The other day, about five days ago, a couple of friends and I had a conversation about Joshua Tree National Monument, and our experiences there, and about desert camping in general, the area around Joshua Tree, etc., etc. Just a conversation, over beers, with no particular focus (eventually the talk of Joshua Tree led to talk about Gram Parsons, country-rock music, Parsons’ relationship with and influence on the Rolling Stones, and so on. You know how it goes).
During this whole conversation, my cell phone was on the table. It was never used. I did not google anything. I didn’t make or receive any calls. It was just there. On, but not used.
A few days later, my Google news feed began to include stories about the area. It even began to include completely irrelevant (to me) stories from local papers and/or television stations (from, for example, Twenty-Nine Palms).
I can think of no explanation other than that Google uses Android phones to monitor conversations. I know they read Gmail messages. I would love for there to be another explanation, but I can’t think of one.
Anyone have any thoughts? Does Google eavesdrop on us?
Went there. Didn’t see any secret recordings. Only recordings I specifically asked Google.
Anyway, I was watching “The Great Hack” on Netflix. On the documentary, the had a guy who teaches classes about protecting your online identity. He asked the class: “Raise your hand if you think your phone has ever eavesdropped on you”. The whole class raised there hand.
He went on to explain that it’s not actually eavesdropping on you. I think he called it “predictive advertising”. They mine all your online data and feed it into an algorithm, and it can predict with stunning accuracy what you’re going to be into next.
He went on to say: “The fact that you think your phone is eavesdropping on you, just goes to show how good it works”.
Agreed. The bandwidth for nonstop audio from every Android phone would be astronomical. And yes, the predictive advertising is even creepier. There was a pretty notorious case not so long ago wherein Target knew a teenaged girl was pregnant before her father did.
My best guess for the events in the OP would be that, even though the OPer didn’t search for anything around Joshua Tree, one or more of the others in the conversation did, and being friends, Google/Facebook figured there was an affinity there. I would also guess that the OPer, having been to Joshua Tree during (I’m guessing, here) the internet era, had left some data crumbs behind (credit card purchases, cellphone GPS data, whatever), confirming the social-circle-affinity.
Or maybe I’m way off base. It’d be interesting to hear what data the OPer finds in their Google profile.
Google can know so much more about you as a consumer through your browsing (if you use Chrome) and Gmail (if you use it) than it could ever garner through your conversations. The way people talk in ordinary conversational discourse requires a high level of analysis to become useful, from Google’s point of view. The topic of a conversation, for example, might only be implied–understood from context Google doesn’t have, and never explicitly stated–while other words would create all kinds of “distractions.” “Eavesdropping” in the ordinary sense would be not be useful to Google.
Maybe not all phones all the time, but the recent revelations of Amazon holding recordings from its Alexa systems, leaves me in little doubt that there is some level of monitoring going on.
I’m being you recurve those suggestions due to having yuppie location services on. I find that after I’ve been in a particular area I’ll get suggestions from Google referencing specific businesses I’ve been near.
Di you click any of those initial links? While Google is pretty smart, it can also be pretty stupid. For example, there’s been times where I’ve searched for a band. The next day, I’ll get a story of that band doing a concert in say, Austin, TX. Now, Google thinks I’m interested in Austin TX and start giving me stories from there even though I never searched for it in the first place.
I’ve been to Joshua Tree during the internet era (depending on how you’re defining that, I guess), but not in 15 years or more.
I don’t have, and have never had, a Facebook page, an Instagram account, a LinkedIn account, or anything like that. I didn’t search for anything related to Joshua Tree, and at least one participant in that conversation (using an iPhone) has confirmed to me that he didn’t either.
I also haven’t mentioned Joshua Tree in email (Gmail) in years, nor has anyone mentioned it to me.
“Yuppie”? :dubious: Ok, whatever, but you don’t know me at all. In any event, location is always off on my phone, I don’t give any apps access to my location, and I haven’t been to Joshua Tree in 15 years anyway.
I did click on a link to a local television station in Twenty-Nine Palms, because the story seemed interesting. But that was days after the conversation.
I feel like this topic comes up every month and it never gets settled.
Two problems:
We don’t know your entire internet history to be able to make the same connections that Google is making.
As far as I know, there is no real evidence of Google listening to conversations, saving the data, and using that data to push you related items.
So eventually, the topic devolves into a bunch people giving similar anecdotes with no real cites.
Now you said this:
Did your Google news feed suddenly start including stories about Gram Parsons, country-rock music, and Parsons’ relationship with and influence on the Rolling Stones?
Smart assistants can save what you asked them for, because they have that. A phone or whatever isn’t powerful enough to be able to reliably process the full range of spoken language. So it has just enough to recognize “OK Google” or “Hey Siri”, or whatever your device’s activation phrase is, and then once it gets that, sends the full sound recording to the cloud servers to process. So the servers have that audio.
But it’d cost way too much bandwidth to always send all audio, and even more processing power to do anything with it. So they don’t do that.
Yeah, this is what Google did, although, probably even more so.
Because Google doesn’t just know that you’re friends with the person who searched for something related. If any of those friends carries an Android phone or has Google apps installed on their non-Android phones with location data access, they know that you and your friends got together right before one of them searched for something about Joshua Tree.
Note that it’s pretty easy to test this.
Find a physical atlas (like, don’t go look stuff up on the internet) and turn to a random page. Talk about that location in a room where your Android phone is present. Do a few of 'em. Do you start seeing any ads for those locations? My guess is: no.
Similarly, next time you get together with friends, ask them if they’ll do you a favor. Assign them each a random location to do some searches on later. See if you start seeing any ads for those locations. My guess is you will.
Last week I worked with someone I hardly ever work with anymore. Twenty years ago we worked together a lot. So last week we were reminiscing about people we used to work with. The next day on Facebook there were two friend suggestions for people we had mentioned. They had never shown up there before. I certainly didn’t do any search for them.
I have an android but never use OK Google. I actually seldom search for anything on my phone.
The ONLY reasonable explanation that I can think of is that my friend searched for those people and Facebook/Google/whatever made the connection that we were physically close the evening before.
ETA As I was typing this the similar story above was being posted.
That’s a good question, and the answer is yes. I might not have noticed that as exceptional, I guess, but the hotel ads and news stories from local sources were definitely exceptional.
Modern smartphones are, in fact, powerful enough. On-device dictation has worked just fine on iPhones, for example, for years. That goes way beyond simple activation phrases.
