Guwahati, July 8 -- You mention new sneakers to a friend over coffee. By evening, your feed is wall-to-wall shoe ads. It feels too precise to be chance - so is your phone quietly listening in?

Almost certainly not. The real explanation is less sinister, but arguably more impressive: social media platforms don't need to eavesdrop, because your digital behaviour already says plenty about you. Every video you linger on, every post you like, every account you follow, even how long you pause mid-scroll, is a small signal. Individually, these signals mean little. Multiplied across millions of users, they form patterns an algorithm can learn from. People are creatures of habit, and that's precisely what makes prediction possible: algorithms don...