Casual Conversation

He said he doesn't have a smart phone how do they know the two people are near.

A lot of people dont realize it's been around since the late nineties when grocery stores started storing massive datasets on customer behavior. It's only grown since then, but even back then they were able to predict things like what you were likely to buy next or where you were in a hormonal cycle

I think a more likely explanation is that Google knows who your friends are, knows your friends watched this movie, and thus thinks it could be relevant to you.

Phones are designed to have massive talk times as is.

Most of that power is required for audio output.

But if you're just parsing for adwords? Capture and send snippets back to a server and process them there, attach them to the google/facebook ID.

Also, consider that cell phones used to have stand by charge times in the range of a week or two if left unused. Smartphones die if left unused for half a week.

I don't think it's either. I think it's reasonable to assume google knows that

• OP watched this movie
• OP and their friend both generally like anime
• OP and their friend are in the same location together

From there it can just infer a bunch of stuff (products) they might talk about.

But why couldn't they have secret "wake" words that don't actually wake, but instead have another secret functionality?

Like, you say "ok google" and it wakes, but you say "Toyota," and it checks a box on your secret profile they use that says "he said Toyota on Friday at 12:45pm" and then you and your friend and a couple other people at the starbucks you've never met get ads for Tacomas for a month due to all being in the same precise location for 47 min. Or you say "bomb" and it immediately puts you on a watchlist they share with the FBI?

I'm not saying it necessarily does, but for all the "it's impossible" people, why wouldn't that work? Why couldn't they hide that traffic with their normal data collection, or update and add new codewords? It at least theoretically seems possible. Sure maybe it isn't a 24/7 hot mic, but does it need to be?

Strike 1: Battery life would be enormously impacted. “Ok google” and such keywords run on specific low power hardware that THEN wake up the rest of the phone when triggered. General recording would need the full phone to always be running == very short battery life.

I think you're mistaken. I'm not saying that smartphones are recording full conversations, but they are definitely capable of listening for keywords without their owner noticing. Auto Shazam (indefinite automatic identification of all music that plays around your phone all the time) has been a thing since 2013. How much simpler would it be to identify words being spoken around your phone and then send a short text hash of that word to a server? Also, see the post from pelespirit on this thread with information about actual, specific ad-tech for this.

Huh, thank you for that. Very strange, looking at the google trends it has very little interest aside from a few blips between otherwise flat 0 interest over the last 5 years. There IS a small spike in interest occurring right now, so perhaps this is indeed some insane coincidence.

On DDG in Firefox Focus I had to go to “satellite gi” to get Satellite Girl and Milk Cow as an autocomplete.

@SoleInvictus@lemmy.blahaj.zone @Bags@piefed.social

I don't watch anime, I browse on Linux, but I often use Google.

I pulled up Chrome on my desktop (connected to the same account from Android) and typed in "Satellite". None of the suggestions involved "girl and milk cow":

- Satellite Map
- Satellite Images
- Satellite Imagery
- Satellite Tracker
- Satellite Weather
- Satellite Internet
- Satellite [a product from a billionaire that I refuse to mention]
- Satellite Phone

I sometimes access NASA and satellite imagery (SOHO and LASCO), hence the "Satellite imagery" suggestions. I also access cartography quite frequently, hence the "Satellite map". Anime is such a very absent thing from my personal interests (and Google, of course, knows this), hence the absence of anime suggestions.

Yes, phones listen, electronic devices can be made to listen, and it have been happening before LLMs came into being, "ECHELON" (from the 60s) is worthy mentioning. Even the Scunthorpe Problem isn't new: saying "bomb" on a landline phone used to trigger automatic recording of the calls for "national security purposes" (even though the mentioned "bomb" was some kind of gossiping between two friends). AI just made it "easier" as electronic devices have lots of power, thus decentralizing part of the data processing from their servers.

And while I may sound like some tinfoil hat (I indeed was at some point of my existence) I don't say this with legitimate concern: I simply don't care anymore (at least, not fully), sometimes I even dare to say... explicitly "concerning" things... near "my" phone, and I don't care... Because it already knows who I am anyways.

Medicine commercials are always such a weird thing in my head, too... Especially the incredibly nonspecific ones blasted blindly from the TV, which doesn't have any of this invasive targeted advertising...

cheerful music plays
[Happy, diverse group of people having a picnic]
[picturesque background of a rainbow and puffy clouds with a person raising their arms triumphantly]
"Ask your doctor if Plapbamba is right for you."
[Child hugs older person in slow motion]

Yeah but WHAT IS IT FOR?

Uninstalling Instagram likely won’t do anything. Even if you don’t have an account they’ll track you all across the web and apps via third-party tracking, it’s why people (like me) go out of their way to download huge blocklists of hostnames.

It may not be a coincidence, but the described correlation does not prove the causation.

The microphone is a shittier version of what they're actually doing: refining a database on each and every one of us in real-time, including those people, places, events, etc. we interact with.

I get why "listening via microphone" is where people's imaginations go first, but the truth of it is far more insidious than that sinplistic outmoded answer —and I'm not exaggerating in the slightest.

Good luck decrypting it. And they do the spoken language decoding on the device itself so it just sends super highly compressed tokens in really, really small payloads at whatever asynchronous rates it wants to. So wireshark is totally worthless here.

Damn, I hate the world we live in.

I remember many years ago people used to joke that our phones were listening to us (when they likely weren't), and now they just straight up provably are, and it seems like people are just ok with it.

I haven't kept up to date on any of this or been in the spaces where this info is usually available, seeing it so easily posted from multiple sources is scary.

I honestly don’t even think it’s that obscure. it has been nominated for (and won) several awards, for example

when searching "satellite gi" it’s the 3rd result on google for me (on firefox ios, not logged in, in private mode, as someone who very rarely uses google these days) and the 1st on english Wikipedia (using the ios app’s search)

We watched it like last October, so way before that spike...

Maybe that spike was us talking about it yesterday and the one search my friend did, and this thread...

Looking at the 5 year trend in the USA, and how there are only 2 blips in interest and a flatline 0 background interest otherwise shows me that the movie is indeed as obscure as I thought. My one mental offramp was that it was actually popular in some other community somewhere and I just hadn't heard of it. Even the Worldwide 5 year graph has a LOT of 0 flatline... Which makes it all the stranger.

And all the people saying it was some correlation between our phones being together or something... I don't have a smartphone. I never searched for the movie on any device I own, the only device it was played on or even typed the words into was my brother's crunchyroll app on his TV (which is indeed one point of collection). We live in different states, and I have never logged into any of my accounts on his TV. I hadn't spoken the words aloud in over 6 months. I have one point of social media, an Instagram, where I interact with 0 other accounts and simply post my photography. This friend does not have an instagram. I can't find any reasonable thread that could connect anything to my friends' phone. He had definitely never heard of the movie before, hence why he went to go look it up. And again, none of us are heavy anime consumers, so it's not like he's searching anime on his phone all day.

Yeah - your boyfriend had watched the video. Your phone was then next to your boyfriends for some amount of time. That's a well known location datapoint for ad targeting (and is the reason for why people freaked out when Facebook started recommending their therapist as "person you might know" etc).