Feels like a dystopian nightmare https://mobile.twitter.com/RobertGReeve/status/1397032784703655938

This has been going on for sometime. There was a report at least 5-6 years ago that showed how Twitter lets you target ads based on your offline purchase. Whenever you give your phone number for buying something in a local store, for cashback, or whatever, all that data goes to different data warehousing companies that sell them to ad companies like FB, Twitter etc. They're very valuable to them. Hence you get asked for your phone number wherever you go. I can only guess that this is same for online services like BigBasket, Swiggy, etc, where there is no option to hide your phone numbers.

+1. Have been regularly buying burgers on swiggy and all I see now on instagram are burger ads.

Use the instagram PWA and have pi-hole at home/blokada on phone, no ads. If you're technically capable, you should definitely setup pi-hole at home.

@famous-art-1142 Can you add more details about this pi-hole? My guess is it’s a raspberry-pi which blocks traffic from/to ad services? 🤔

@thousands-morning-63911 https://pi-hole.net/

It's a software that works as the DNS server in your local network and blocks trackers/ads/whatever domain you define. It can be run on most linux based systems. Only condition is that that system has to be running all the time when you want to use the Internet. So something like raspberry pi makes sense because of it's low power consumption. Details - https://pi-hole.net/

You also host pihole on google cloud for free - https://github.com/rajannpatel/Pi-Hole-on-Google-Compute-Engine-Free-Tier-with-Full-Tunnel-and-Split-Tunnel-Wireguard-VPN-Configs