Something kinda creepy just happened, but maybe it’s a coincidence. I just now randomly decided to rewatch the pilot of breaking bad after many years of not watching it. After the episode ended, I started scrolling reddit and the breaking bad subreddit was just suggested in my timeline. Wtf?? It’s never been suggested before just now.
Comments
Yeah they do
Yes, 100%
My wife and I had a conversation about a product which we’d never even considered before. The next day, she had ads for it on her computer. I’d say yes.
While everyone has an anecdote that makes it sound like the answer is yes, in reality the answer is no, the truth is scarier. The social media and advertising companies are so good at tracking your behavior and guessing what you might want to hear about that coincidences happen.
They guess what to show you a thousand times a year. If their guess is amazingly accurate 10 times a year you really notice it. That doesn’t mean they were using a microphone to listen to you.
It wouldn’t need to be listening to catch for that. All devices in your house on your Wifi share an IP address and your home address just watched Breaking Bad, so…
However, how do you think Alexa (or Google or Siri) can respond to her name? The microphone is always on. It’s always listening. How much gets transmitted back to whoever is in the cloud is debatable, but the device is always listening.
No, they don’t need to.
They’d have to waste huge amounts of money and resources into maintain very very large data centers to parse through every little thing millions of people are saying around the world at all times in all languages.
Why do that when instead they can know how old you are, your gender then track where you are, what you browse and who you’re with and have a basic algorithm to just pump ads at you till one hits right.
The “it’s listening to us” is confirmation bias.
Absolutely
Yes they listen, they also have algorithms that can correlate billions of data points on hundreds of millions of individuals. If the algorithm sees 450k people between the ages of X and x+15 and one third of those people that happen to live in Florida and occasionally use a credit card at a Publix grocery store and ever utter the words “Walter White” half of them would be interested in a Breaking Bad news group.
Absolutely, unfortunately.
My Samsung TV will play an ad on YouTube as soon as someone moves.
It’s not in my head, I ran an actual experiment and recorded everything.
Not just Facebook. Even reddit listens in these days
Ooooooh yah
Yeah. It’s terrible for me right now – we just lost our last cat Wednesday and are all devastated- algorithms keep sending me cats to adopt even though I’ve not been on my phone. Literally fuck off
If you’ve ever had your phone know what song is playing without you asking it, that’s because it’s listening to everything. It also will spy on your Internet and nearby devices; that’s why when I went to a family reunion where my anime-obsessed cousin was, I started getting a ton of anime ads.
You are never safe from spies, Google, Apple, Amazon, and more will record all the data they can and use it to give you ads and sell it to other companies. If you are uncomfortable with this, you will have to give up all Internet connections and electronic devices.
Always assume that your phone, your computer, your TV, and your car always listen to you.
Yeah it feels super creepy but it’s more likely tied to your viewing habits or app activity.
The short answer is, ‘yes, but’.
The longer answer is:
Many of our devices track our preferences. However, it’s also human nature to seek out patterns in random occurrences.
Derren Brown, the mentalist and illusionist, goes into the phenomena in some detail in many of his videos, and explains how it can be used to influence perception: you think of a particular song, or hear/see a news report on a particular subject, and suddenly it seemingly starts appearing everywhere you look.
So, our devices are listening (actively or passively is an argument for another time), but what you’ve experienced is more than likely just coincidence.
No, why do you care? Please speak clearly into your phone’s mic.
Side note, I actually just started watching it again a couple nights ago. I forgot how good the characters/acting was.
Well I was talking (not googling or watching) about a really random subject- like I wish they made this product- that I’ve never googled in my life) Next thing I know I got an add for it on Facebook. So yeah it listens!
It’s silly but sometimes I’ll think of something and see it pop up as an ad like— an hour later, without even mentioning it outloud.
Do you actually have something interesting going on worth listening to?
Yeah, I thought not…
I’m not saying they do but every time I have a online therapy appointment I get better help ads out the ass
The thing to remember is security researchers have been looking at phone OSs for a long time, and over all these years no one has found any code that does this.
There are plenty of ways we know devices spy on you though. Got a Smart TV? Most pre-enable sharing your viewing habits with advertisers. And obviously streaming services know what you’re watching by default.
All these ad services can link your devices by IP address and which services you’re logged in to as well.
So there are plenty of avenues for the fact that you just watched Breaking Bad to get associated with your ad profile.
Yes, they gas lite everyone for a while about preference prediction etc and then recently admitted they listen too.
100% yes.
A friend of mine had an older gentleman tell him about the prostitute he has used since his wife’s passing. This was on a long bus drive, and he had. His phone on him but away. He recounted this to a group of us later. Some of us with him began getting ads for prostitutes that evening.
Prostitution is legal where I live, but soliciting is not. I don’t know the legality of the ads, I dotn know the exact phrasing as I didn’t get them.