Ok, it’s possible I did that without remembering. I’ve never intentionally used Siri for anything, and yet it kicks in randomly. Alexa is the worst about that, but I’ve never had an accidental Google engagement.
Apple’s position on privacy is mostly commendable, but greatly undermined by their attitude toward third-party browsers on iOS. They are all just skins on Safari and don’t support plugins, which means I can’t fully block ads and trackers. They have their own built-in system, but it isn’t good enough. On Android, I can use Firefox with uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger.
I have an Android phone as well, and I used the settings to enable/disable specific apps from the phones capabilities. Under the “Privacy” settings, then “Permission Manager” - you can see what apps have permissions to access various things like your location, microphone, your text messages (SMS) calendar, camera, files, etc. I went in there once when the phone was new to shut down everything I thought was un-needed (such as ‘Bixby’) and have had no suspicious eavesdropping that I can detect. I do check these occasionally after a software update and all seems as I want it. I also shut-down nearly everything on my google account, and use the Duck-Duck-Go browser. If an app requires something, it will let me know and I can temporarily permit access.
Are you-all saying these measures are inadequate? I mean, I know it’s not bulletproof but at least I am not getting weird stuff happen like the OP. My wife has not taken such measures and she does occasionally have times when her phone provides suggestions that seems overly accurate, whereas mine does not do that - so I think what I have done may be marginally working, no?
I used the permission manager to scrub a lot on my phone. Only two apps have location data, for example, and one of them is Maps. The other times me and tracks data when I’m on a race course (and it’s active all the time because I need it to keep tracking me even when the screen goes dead).
You can’t disable the microphone permission for Google Assistant because I don’t think there is any working feature of the app without the microphone. I disabled the app a long time ago but it resurrected itself and began eavesdropping on me.
If you go to Settings > Siri & Search and turn off “Listen for Hey Siri” and “Press Button for Siri” it should pretty much be impossible for Siri to ever engage at all, accidentally or not.
Apple only allowing WebKit-based browsers on iOS is its own kettle of fish, but from a privacy standpoint, I can’t say I remember the last time an ad got by or noticed any tracking when using AdBlock Pro or AdGuard content blockers. YMMV I guess.
Thanks; actually I didn’t realize there was a switch that might work even better, which is allowing Siri while locked. I might eventually use it but I want it to only be active when I’m using the tablet.
I use the AdGuard blocker, but it lets through Reddit inline ads. There’s no blocking for YouTube ads, nor ones shown when clicking through on Google News stories from its app. And on my desktop browser, I block absolutely everything from Facebook but the customizability isn’t there on iOS.
BTW, is there some means of disabling the way the Google News app auto-launches when I visit the web page via the browser? I suspect the ads would disappear if it all stayed within the browser.
Duckduckgo doesn’t. They don’t save search histories. They sell ads based on the keywords from that particular search term, which was how Google used to do it before they became a Panopticon. Perhaps TomTom tries to do what Google does with the location data they have but they don’t have all the other data like search terms, contents of emails, contact data, calendar invitations, time spent on Google Hangouts, contents of Google docs and spreadsheets, etc. etc. to further profile you. The only thing TomTom really knows about you from its app is where you go, occasionally. Chrome knows essentially everything you see or do on the internet, which is pretty all encompassing in the age of pandemic.
1Blocker seems to work on Reddit ads, or at least all I get are Reddit self promotion stuff. It also blocks YouTube ads within safari. I just use the free version so I can only block ads. The paid version blocks ads, trackers, and some other stuff.
Apple makes most of its money selling stuff to me
(And other consumers)
TomTom makes money selling maps (not my location info)
Vivaldi has a business model relying on having more privacy than chrome.
That is how they are different.
AND those services were not set up to seamlessly integrate my browsing history with my location data and email.
The problem comes when companies like that realize that (they think) they can make even more by also selling a bunch of information about you. For example, AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile make money selling you mobile phone service. They also make money selling as much tracking information as they can manage to collect about you—location data, browsing data, network use, and such. Microsoft sells you (through the company you bought your computer from) an operating system, but they also use that operating system to collect lots of information about you that they use for their own ad network.
Anyway, the point isn’t to say “Apple is just as bad” or some other whataboutism. Apple generally has a far superior privacy record than other large tech firms. The point is that even though a company views you as a customer, they might also see you as a product.
There’s a Firefox add-on I’ve been using for a while called “multi-account containers” that basically isolates tabs from each other. Anything within the same “container” can see each other, but anything in a different container cannot. You can use the preset containers or define your own.
So you can still use Google services, you can even sign in to Google services, and you can keep what they “see” to just whatever you do in those specific tabs. Theoretically. I can neither confirm nor deny that it’s actually doing that, but that’s what it says it’s for.
It seems to work differently between Safari and Firefox, despite both being on the same backend. I indeed see Reddit ads being blocked on Safari via 1Blocker, but not Firefox. Not sure what the deal is; I thought everything went through the same content blocking pipeline.
In general, targeted ads have GOT to be counterproductive. It creeps me the HELL out when I see an ad for something I have recently done a search for.
I have a personal story of Google listening to me and serving up an ad - when I had assistant (and in fact, any voice commands) turned off on my cell phone. My husband and I had been talking about step stools. 5 minutes later, I picked up my phone - and the first thing I saw when I unlocked the screen was a pageful of ads for step stools.
And note that when I say “talking”, I mean literally verbally talking, not texting or emailing or anything that Google should have been able to follow.
I think you can turn off the permission for the microphone for all apps with the Permission Manager, but leave it on for your phone (and your camera, should you want to take a video). That may help with the eavesdropping.
No offense, but this is probably an example of confirmation bias rather than some eavesdropping on Google’s part. What about the thousands of other conversations you’ve had with your husband — where should we go for dinner, do you want to see a movie, our vacuum cleaner is broken — that didn’t result in seeing an ad immediately after for a restaurant, movie or vacuum cleaner?
There are also other mundane explanations. Again, no offense, but you may simply just not remember that you did indeed search for a step stool, or you didn’t do a search but were looking at step stools at Home Depot’s web page or wherever. It’s also possible that you really didn’t do any active searching for step stools, but your husband did. Depending on how much information you’ve given to Google in the past (Google Account info, location data, IP data, wifi network), they know you live together (I assume) or at the very least are at the same place right then, so it knows people in this very specific place who are related to each other are searching for step stools so it sends everyone there (or just the user it thinks will be most receptive) an ad. That level of detail is much more creepy than simple eavesdropping.
I know it’s really easy to assume they are listening in, but the fact is, Google, Facebook, et al have much more efficient ways of tracking you and your interests in order to serve up targeted ads than listening in to your conversations. FWIW, Google has denied that they do this, so it would be a major public relations embarrassment if anyone could show conclusively that they did. And that’s not even getting in to the fact that you say you had voice recognition off.
That was my thought as well, but in this specific situation, I’m 100% certain I had not done any such search - he’d literally just brought the topic up. There was also something odd about how the ad displayed - and I so quickly and automatically closed out the window that I don’t recall the details, but I think it was something like “1. unlock phone. 2. see page with all sorts of search results” when I had not even been using a browser.
Google DOES have some listen-by-default-even-when-you-don’t-expect settings, as i found out once when I was driving my daughter somewhere. All of a sudden I heard “I don’t understand (whatever oddball phrase one of us had just used)”. In that case, it was because we were using the maps to navigate - and there was a setting that let Google Assistant respond to voice commands when navigating, even when you’d otherwise turned it off.
I tend to think of my scenario as some kind of one-off bug that we somehow activated, as the behavior has never recurred. But it creeped me RIGHT THE HELL out.
Forgot to respond to the possibility that my husband had been searching: yes, that’s true. He may well have. But it still does nott answer why I was shown a pageful of search results in a browser.
Actual ads for footstools, on some other page (e.g. Facebook or something else that serves Google ads) would make more sense. Not a pageful as if I’d gone to google and done a search.
This is one of this times where , while I will never be able to prove it, the explanation of Google listening in when it had been told not to is really the only thing that makes sense.
