Someone is watching me... Google

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
21

I recently read about this issue. In fact, it may have been in Straight Dope, I can’t remember. But people here aren’t the only ones wondering about being spied on by Google. Turns out that spying on people is so 20th century. Google and many of the major tech companies, Facebook for one, uses artificial intelligence to model the behavior of every individual. You already have a doppelhanger at Google. The AI monitors a few general characteristics about your current behavior and predicts specific future events about you. They don’t actually listen in to your conversations, but as an example they know that when a person just like you calls their sister, that means you are likely to do something similar to what your sister is doing. If you sister is surfing the web looking at shoes, the AI will start serving you shoe ads. etc. They didn’t listen in to your call, but they know who you called etc.

All very spooky and so far ahead of the law that legal issues simply aren’t a factor. They aren’t monitoring your activities, they are monitoring an AI creation of you that they created. That AI creation doesn’t have any privacy to violate.

22

It’s not just Google. The other day I was browsing on my PC for some items on Amazon. They happened to be expensive items, which may have triggered something. Obviously the advertising behemoths are going to be triggered to deluge you with related ads, but what I found disturbing is that I got an alert on my Amazon tablet! Not on the PC where I looked at this stuff, not via email, not via any normal communication mechanism. Just the kind of on-screen alert similar to “your battery is down to 20%”. And what this alert said was “We just thought you might be interested in … {the exact items I was looking at}”.

These people are shamelessly aggressive and insidious and their aggressiveness now extends across platforms. The just love platforms that they own and can totally control. I think there is a market for apps that disable vendors’ hidden online functions, including the Amazon tablets’ mandatory updates that cannot be turned off.

23

They have to monitor your activities to create an AI or you though, don’t they?

24

A few weeks back I was out with my brother. He was driving and we passed a sign outside an apparently new business that hadn’t been there before. It said “Crazy Aaron’s”. I don’t recall if I read it out loud or not but I was curious so I took out my phone to google it. I typed in “Crazy” and before I could type any further the first suggestion was “Crazy Aarons”.

I had never heard of this business before let alone searched for it and I highly doubt that large numbers of people search on that phrase as opposed to other phrases starting with the word “crazy”.

I’m hard pressed to attribute this to anything other than one of two possibilities. Either I said it out loud and Google keyed on that, or it was location based, since we had just driven past that business.

I assumed at the time that it was location based, but after reading this thread I’m starting to wonder.

In any case I recently was looking at what Google had stored about my searches, etc. and discovered that it had stored a bunch of short audio clips supposedly recorded from my “OK Google” voice searches.

Some of them sounded like conversational snippets that were definitely not part of some search. I assume I had somehow triggered voice searches automatically, probably by inadvertently touching the microphone icon in the search box.

I’ve since revoked the Google app’s microphone and camera permissions. Voice search no longer works but I can live with that.

FB’s app has a bunch of permissions to things like contacts, microphone, camera etc., all of which I’ve turned off.

Anytime I install ANY new app the first thing I do is check it’s permissions and turn off anything that doesn’t make sense for it’s functionality.

While we’re on this subject; recently, while I’m on the SDMB, Tapatalk has been showing me a lot of ads concerning where close carry is legal and where I can get a close carry license.

In fact those are the only ads it’s been showing me and it doesn’t matter what thread I’m in. I’ve never expressed interest in close carry either on or off line. I’ve never even owned a gun. So whatever algorithms determine these things aren’t infallible.

26

I had a strange incident as well. I had to have mold remediation done in my apartment. The building management took care of most of the arrangements, although there were a handful of phone calls to the remediation company. No emails, though.

The mold testing system they used connected to a phone app. Immediately after they did this test, I started seeing ads for mold remediation.

Probably something to do with the phone numbers I called, even though that happened days before I started seeing the ads. I was almost thinking that my devices had somehow registered the proximity of the mold testing app, even though the testers weren’t connected to my network? Crazy, huh?

27

They weren’t using your WiFi? If not, i can see a couple of other possibilities.

Their location could have connected them to you, either through your phone’s location or the fact that their phone’s location coincided with your address that your ISP has on file.

Another possibility could occur if you and they are both Xfinity subscribers. Xfinity users can use any public Xfinity hotspot. Xfinity uses some home modems to broadcast a separate channel.that is one of these public hotspots. If the worker uses Xfinity and your modem is being used as a public hotspot his phone may have been using your modem.

28

The two devices are likely linked by email address to the same account. Even if they aren’t, they share enough data for it not to be any big secret they’re owned by the same person.

Years ago I learned this when I’d search for an address on my work computer and then two hours later I’d get in my car and my phone would tell me how long it’s going to take to get there. Similarly, I could search for something at home, and it would autofill the search term (on google) at work (and show it as already having been searched).
I’m a big believer in using private mode, especially at work, when doing anything sensitive. But now, I make sure to do that even at home and on my phone (Firefox Focus).
I’d hate to be at work and start to search for “What day is Easter 2020” and have it fill in “What’s this funny rash on my thigh” as soon as I hit the W.

On top of all that, my home computer and phone use one gmail account. At work, I’m logged into a different one, just to make sure they really don’t overlap.

29

I am not so sure they don’t listen. I’ve had way too many examples of having a conversation about something, then going to search for it, and finding nearly perfect search terms show up before I get the first word completed. Not just the word, but the full thing I was just discussing. Like if I am talking with my wife about drip irrigating our garden and wondering what the best spacing for the emitters is, if I go google that a few seconds later, I’ll get “drip irr” typed in and the first hit will be “drip irrigation emitter spacing” (just like David Allen’s)

I mean, I’m not surprised that googling something on my phone will end up having tailored ads start showing up on various sites, including Amazon, or that Amazon has a pretty good handle on stuff I’d like based on my virtual doppleganger, but what surprises me and unnerves me is when my Google searches are TOO accurate and pertinent.

30

Check out the podcast Reply All episode titled “Is Facebook Spying on You?” The are any number of ways for them and Google and whomever else may be interested to obtain information about you. And they have a ton of it.

31

It’s an interesting business strategy. We all know Google, Amazon etc. do extensive data mining, stuffing our computers with cookies and showing us page after page of ads for washing machines if we just showed interest in one through our clicks, or our searches or our online purchases. And they don’t keep it a secret.

But their “listening in on people” illegal and secret approach apparently only applies to a small percentage of people(“Yes it happened to me too” on a message board, or your facebook wall, does not make it universal), and is used for bizarre purposes like targeting snack adds and customizing google search term completion.

I especially like the last one, because it must make google so much money to violate the law just so people can type in one less word of a search they were already doing!

:rolleyes:

32

Well, I notice that whenever I learn a new word, suddenly I start seeing and hearing that word all over the place. Same concept at play as others have discussed, and I KNOW Google didn’t have anything to do with that.

33

The Baader-Meinhof Effect.

34

Well, what is the brand name so we can see if anyone else has been getting ads.

Dennis

35

About 2 months ago I was on the UC Santa Barbara website looking up campus tour dates to see if we could line up a tour with my son’s Spring Break. Later that night I was watching a show on the ad-supported VRV streaming service. Every ad break featured the exact same 15 second ad repeated 4 times.

What was it? A public service announcement from the Santa Barbara police department warning that DUI checkpoints will be in effect during the UCSB street party held over Spring Break.

Definitely not ISP location based, as I live over 100 miles from Santa Barbara. I used the same instance of Chrome to access both sites, so most likely the ad server just looked at my cookies. After I cleared my cookies, I started getting ads for Uber Eats.

36

Before I listen to a half hour podcast…is using your phone to listen to you one of the ways?
I mean, anything else, I think most people have a grasp of. It’s the concern that they’re listening that bothers people.

37

A lot of people don’t realize what’s really going on. They view life as a bunch of unconnected incidences and things. They don’t realizes that there’s this, like, lattice of coincidence that lays on top of everything.

I’ll give you an example, show you what I mean. Suppose you’re thinking about a plate of shrimp. Suddenly, Google will say, like, “plate,” or “shrimp,” or “plate of shrimp,” out of the blue, no explanation. No point in looking for one either. It’s all part of a cosmic unconsciousness.

38

You eat a lot of acid, Miller, back in the hippie days?

39

I propose that women gush about nitros at the same rate men talk about tampons… more than zero, less than alot.:smiley:

To clarify, some men use (1st aide for ex) or wonder aloud about tampons, but not many, and obviously there are some women interested in cars, but also not many.:cool:

40

I’ve had similar experiences. Stopped by a shop I don’t normally use, and got flooded with ads for that shop. Turned off location on my phone and the problem cleared itself up. Stranger things too. Gotten ads for products my SO was browsing, etc. I’ve gotten some control of it through using different accounts for different purposes on my browser, but the occasional weirdness makes its way through. A friend in the UK said to do the occasional search for bras. Then most of the advertising targeted to me will show pretty tits.

41

I posted a very similar thread here last year. I went to a Qdoba for lunch, using a lot of Cholula hot sauce on my burrito. I paid cash. When I got back to work, I took a quick look at a news website on my work computer, aaaand there was an ad for Cholula hot sauce. I’d link to my post from last year but i’m on my phone now.

The consensus, if I recall correctly, was that my phone had been gps tracked and the ad relevance guessed at from my location. There were a few votes for coincidence but Cholula hot sauce seems too random of an ad for that. So, my location was likely tracked from my phone, my consumer preference correctly divined, and I was cross-tracked to my work computer, where I was delivered my Cholula ad less than an hour later. Brave new world!