef Sarhan noticed that this very thing was happening way too often for it to be coincidence, so he set out to document - via Twitter - the amount of times it happened and what he or friends of his were talking about near their phone, or even in a phone conversation.

As it turns out, there were a lot of coincidences. So many that it couldn't be reasonably considered coincidence.

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is only just a few tweets, but you can check out the full Twitter thread here and see for yourself. It's also worth pointing out that Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp and Twitter can't use your microphone or geo-location without your express permission - so it's really a question of what apps you allow to track or listen in on conversations, and what they're listening in on.

Either way, this is definitely unsettling.

 

Via Twitter