The other day I met up with an ex-colleague from somewhere I used to work. At one point she told me about an ultra running race called the Barklay Loops, and Jasmine Parris, the first woman to complete it. I’m not that interested in ultra running, and I’d never heard of this before. After our lunch I didn’t think any more about it, but a day or so later on my YouTube “Home” page there was a film about Jasmin and the race she completed. How does that work? There are no other ultra running suggestions, and I’ve never Googled for information about this race. Maybe I should wear a tinfoil hat, but how did this happen?
They definitely do 'listen'. Had this happen many times.
Your friend has been spending considerable time looking at stuff online about the event. Their phone and your phone were in the same location for a significant period. Google, etc. has determined you're 'friends' and is serving up content it thinks you'd enjoy because they have been interested in it.
Your friend has been spending considerable time looking at stuff online about the event. Their phone and your phone were in the same location for a significant period. Google, etc. has determined you're 'friends' and is serving up content it thinks you'd enjoy because they have been interested in it.
This.
They definitely do 'listen'. Had this happen many times.
Definitely not that.
Cougar will say no. I will say yes.
I've had a similar thing happen where, briefly, randomly, a group of us sitting in a pub talked about Charlie Brown and the Peanuts cartoons. It was a passing conversation for about five minutes, over and done. No-one Googled anything about it at the time and I can pretty much guarantee that no-one Googled anything about it afterwards.
Next day, there's Peanuts stuff in my Google feed. Uh-huh, deffo not listening.
briefly, randomly, a group of us sitting in a pub talked about Charlie Brown and the Peanuts cartoons. It was a passing conversation for about five minutes, over and done
I expect you spoke about many other things that didn't appear in any online suggestions, so why would it choose Peanuts?
Pubs and Peanuts go together.
Yeah I've had similar.
Got told on here that it's definitely not listening, but I am completely sure it is listening.
In my case it was discussing an internal database name at work which happens to share the same name as a clothing retailer (the dB has nothing to do with the retailer - I also did not do any searching for the name of the dB or retailer and pretty sure people I was discussing with didn't search either.)
The next day I get an ad for the clothing retailer....hmm.
As above though, location services can be used to proxy-spam you with stuff from people you spend significant time with.
My sister swore this was happening recently. So we sat around with our phones having a long discussion about giraffes. Have we been inundated with posts about giraffes? No.
In my case it was discussing an internal database name at work which happens to share the same name as a clothing retailer (the dB has nothing to do with the retailer - I also did not do any searching for the name of the dB or retailer and pretty sure people I was discussing with didn't search either.)
You called your database Top Shop?
How does that work?
Sort of co-incidence, but also at the same time not. If you have any sort of YouTube/Insta history, and you've watched DH race highlights, mountain-biking POV, maybe climbing or other 'outdoorsy' type stuff, then it'll serve you a video about this event. - My YouTube feed did the same thing this morning when I was idly browsing over my coffee, and I've seen clips on Insta all week. I'll bet that's also where your colleague found out about it as well.
I expect you spoke about many other things that didn't appear in any online suggestions, so why would it choose Peanuts?
It was a pub conversation so I'd imagine that most of it was incomprehensible bollocks and even AI has it's computational limits 🙂
My sister swore this was happening recently. So we sat around with our phones having a long discussion about giraffes. Have we been inundated with posts about giraffes? No.
But is anyone likely to sling you an advert in relation to giraffes? Or do giraffes have a particularly strong social media presence that needs pushing?
There's always and angle in trying to sell you stuff directly, or get you onto a platform where they can then sell you stuff.
so why would it choose Peanuts?
To promote the new Peanuts film? There isn't a "Whose round is it" film coming out 🙂
a group of us sitting in a pub talked about Charlie Brown and the Peanuts cartoons. It was a passing conversation for about five minutes, over and done. No-one Googled anything about it at the time and I can pretty much guarantee that no-one Googled anything about it afterwards.
Next day, there's Peanuts stuff in my Google feed.
the obvious answer (which you seem to have discounted for some reason in favour of tin foil hat stuff) is that one of you, inspired by the convo, did go home and Google loads of Peanuts stuff.
But is anyone likely to sling you an advert in relation to giraffes?
there are these things called zoos now 🤔
Years ago when I used to use Instagram it was 100% MTB's and racing cars for me.
Then we started watching Seinfeld every night on Netflix because we'd never seen it before. Within a few days my Instagram explore page is full of Seinfeld memes.
We did the same again, this time with the original 1960's Star Trek. Same again, Star Trek memes and Trekky accounts everywhere.
Switched off Instagram's permission to use the microphone and it stopped happening.
My sister swore this was happening recently. So we sat around with our phones having a long discussion about giraffes. Have we been inundated with posts about giraffes? No.
Probably because there aren't many companies paying to advertise Giraffe's for sale. Try the same again for Dryrobes or Rooftents or something.
Yes, that expensive smartphone you bought/leased listens to everything all the time, even when it's off. If it didn't, it couldn't hear you say "Hey Siri / Alexa" etc.
Apple say they don't eavesdrop for marketing reasons, but they allow 3rd party app to do so, so if you give permission (it's often in the details when you download it) it will listen to everything it can and use that data to tailor ads for you and collate data for anyone who wants to pay for it, for any reason.
With smartphones, and it's doesn't matter which, you are both the consumer and the product.
Here's an idea - next time try having a discussion about which tin foil is best for making hats and see what turns up on your phone.
Your friend has been spending considerable time looking at stuff online about the event. Their phone and your phone were in the same location for a significant period. Google, etc. has determined you're 'friends' and is serving up content it thinks you'd enjoy because they have been interested in it.
Most likely this, as others have said. The ability that Meta apps and others have to x-reference user locations, contacts, online history and other demographic data to predict what will get your attention next is not to be underestimated.
I turned off permissions for all apps apart from location for mapping while using the app. It means I can't just send images on whatsapp or similar without turning on permissions briefly but .. *Partridge shrug*. It's a snag that helps me think whether I could be doing something more useful or valuable like looking out of a window and watching the clouds, or talking to someone, or posting on a longer-form forum via an adblock filtered browser : )
Turning a smart phone into a mostly dumb phone with occasional ability to convert temporarily to smart is something I should have done years ago.
Cougar will say no. I will say yes.
Then you will be wrong. Obviously. HTH. 😁
It's simple, really. Let me give an example. You know all the crackpot conspiracies about the Moon landings being a hoax? We can sit around for hours debunking things like waving flags or explaining how photography works, but the crux of it all was that "the world is watching." The USSR tracked Apollo 11 (almost?) all the way to the moon - this was at the height of the Cold War remember, which was the reason Apollo existed at all. If the mission was a fake Russia would have called them out, they'd have been all over it like a tramp on hot chips. China was paying attention, every amateur astronomer in the world was transfixed, someone would have noticed. And even if by some miracle they did get away with it they'd certainly have been busted by now. As recently as five years ago, India did a drive-by of the Moon and took photos of the Apollo 11 and 12 landing sites complete with LM descent stages and (at A12) footprints.
This is the same principle. We can do a deep-dive into how it's possible that Facebook knows you were talking about Snoopy or whatever, with a sidetrack into how coincidences and confirmation bias work, but it's not necessary. Because there are very clever people actively looking for this sort of stuff. The world is still watching. It would be a career-changing find for someone to discover that Google/Microsoft/Apple/Amazon/Musk/Beyoncé etc is secretly listening to conversations and sending data back home, and it would be blindingly obvious with little more than a cursory glance at network traffic.
At which point, it makes no absolutely sense for them to do so. The chances of getting caught are incredibly high, the consequences would be bankruptcy levels of catastrophic. And for what? Tracking is already all over everything, never has a company been more appropriately named than Meta. Yet seemingly a company is prepared to risk everything, to collate absolutely insane volumes of data from everyone's mobile devices, dedicate compute power that would make A.I. blush to process all that voice data into something machine-understandable, in order to... suggest a video on YouTube? 👀 Pass the tinfoil when you've done.
More like some algorithms on your phones collided, had an interaction, and came up with running as being a possible interest. No effort at all to throw it out to you the next day. It would take a fair bit of effort to listen in 24hrs a day for very little reward.
I'm pretty certain that phones listen to us, following what happened last week for me.
Driving down the M6, sat-nav (using Android Auto) says to stay in the left lane and enter slip road.
On the slip road it then starts to give instructions on where to go at the roundabout, but stops halfway through and just 'beeps' once.
Mrs P says "What happened there?"
I reply "I have no idea."
"Me neither" responds the sat-nav 😱😱😱
I never use voice activated commands, Gemini or other VC AI on my phone or in the car.
More importantly, Barkley Marathons are fascinating and Jasmin Paris is an absolute superhero. Well worth reading up on both, even if you have no current interest in either.
On the slip road it then starts to give instructions on where to go at the roundabout, but stops halfway through and just 'beeps' once.
Most modern cars have a voice command / press to talk button on the steering wheel. You probably pressed it by accident.
It would be a career-changing find for someone to discover that Google/Microsoft/Apple/Amazon/Musk/Beyoncé etc is secretly listening to conversations
I'd love to go for a pint and a bag of chips with Beyoncé.
I SAID I'D LOVE TO GO FOR A PINT AND A BAG OF CHIPS WITH BEYONCÉ
Aside: Apollo photos I mentioned.
That is very cool.
im going with the "Defo do" crowd. Far too many times now friends and I have had things we've not looked at that all of a sudden become a "thing" due to something someone said. More recently -and we still hope it's coincidence, but, my organisation got a VERY clever spam email about bonuses and changes to remuneration etc -this was <12 hours after a company wide TEAMS call that was transcripted. Everything about the mail looked legit..
Theyre watching and listnening i tell thee...
Those are different things.
The Snowdon comment is talking about actively targeting individual high-value targets. The NSA is, well, the NSA, they're (cough allegedly) operating at an infrastructure level and they're not trying to advertise a Charlie Brown movie.
There is little doubt that any of this stuff is possible at a technical level. There's been plenty of instances of cheap smart devices from distant lands having serious privacy concerns, for which I would recommend googling Ken Munro. Here's a talk I was actually at, I'll remove the embed as it's somewhat NSFW:
More importantly, Barkley Marathons are fascinating and Jasmin Paris is an absolute superhero. Well worth reading up on both, even if you have no current interest in either.
Yes I did watch the film and it was quite inspirational, so some benefit to being eavesdropped by Tim Cook.
Those are different things.
The Snowdon comment is talking about actively targeting individual high-value targets. The NSA is, well, the NSA, they're (cough allegedly) operating at an infrastructure level and they're not trying to advertise a Charlie Brown movie.
There is little doubt that any of this stuff is possible at a technical level. There's been plenty of instances of cheap smart devices from distant lands having serious privacy concerns, for which I would recommend googling Ken Munro. Here's a talk I was actually at, I'll remove the embed as it's somewhat NSFW:
It's quite an interesting thing, and the technicals of it all are well beyond me. But I don't doubt our electronic devices are listening to us...
I'll go sit in my corner with my tinfoil hat on... haha!
I may be a bit of a fossil, but a week or so ago I was getting into the car to go and visit my daughter, when my phone sent a notification from Maps asking if i wanted to navigate to her address. It took me a couple of seconds to sus out that I put an entry in my phone calendar that I was going to help her decorate, and had recently saved her address from a dropped pin in my favourites folder. I was initially a bit freaked out, but then realised just how powerful this tech is. The phone had paired with the car, checked the calendar, interpreted the calendar entry with my daughter's name, associated her name with the address I'd saved and decided it could be helpful by telling me how to get there. I went from slightly freaked out to quite impressed. The only issue was that it wanted to open the iphone maps not Google maps, which I prefer!
@Cougar, your posts were excellent. Very interesting to read, thanks for taking the time to post.
@Scapegoat my "WTF" moment was heading for a flight. I'd booked the seats then received an email confirmation. Gmail added the flights to my Calendar. So far, so meh. However, when I checked my Calendar on the day, the flight time had been altered because the flight had been delayed and Google was actually tracking all that in real time.
@johnhe Aw, thank you.
@Scapegoat Yeah, the integration is pretty slick. I can use voice commands to say "navigate to Dave's" and it'll pluck Dave's address out of my Contacts list. I haven't set any of that up, but (with apologies to Paul Hibbert) It Just Works.
This may or may not be a useful tip as I don't know how common it is, but in our Seat there's a Voice button on the steering wheel. Clicking it invokes the car's own voice control which is about as whelming as you'd expect, but long-pressing diverts it straight to Android Auto (in my case, I assume Apple is the same).
My big tinfoil moment was when my (at the time) 6 month old son was playing with a toy drum beside me - shortly afterwards Facebook is giving me drum adverts. The toy came from a second hand shop as a chance purchase (ie no googling involved), and he doesn't have a phone so that rules out the sharing interests part. It was early in the morning, so there had been no correspondence regarding said drum and, iirc, no correspondence on the matter had ever happened. If anyone wants to give me a sensible reason for the adverts appearing then I'd be happy to see it
Even if we assume you are indeed being spied on, going from a 6-month old ****ting things with sticks to advertising drum kits is a flight of fantasy.
Sensible reason 1: your partner googled it.
Sensible reason 2: coincidences happen and they are highly memorable because they're startling. How many times has your kid been playing with things and that hasn't happened?
Cougar is wrong
I have well random conversations all the time about stuff that exists only in my head and has never been physically entered anywhere online by myself or anyone I know. Conversations which have often taken place absolutely nowhere near any other device at all. Content on insta/til tok can be scarily accurately relevant to the pish I've been talking about.
It's not a coincidence. I don't have a partner and no one else I know randomly googles random things I've not yet said to them.
Our phones 100% do listen to us. But I for one couldn't care less
Sorry, are you saying you talk to yourself or that they're reading your thoughts?
Sorry, are you saying you talk to yourself or that they're reading your thoughts?
Brings a new meaning to “I think………. therefore I receive an Amazon delivery”
Don't be sorry for not comprehending basic written text. Many adults struggle.
Be sorry for being a relentless overbearing know it all bore forcefully and repetitively pushing your own personal views across as fact with rudeness and arrogance.
I genuinely didn't know what you were talking about.
But, y'know, you do you if you want to take that tack.
Well, that’s the most bizarre coincidence yet. I’ve just read a few of the last posts and this popped up in my feed…..
