does anyone ever feel like google listens to you without you knowing it?

[hillkill]

i've been having these really eerie experiences with my google search recommendations for the past few months and it's been bothering me.

for example, me and my friend were talking about birds and the topic of blue and yellow macaws came up. we talked about them for about 5 minutes. later during the same day, i was looking up electronics because i kinda wanted to get into them. i was going to type in "breadboard", but as soon as i typed in the letter "b", the loving blue and yellow macaws popped up. i had never searched it before, but it immediately came up. i struck it as odd, but didn't think of it too much.

however what really got me is the loving ads in spanish. i have this hispanic friend and i visit his house occasionally. his family watches telemundo or some other spanish channel mainly. i never watched them, but i still heard them even when were in his room playing vidya games. about a day later i started to get these ads in spanish on facebook and youtube. i didn't really think much of it until i was laying down this morning, and then the question hit me: are they actively listening without my permission?

i might just be paranoid and these are just a coincidence, i don't know. i'm actually kind of scared to have my phone on at all times. has anyone else felt this way?

[Ad Bot]

[joe411]

Honestly, I'm not surprised. Google has been tracking your search and browsing history for years all for the sake of advertising, listening for keywords is not out of their league.

[Drydess]

literally every major corporation tracks you down for ad choice, walmart, google, apple, etc
where were you talking about blue and yellow macaws though

[Teneksi]

how did blue and yellow macaws come up? are you certain you'd never looked for a picture of one before?

I find this extra weird because I looked up pages and images about the crown victoria like a madman



then I did the same to the '79 cadillac coupe de ville



then to the toyota hilux



Perhaps they find me boring

[hillkill]

how did blue and yellow macaws come up? are you certain you'd never looked for a picture of one before?

absolutely certain. i may have looked up birds about 2 years ago because i had a peak interest of them then, but i doubt that'd affect anything

literally every major corporation tracks you down for ad choice, walmart, google, apple, etc
where were you talking about blue and yellow macaws though

at my house

[Red Spy]

literally every major corporation tracks you down for ad choice, walmart, google, apple, etc
where were you talking about blue and yellow macaws though

[Drydess]

at my house

unless you have the google version of amazon echo then theres no thesible way for them to know that
even then i hold just enough trust that those things dont track what you say but it'd be the only possible explanation unless you got high

[hillkill]

been like a year since i've gotten high lol. i don't own or would i ever own an echo or the google equivalent. in this day and age, almost anything can be exploited by hackers.

[Insert Name Here²]

If they do, I personally don't really care if they "listen" to my voice or not, it doesn't effect me in any way.

[Ipquarx]

If this is actually happening (We can't really verify this for sure), it's likely one of the apps you have installed. There are certain apps which will monitor your microphone and send information that it hears about your conversations to the apps servers, and will then sell it to third parties. I seem to recall the Facebook app doing this if allowed access to the microphone, but don't quote me on that.

If you don't have microphone privileges enabled for any of your apps, then it's probably just a coincidence.

[Drydess]

been like a year since i've gotten high lol. i don't own or would i ever own an echo or the google equivalent. in this day and age, almost anything can be exploited by hackers.

sure but would google honestly go through the trouble of hacking into your x, manually listening to you, finding ads, etc just to put it on a search result

If this is actually happening, it's likely one of the apps you have installed. There are certain apps which will monitor your microphone and send information that it hears about your conversations to the apps servers, and will then sell it to third parties. I seem to recall the Facebook app doing this if allowed access to the microphone, but don't quote me on that.

If you don't have microphone privileges enabled for any of your apps, then it's probably just a coincidence.

ya theres really no reason to activate mic privileges for things like facebook or chrome or anything

[hillkill]

If this is actually happening (We can't really verify this for sure), it's likely one of the apps you have installed. There are certain apps which will monitor your microphone and send information that it hears about your conversations to the apps servers, and will then sell it to third parties. I seem to recall the Facebook app doing this if allowed access to the microphone, but don't quote me on that.

If you don't have microphone privileges enabled for any of your apps, then it's probably just a coincidence.

iirc you have to agree to all permissions before installing an app. you can't disable privileges i believe.

sure but would google honestly go through the trouble of hacking into your x, manually listening to you, finding ads, etc just to put it on a search result

not worried about google per say, i'm worried about in the future these things being hacked is going to become big. i don't want to be a part of that. call me paranoid idc

[Ipquarx]

iirc you have to agree to all permissions before installing an app. you can't disable privileges i believe.

You can disable permissions in the Apps menu under settings. I know this works on Android 6 and above, I forget if it's there for android 5.

not worried about google per say, i'm worried about in the future these things being hacked is going to become big. i don't want to be a part of that. call me paranoid idc

It's absolutely not bad at all to be worried about this. Privacy is an extremely important human right and you've got every right to exercise that.

[hillkill]

i still have android 4.4.2

[Daswiruch]

how