I've noticed this phenomenon as well, but one thing you can do is watch the network traffic on your router, and you'll see that they aren't snooping in on your conversations. What's likely happening is that Facebook knows that you're married to her, and since spouses/friends/close relationships tend to have the same general interests, it's a good way to narrow down the scope of advertisements for you and your social graph. If you search for a coffee machine, then your wife is also likely to search for a coffee machine, therefore, it follows that Amazon would show an ad for a coffee machine to your local network.
Like I said, I've definitely observed this phenomenon before. I've also observed that it's likely confirmation bias: I don't remember all the OTHER things Facebook advertises to me. The only reason that ad for the coffee machine jumps out at me is because I was just talking about it, but who knows how many times it showed up on my feed and I just glossed over it because I tend to gloss over ads?
Posts like this come up quite often, and I definitely think it's dodgy and suspicious, but ultimately, I think it's just clever marketing tactics by Facebook to determine what to advertise to you.
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I've noticed this phenomenon as well, but one thing you can do is watch the network traffic on your router, and you'll see that they aren't snooping in on your conversations. What's likely happening is that Facebook knows that you're married to her, and since spouses/friends/close relationships tend to have the same general interests, it's a good way to narrow down the scope of advertisements for you and your social graph. If you search for a coffee machine, then your wife is also likely to search for a coffee machine, therefore, it follows that Amazon would show an ad for a coffee machine to your local network.
Like I said, I've definitely observed this phenomenon before. I've also observed that it's likely confirmation bias: I don't remember all the OTHER things Facebook advertises to me. The only reason that ad for the coffee machine jumps out at me is because I was just talking about it, but who knows how many times it showed up on my feed and I just glossed over it because I tend to gloss over ads?
Posts like this come up quite often, and I definitely think it's dodgy and suspicious, but ultimately, I think it's just clever marketing tactics by Facebook to determine what to advertise to you.