On Monday morning, the torrential rains and flooding caused by tropical storm Harvey gave Houston residents plenty to worry about. Yet that didn’t seem to keep them from using photo-filtering and music-discovery apps between 4 a.m. to 5 a.m. local timelargely the same rate as did people who were out of harm’s way some 1,500 miles northwest in Bozeman, Mont.

At least that’s what it looked like when programmatic digital buys were placed across 18 exchanges early Monday in a test conductged by cybersecurity researcher Augustine Fou of Marketing Science Consulting Group. Buys in the two cities went to the exact same group of 15 apps, despite the very different circumstances.

The data, however, turned out to be false.