Have you ever wondered how targeted ads end up in your Instagram feed? You might look at a tent on some outdoor retailer’s site once, and the next day your feed is Reels about campsites and an ad for that same tent. You never searched for camping on Instagram, so why is it all over your feed?
This has plagued me for years, so I figured it was time to actually do some research. I pointed an agent at Meta’s documentation, the terms of use, and a stack of court records, and the answer turned out to be sitting in plain sight. A follow-up post will get into the plumbing between the tent website and Meta, for any nerds like me who want to understand the entire data pipeline.
Is the phone listening?
If you’ve ever thought, “Is my phone listening to me?!”, you’re not alone. Meta has been denying it since 2016, and Instagram’s head Adam Mosseri was still swearing it isn’t on video in 2025.
Denials aren’t evidence, so people have looked into it. 🕵️♀️ The biggest published test is a 2018 Northeastern University study that ran 9,100 Android apps on phones set up to capture everything they sent, and reported that “no apps appeared to exfiltrate audio in our tests.” Nobody has published a bigger test since.
That’s absence of evidence after a lot of looking, and the Northeastern test was Android only. But the tent ad doesn’t need a microphone. You loaded a tent page, and that was enough.
Here’s what you did that counted.
Meta’s privacy policy lists what you do on the app, down to “time, frequency and duration of your activities” and “whether our app is in the foreground or if your mouse is moving.” Since December 2025, your conversations with Meta AI count too, though Meta says it leaves out topics like health, religion, and politics.
So why is the tent showing up on Instagram, when you never even touched a tent there? The answer is in the policy’s section on information from partners. Meta receives data about “websites you visit and cookie data,” “apps you use,” and “purchases and transactions you make off of our Products,” and, in its own words, “We receive this information whether or not you’re logged in or have an account on our Products.”
Here’s how that plays out:
- You open the tent page. The retailer’s site has a small piece of Meta’s code on it, and it tells Meta a browser just looked at a tent.
- You type your email at checkout. The site scrambles it and sends it along, and Meta compares it to its own scrambled copy of your email. Now the tent visit is tied to your account.
- You open Instagram. The tent company has paid Meta to show ads to people who looked at that tent, and you’re one of them, congrats! 🎉
That second step is Meta’s entire public description of how a visit on another site becomes a fact about you. And the tent retailer is one of thousands. In 2024, Consumer Reports asked 709 volunteers to download their Facebook archives and count. The average person had data sent about them by 2,230 companies.
Here’s what you agreed to.
The Instagram Terms of Use says: “We use your personal data, such as information about your activity and interests, to show you ads that are more relevant to you.” A few lines later: “We show you relevant and useful ads without telling advertisers who you are. We don’t sell your personal data.”
The “we don’t sell” part is true. The tent company hands Meta a file about you, Meta matches it, and the tent company pays Meta to put an ad in front of whoever matched. Meta sells access to you, based on your data.
The clause people usually worry about, “you grant us a license” to your content, only covers things like photos and videos. It says nothing about the log of what you looked at and for how long, and that log is what ads run on. Legally, nobody owns that log. Depending on where you live, like the EU or California, you have the right to see it, delete it, and opt out of it being used for ads.
What you can still see
Instagram lets you download a copy of your data, and it lists every business that sent Meta data about you. It doesn’t show what they sent or what Meta inferred from it. Ad preferences shows the interests Meta has assigned to you. A 2022 study at NC State found about 30% of those were wrong, and that scrolling past a post was enough to create one.
In June, Meta announced it was retiring the setting that let you unlink what other websites and apps sent Meta from your account. The new setting only stops that data from being used to personalize what you see. In Meta’s words: “We aren’t collecting any new data as part of this update … if you’ve recently purchased a tent online, you might see more Reels about camping.”
If you want to see the list for yourself, open Instagram, go to Accounts Center, then Your information and permissions, then Export your information, and create an export. Meta says the link can take up to 30 days. When it arrives, count the businesses. Mine was more than I expected, and I work in software. 😅