Private companies are allowed to have many failures before they succeed, unlike NASA who lose public goodwill and therefore potentially lose funding when they fail. SpaceX blew up a ton of rockets before they succeeded in having the first reusable rocket. It’s much faster to iterate this way but also more expensive, so NASA cant really operate this way. Although on the other hand all the private aerospace companies seem to rely on government subsidies so it’s pretty crappy we cant just fund NASA more.
I know a lot of people won’t believe it happens, because the simpler and more mundane explanation (which is usually the true one) is that it isn’t necessary because of all the data that we know is being collected like browsing habits, searches, etc but my partner has a few times tried to test this as a party trick. Normally her ads are for like kitcschy knick-knacks or like funky flower pots but one time we were hanging with friends talking about this discussion and we decided to all repeat out loud “lab grown diamond engagement rings” for about 15 min. Not 1 hour later she had an Instagram ad that said word for word “lab grown diamond engagement rings.” I know it’s anecdotal and isn’t proof but we’ve done this a few times and it’s seemed to work about half the time; each time we get an ad that’s both hyper specific to what we’re taking about and also not something close to anything we’ve been advertised before.