Digital tracking may be sophisticated, but they do not have to do anything sophisticated to get an IP address (and time, etc.) for each request. That is how the network functions.
I’m pretty sure Firefox has a setting for that functionality.
Privacy Badger attempts to auto-block many of those bad cookies and widgets
It sounds like you have the Shazam app with “Auto Shazam” turned on, or you have a Pixel with “Now Playing” turned on. Or maybe some other music ID app with an always-listen feature. Those both do exactly what you are describing. They can be easily turned off.
Thanks for the tip, will check it out.
I watched a Netflix docu-show about internet tracking a few years ago. There was a scene in which a professor in a computer class asked his students “how many of you think your devices are listening to you?” A lot of hands went up. He said “the truth is, they don’t need to listen to you”. He gave an example of a new mom meeting a pregnant mom to be at a park. The new mom shows future mom the new stroller she bought and talks about all of its nice features. Then the mom to be starts getting online ads for that stroller. Was her phone listening? No, what happened was that the companies that do the tracking are geo-tracking their phones and know they are in close proximity. They know a lot about the two women, that they are both in a ‘new mom’ demographic and that the one just bought the stroller, so it’s determined that the mom to be would be interested in ads for that stroller. All that is easily accomplished without the need for devices to actually listen to conversations.
But, as I said, that was a few years ago. I strongly suspect that we are now also actually being listened to by our devices.
The harvesting of information is far more serious than what will ever be described here in a couple of sentences. Those of the ‘I’ve nothing to hide’ camp should take a deep dive into the rabbit hole for a few hours and research the many ways our information is being taken and get an inking of what it’s being used for. It’s not just about cookies and a few ads. Those are the least of concerns.
This is before we get into smart phones, which are essentially a monitoring device, as with ‘smart’ anything. Much of the population is walking around with a phone glued to their hand. A dream come true for those with ulterior motives. And of course things like Alexa type devices are always listening, yet people willingly have them in their homes because, ‘I’ve nothing to hide’.
It’s the nefarious ways the information is gathered & used to manipulate that’s troubling. Most of us will never suffer consequences knowingly, such as identity theft, banks accounts cleaned out. But it goes much deeper than that.
Sounds paranoid and rightfully so. Do some reading.
I’ll add that I don’t believe things like computers, phones, social media etc. started out to become the intrusive, manipulative devices they’ve become. It just became evident that they could be used as such and over the years they’ve become as dangerous as they can be useful. Caution & awareness is the key.
Yes, I turned off the Pixel feature.
I’ve read articles about how it’s quite common for spyware to be surreptitiously installed on phones, even beyond whatever innate ability they have to monitor you. So you can’t even be sure turning off the phone means it can’t listen, since the spyware can tell it to fake being turned off.
Well, I asked Google Gertie (the upbeat voice that responds to “Hey, Google” and tells us all kinds of interesting stuff) if she was listening to and reporting our conversations in the vehicle, and she assured us she wasn’t, so there’s that.
*when asked pointed or uncomfortable questions, she responds with “Sorry, I don’t understand” - an obvious cop-out.
Interesting article I just happened across. It could fit loosely under one of Newton’s Laws; every action has an equal and opposite reaction.
Age verification
The issue isn’t that I don’t know what they can track or what they can do. It’s that I already have a lot more immediate concerns than have actually affected my life in some way. I take what reasonable steps I can and then just let go of thinking about it. (I don’t view ads, don’t allow personalized ads, opt out whenever available, use privacy enhancing extensions when they don’t get in the way, and so on.)
As for the OP: the IP address is definitely one possibility, especially if she was on your wi-fi (or otherwise using your home Internet connection). But Google also bases things on your location. It’s less likely, but it could happen even if she was on mobile internet and you weren’t.
Those devices are always listening for the wake phrase; they aren’t sending everything you’re saying in front of it back to Amazon’s servers 24/7.
Do you mean you turned it off after you read what I posted, or you had already turned it off beforehand and yet it is still recognizing songs?
What makes you suspect that?
Eh, it may just be paranoia on my part. Like I said in the rest of my post that you quoted, a lot is already accomplished by these companies geotracking our locations and already knowing a lot of demographic data about us, to the point that it may really seem like they’re listening when they’re not.
But it seems like my wife and I sometimes get served ads based on things our devices only could have listened in on-- like ads about visiting (X) vacation location after only having a conversation about it. Did one of us also briefly google the location and forget we did? Maybe. But a practical argument against our devices listening to us just a few years ago was that companies don’t have the ability or resources to monitor the conversations of hundreds of thousands to millions of people and gain key intel from all that in order to monetize it. But now with AI getting more and more capable, I would guess that it’s something AI could do.
It’s all data that can be sold, so it’s a safe assumption that if a company can gather data on you they will even if there’s no obvious reason to.
I figured out how to turn off Now Playing before I saw your post.
But now the phone is whispering Weird Al lyrics to me while I sleep. 
You might think it’s a safe assumption, and it might even seen reasonable but (barring bugs and whatnot) it doesn’t happen. It would be a major shitstorm for Google or Samsung or Amazon or Apple if that happened. It would also be fairly easy to detect. Any half decent security researcher could expose it. Even an average user could see data being sent in their bandwidth log.
It’s perfectly ok to be cynical of these companies for a host of good reasons, but none of them are eavesdropping on you 24/7 and sending your every conversation back to its servers to be monetized against you.
I’d bump that up to a probably. Plus, a lot of confirmation bias because you’re forgetting all the thousands of things you’ve mentioned in front of your phone that you never saw an ad for.