Two days ago my Roon New Releases For You suggested Heather Maloney. I have other music by her so I listened to the entire album and marked it as a favorite. Facebook doesn’t normally suggest musical artists in my Timeline but today suggested following Heather Maloney’s page. To me, that’s a little too specific to be a random coincidence. I subscribe to Qobuz which is the source of the album I listened to. Is it possible that Facebook has access to what I listen to either through Roon or Qobuz? Some other possible explanation?
Random chance
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everything listens and everything’s connected
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so very true - your phones’ mic is always active waiting for hey siri, hey google, alexa, etc…- there’s non-stop surveillance, and it’ll just keep growing!
We live in a hopeless world of lost privacy.
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Big Brother is Watching 
That doesn’t seem likely. I haven’t listened to any of her music for some time so to have it show up on Facebook a couple of days after listening to her new album isn’t coincidence. I’m not new to this, I’m aware Facebook follows me around judging by the number of times I research a purchase only to have it show up in my Timeline soon after. But this is the first time it’s happened to me with a musician and the only sources of that information would be Roon or Qobuz. Not the end of the world, just unexpected.
Unlikely things do happen, and some of them are more noticeable than the majority.
At work, it happens quite often that someone in my support team mentions an issue that we haven’t heard about in years, followed by a customer writing an email about it 5 minutes later. It’s always a cause for laughs, but the reality is that we talk about issues all day, every day, and coincidences are inevitable. Those stick in the mind, while other instances where we talk about issue A followed by a customer writing about a different issue B are not considered anything special, although they are just as probable. (Side note: Apophenia - Wikipedia)
Apart from this, you have other releases by the same artist, so FB may have enough data to infer that a new release by the artist may be of interest, even if it knows nothing about you recently listening to it. It’s enough to fall into a statistical bucket that suggests it
This isn’t just as FB concern. It’s a technology concern.
You only have to listen, say, play, search a title phrase, anything on a computer or phone. For the PC, you have cookies, trackers that follow you around on the internet, the OS itself will track you across the internet. iPads, iPhones, all tracked including the mic, cameras, etc. Phones, or devices are never truly turned off.
I was talking about something random last week as it was and a few days later (without searching nothing) this random thing was an ad on as site.
You want access to the internet, you give up any privacy concerns.
Not Roon. We have no relationship with Meta/Facebook or any ad-sales platform. I can’t speak authoritatively about Qobuz, but my guess they don’t either.
There are other ways however. For example (and only one example), my wife and I were chatting about a product and a few minutes later, after I had left the room, I received an ad for the exact product. This was a product that I was not interested in and have never interacted with. However, it turns out my wife had searched Google for the product just minutes earlier, using her phone. Because we were both on the same internet connection, they were just serving the ads for this product to anyone at our home. My gut was “they are listening”, and they were… just not with audio – “they” were looking at the actions of people at our IP address.
While this seems real, the technology isn’t currently implemented in this manner (yet). The phone (and other devices) are indeed listening, but not in the way a human being would. They have a piece of code that processes data from the microphone looking for certain sounds. For example, something that may be considered “OK GOOGLE”. Once it’s identified that, it knows how to wait until the “end of the sentence”.
The whole phrase (the audio, or maybe a processed version of it) is then sent to the cloud for “intelligence”, and a response would then be sent back to speak back at you.
For now (in early 2025), it would be both battery and cost prohibitive to send everything your mic heard to be sent to the cloud for processing.
There are products that are experimenting with this type of work with deeper and smarter local processing. For example, Limitless has such a product.
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While I’ve experienced many of the things you’ve described, this isn’t an example of them. I played an album on Qobuz via Roon. Heather is far from a mainstream artist but two days later Facebook suggested specifically that I follow her page. I wasn’t browsing, I wasn’t talking for a microphone to hear, I didn’t search anything related to her afterwards, didn’t do any of the common things that would allow any company other than Roon or Qobuz to have information about what I was doing.
Thanks for the response. I didn’t intend my post to accuse anyone specific of spying on me as much as it was to express the opinion that someone had. I believe you when you say Roon isn’t doing it which narrows down the choices substantially, not that it matters all that much.
My experience of this was with an Echo speaker.
My wife and I were chatting about cushions for our new sofa. We hadn’t searched on our phones, nor used anything else that could have detected us other than the Echo speaker (which was in a dormant state).
I then unlocked my phone, opened the Amazon app to look for a cable or something else, but definitely not cushions.
Lo and behold I had recommendations for cushions.
That Echo speaker ended up unplugged and stored deep in a cupboard.
Since, I haven’t had a repeat experience like that.
I have opted before running my own ad-blocking etc DNS server and an alternative DNS of 76.76.2.2 / 76.76.10.2 which blocks a lot of ads. Both options annoy my lovely wife as it blocks some of her websites she visits. Great for my kids too.
Once made a joke to the wife during a conversation late at night. Few minutes later received “LOL” message from a 4 digit number. Was about 6 months before Apple admitted they were recording conversations to help “improve Siri”. if you own a computer or smart device or phone your data is there to be scraped, Google and Meta are masters at it. Apple and Microsoft also do it and increasingly app vendors do it to increase their revenue streams.
Hackers steal your data for profit. Large software companies just have a EULA where you give permission for them to take your data and sell it for profit. One and the same really but at least with META we can all post about how wonderful our latest handbag is or meal was……… it is a sad world……
Facebook is tracking your online usage. The app is tracking your usage across other apps and websites.
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Well how’s this for irony? I clicked on the link above “All The Ways Facebook Track you……” and up pops a message stating “we see you are using an add blocker” so it doesn’t allow me to read the article because it has checked my browser first before it will allow me to view. What else is it picking up to monetize while it’s checking my add blocker?
Maybe don’t use Facebook/whatsapp/etc then?
Once the site loads, press ‘Reader View’ and you can view the article. 
Read the Qobuz EULA and see what it says about what they do with your listening and search data.
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Regarding Glimmer’s comments I don’t use nor have I ever used Facebook or any other SM platform for this very reason. My business is my business and I’ve tried to keep it that way but the SM platforms are endemic and persistent and will find a way to scavange ones personal data regardless.
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