(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.
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.