(I know many of you already know it but this incident I experienced made me so paranoid about using smartphones)
To start off, I’m not that deep into privacy rabbit hole but I do as much I can possibly to be private on my phone. But for the rest of phones in my family, I generally don’t care because they are not tech savvy and pushing them towards privacy would make their lives hard.
So, the other day I pirated a movie for my family and since it was on Netflix, it was a direct rip with full HD. I was explaining to my family how this looks so good as this is an direct rip off from the Netflix platform, and not a recording of a screening in a cinema hall(camrip). It was a small 2min discussion in my native language with only English words used are record, piracy and Netflix.
Later I walk off and open YouTube, and I see a 2 recommendations pop-up on my homepage, “How to record Netflix shows” & “Why can’t you screen record Netflix”. THE WHAT NOW. I felt insanely insecure as I was sure never in my life I looked this shit up and it was purely based on those words I just spoke 5min back.
I am pretty secure on my device afaik and pretty sure all the listening happened on other devices in my family. Later that day, I went and saw which all apps had microphone access, moved most of them to Ask everytime and disabled Google app which literally has all the permissions enabled.
Overall a scary and saddening experience as this might be happening to almost everyone and made me feel it the journey I took to privacy-focused, all worth it.
Same thing with microwaves
Food is ready and get a video for “why do microwaves hmm?”
I’ve gotten ads for things I’ve just thought about. Never said anything out loud about or did any searches related to. It was something in a video I’ve watched dozens of videos about in the past. But on this occasion, I happened to think that I kind of want one for the first time. And I just so happened to start getting ads for them right after, also for the first time. They know way more about you than you think and don’t need to listen to you.
Don’t get things for free! Ever! The producers aren’t rich enough yet to pay the artists a living wage for their creative work. Homeland will extra-judicially use weapon systems on you even if you don’t pirate because all it takes is false accusation and then you will be tortured and never allowed to reproduce anywhere in the US sphere of influence (or TPP or UN).
And how often. have you said stuff that you have not received advertising for? You will notice it when you get a positive match but not on a negative.
Data collecting companies can predict/rate your behavior for more then 20 years based. Since then. it has been perfected. They know that you are interested in those topics without having the need to waste resources on recording and analyzing every single audio stream.
Reporter: [REDACTED]
Reason: BSMaybe I should have removed this post, because it is ridiculous.
Exactly, it is “A community of privacy and FOSS enthusiasts, run by Lemmy’s developers,” and not a community for spreading nonsense like Google secretly listening to your conversations to better recommend YouTube videos to you.
The youtube algorithm determined the following: people who watch the kind of videos in your history, are also interested in recording netflix shows. And it was right, because you are in fact interested in that (general) topic. This is another possible explanation.
Root your phone and degoogle it if it doesn’t have LineageOS image. If it does have LineageOS image, then flash it. Oh, and don’t use Google and YouTube. Use Brave/Vivaldi for web search and Tubular for YouTube.
Bruh Brave or Vivaldi? Those are not even the best options out there
Or anything else that isn’t Google Chrome.
Yep I am not using that.
I’ve seen a lot of people using Vivaldi as “private” browser. What is the point here?
Because it’s one of the few browsers on Android that allow you to put your address bar down
Firefox?
Chromite?
Firefox is okay but most websites break on it.
Most? Are you sure you didn’t install some extensions that break your browsing?
I had uBO and Dark Reader installed.
Those 2 might very well cause issues sometimes, you should try and fiddle around with their settings on the websites that complain, or outright whitelist them if nothing works and you want to use them, other times it really is the browser or even more often an artificial check of the user agent string (dick move on the dev’s side), so if you spoof a Chromium browser it’ll start working right away
I meant on mobile. It’s the reason why I use Vivaldi on Android.
Still personally I’ve had very very few ones breaking, but I guess it depends on our browsing habits what we use the most. A report broken site function exists on desktop, but I think it’s still missing from mobile
I don’t see any main website being broken due to firefox
I’ll second the recommendation for GrapheneOS. One of the available options I use is to keep mic, camera, and location off at all times until I need them. That simple toggle ability changes your privacy stance greatly.
These kinds of things never happen to me, could it be because I have all the tracking stuff disabled?? /s
Here’s a fun little experiment you can try. Make a list of random topics and have a discussion about each of them on separate days. Make sure each topic is something that could result in creepy suggestions or ads on YT. If even one of these topics produces the expected result, you could be on to something.
Fun, sure, but not an experiment that would actually be meaningful.
The data from your phone’s microphone doesn’t magically appear in Google’s advertising servers. It would have to go through a lot of steps before it gets there, and one of the first steps is in your home (if you’re on WiFi). One can analyze the traffic/data that leaves their phone.
It’s good to be cautious, but worrying about your phone’s microphone is potentially like worrying about your windows while leaving your front door open.
It’s possible that it’s inferred off the digital footprint of you pirating the content, also. People freak out a lot about being listened to, but I’d argue that’s an inefficient spying mechanism they probably don’t lean heavily on if they can avoid it. We’re all living on platforms that are knowably spying on everything you click on or read or do online and feeding that into giant AI models with everything about you. Like just by watching a pirated video on a Google TV device, Google’s hashing that and phoning that data home, possibly even matching that to the specific file, and adding that to an ad profile.
In addition to all the GrapheneOS recommendations, there are also faraday bags. Drop the phone in while at home or wherever.
That doesn’t really help unless the bag is also soundproof; it could just as easily store what you say and send it off later.
I understand completely. It’s happened to me too many times now to be a coincidence. For a while there whenever I talked to myself “alone” I would sometimes pretend I was also talking to LaMDA, the AI. Now I know it’s probably not LaMDA. But it’s not outside the scope of possibility for Google or Meta to be listening 24/7 if it’s an AI overseeing the panopticon.
I said it has happened to me mulitple times, and I have done experiments. I have given the listeners false information to see if and when it will spread. I have seen whole products pop up out of nowhere in nearby stores because of this. I have seen shitty half-assed tv shows and movies suddenly show up on billboards, as if with only an understanding of the bullet points of my overall speech, and even then with the shaky understanding of an AI trying to fill in the blanks.
Only thing I can think to suggest (that hasn’t been suggested already) is to purposely poison the well by sometimes loading it with falsities for obscuration.
Your phone is not listening to you. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-49585682
Listening to conversations and turning that into interests that can be advertised against is by far the least efficient method they could use. You can get just as good data through normal tracking.
This is just an example of a frequency illusion where you notice stuff because you’re looking for it. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion
ah I see what you’re saying, more efficient ways to get the same data. Makes sense. Thanks for explaining.
Listening to audio would be the least effective and most expensive method of data collection for advertisers. It’s not happening. They already have literally over a million data points on you, there’s nothing useful for them to glean from your audio that they don’t already have ad nauseum.
You see thousands of ads and recommendations every day. You finally found one that was relevant to you. It’s not that deep.
