FEATURE: What Your Scrolls Tell the Internet About You
By Mumeenah Oyindamola Abdulrahman
We have all had that moment. You think about getting a bicycle without saying it out loud, and by the next day your Instagram feed is full of bicycle ads, with prices and shops in your own town. It feels less like advertising and more like someone read your mind. So you start to wonder: is the internet following my thoughts?
We are the generation that lives online. We scroll, we shop, we learn, we gist, and we build our dreams on our phones. But have we ever stopped to ask how much our phones know about us without us ever speaking?
The Microphone Myth
Let us start with the biggest myth. Many young people believe their phones secretly listen to their conversations to show ads. Facebook, Google and Apple have all denied this. Researchers who have spent months trying to catch phones secretly recording have found no evidence.
The technical reason is simple: always-on listening at a global scale would drain your battery fast, use suspicious amounts of data, and risk the app being banned from app stores. When US Senator Gary Peters asked Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, owners of Facebook, directly under oath in 2018 whether Facebook used phone microphones for ad targeting, he said no. The real villain is not your microphone.
What is actually at work is metadata. Not what you say, but everything around what you do.
The Real Engine: Metadata
How long you paused on a post. Whether you re-watched a TikTok. What you searched last week. Where your phone was at 6pm on a Tuesday. Who else was near you. What you almost clicked but did not.
One signal alone means nothing. But stitched together across thousands of interactions, they form a digital footprint that can predict what you want next, even before you fully admit it to yourself. Google reportedly checks hundreds of behavioural signals in a fraction of a second to decide which ad wins your attention. That bicycle ad was not magic. It was a prediction based on what people who behaved like you did next — and they bought a bike.
Then there are cookies. Cookies are the glue that holds this together. A cookie tags your browser with an identity, not your name, but a consistent fingerprint. It allows a site you visited on Monday to inform an ad you see somewhere else on Wednesday. Third-party cookies exist specifically to follow that fingerprint across the web, building one full picture from small pieces collected in different places.
Why Doomscrolling Makes You Vulnerable
This is where doomscrolling stops being just a bad habit and becomes a vulnerability.
When you are actively browsing — searching, comparing, choosing — you are in control. But doomscrolling is different. It is low-friction, semi-automatic, and you have no control over what comes next. That lack of control is the point.
In that state, two things happen quietly. First, psychology comes in. There is something called the mere exposure effect — the tendency to start liking something simply because you have seen it many times, even without really thinking about it. You do not need to be convinced; you just need to see it enough times while your guard is down.
Second, the platform is running a constant experiment on you. Every pause, skip and rewatch is data. It quietly discards what did not work and doubles down on what almost worked. You never see the failed attempts. You only remember the one time it “got you right.” That is not mind-reading. It is survivorship bias — you forget the dozens of wrong ads and remember the one accurate hit.
That is why your feed feels like a mirror you did not ask for. It feels like a discovery you made yourself, but it is not personal. The system does not need to know you. It needs to know people statistically similar to you, and it borrows their behaviour and hands it back to you as coincidence.
So What Can Be Done?
If the danger is not one company spying, but an economy of small data points, a pause here, a location ping there, then protection must also be intentional.
First, manage your digital footprint. Check your app permissions. Turn off unnecessary location tracking and microphone access.
Second, tame cookies. Make it a habit to not click “accept all” blindly. Go to your browser settings and clear third-party cookies regularly. Use private browsing when you can.
Third, break the doomscrolling cycle. Set screen time limits and be deliberate about what you consume. When you control the sequence, you control the input.
Finally, be mindful of what you feed the system. Likes, pauses and comments are not harmless — they are data. Curating what you engage with is now part of protecting your future.
The mind-reading myth is comforting because it gives us a clear villain to blame. The real mechanism has no such villain. It is an accumulation of mundane behaviours that leaves a trail, and behaviour, unlike thought, leaves a trail that can be tracked.
The next time your feed feels eerily accurate, do not ask “how did they know what I was thinking?” Ask a harder question: how much of what I think is still mine, after it has been reflected back at me long enough?
Mumeenah is a Computer Science student at Kwara State University (KWASU). She can be reached at [email protected]
