I know everyone says it’s just a coincidence and the algorithms are just really good. But this one is too specific. My friends were talking about cat dentures and whether or not they’re a thing. That same evening, I got an Instagram reel recommended to me showing a cat with grills!
What app is listening to me?? Is Instagram directly? Or some other app that sells Instagram data?
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Yes
yeah it is we all know that… i mean, how would “Hey Siri” be able to work otherwise?
Yup. You know how you might download instagram or facebook or tik tok and as you’re opening the app for the first time it will ask if the app can access your microphone…? That’s how they getchya. So, if I am in close enough distance and start talking to you about Delta Airlines…you’re going to see a couple of ads for them and other airlines or trip websites. What a time to be alive!
always.
Everyone says it’s a coincidence?
Man you are surrounded by idiots, everybody knows phone, tablets, PC’s and even maybe consoles hear users.
They have to be listening. The other day I played the song Get a Clue from the Disney channel movie from the late 90s/early 2000s on my phone but near my wife.
Next time my wife opens up IG? A post about Get a Clue was at the top. No one has talked about that movie for 25 years. Can’t be a coincidence.
And before someone thinks there must have been something about Get a Clue around me originally to put that song in my head — you’re wrong. Something triggered another one of their songs in my head (www.nevergetoveryou), which made me think of the get a clue song.
I was also on cell data, so no common IP to use, and we’re still on our respective parents family plan, so we’re not even on the same phone plan
Even when it’s powered off, I am told!
My parents and their friends were paranoid about talking on landline phones because “the government might be listening.” This was the 70s. 50 years later we’re inviting corporations, the government, and God only knows what other shadowy cabals right into our homes, our cars, our pockets. It’s insane.
And as others have noted, yes, it’s demonstrably true that our phones and other devices are always listening at the very least to tailor ads to us via social media. To test this, my wife and I have had conversations about shit we have no intention of buying just to see ads for the stuff show up on FB almost immediately.
Yes.
Yes, all the time. This isn’t anything new kinda surprised you didn’t know this.
Yup. Was chatting to my mate about laser jet printers of all things and what do i get an ad for not ten minutes later?
Yup. Yesterday my wife and I were talking about getting a new BBQ then last night all her ads were about bbq’s 🤔
Believe me it is listening. A black guy stopped me in the street near Tanjong Pagar Road over the weekend and asked me for directions. I got chatting with him briefly and he said he was from Ghana. When I got home and scrolled through my news feed on my Pixel phone there was an article from a Ghana local newspaper. That’s not a coincidence.
Always..
Yes
All the time. Even when they are not near you, they listen through connected devices.
Noted and answered. I turned Siri off but I’m sure that won’t make too much of a change. It sounds like lots of devices are listening so as long as you’re around any other person or technology or any app has access to your mic, they’re listening.
Look into your apps permissions and see how many are requesting access to your microphone.
Almost all of them have microphone access built into the app regardless of what the app does.
I don’t think so. You might be interested in the “frequency illusion”. It’s something of a fallacy of assumption.
“I was just talking about this thing with my friend and now I see it constantly.” Interestingly enough it predates smartphones.
I think it’s a better explanation than “the cabal is always listening”. To be clear, the NSA absolutely is always listening, but not your cell provider per se.
There’s another part to this. Your data may be collated with others with phones that spend time near your phone. This means that if you and your friend (“they” know who your friends are by cell location) have similar data profiles, an add that worked on your friend will be targeted at you too. In this way, if your friend is doing a bit of comparative shopping, for example, you’ll likely receive adds for similar or identical items. It’s not a stretch to think that your friend would share some of this info with you just as they are getting into it, and that’s when “they” log a new potential buyer for their adds (you).
One final thing. Consider all the times you reveal yourself to be a potential buyer and don’t receive a targeted add? Ignoring all of those, likely the overwhelming majority of cases, would be selection bias.
Most apps require permission after downloading to use your microphone. Any one of them can be listening and mining data. That data is shared with any app that requires permission to use your phone data to function. Those apps can mine your phone for any data collected by and stored on your phone by another app. When you download those games that look fun, but then they turn out to want money for every step of progress so you delete it immediately; those apps mined the data collected by apps that have been in your phone since day 1, even though you deleted it immediately.
Data mining is the new gold. It’s why (not to get political) DOGE hired hackers instead of qualified auditors to audit the federal government. They mined the Fort Knox of data and bounced.
Are you really just finding this out now?
Yes and one of the weirdest one for me is my roomate bought a cajon. I’ve never heard of it before at the time. Those drum chairs you play on the sides. And have snares and different sounds depending where you hit it. Neither of us said the word and started playing it. First add that popped up on Facebook was for cajons.
Yup
Just yesterday my wife told me she popped a vein in one of her fingers, which happens periodically. Less than 5 minutes later I received a job post from Linked In for an opening at a vein treatment clinic.
You provide permission in EULA’s for the apps to listen to everything you say, look at what’s around you via your phones cameras, and dig through your phones hard drive.
I do not use voice commands on my phone but was talking to someone (in person) about something (jeeps, I think) and had all sorts of jeep ads and stuff the next time I got on my phone.
Yep, really common knowledge
Contact Cell-busters
Yes. No. It can always hear you. Sometimes, it’s listening.
Absolutely. To you and us all. We are cooked like a well done steak mate.
Yes! Have you enabled ad tracking? When you signed up for IG did you give it permission to access to your contacts? Have you enabled permission to access your mic? Have you enabled location services?
What is genius is that the designers of smartphones and apps figured out that most people would blindly agree to a system that sells them as a captive market for advertisers. And they told us up front they were going to do it.
Yes, of course it is. How else can it interact when you speak to it.
SKYNET is listening and learning.
Yep, I got some way to close search suggestions after talking about specific topics.
No, but Siri does. It always listen.
I don’t know at this point. Sometimes I just think about something and it appears on my fyp. Have I been brainwashed or can it read my mind?
Anything you interact with is collecting and selling your data. Anything on your phone is tracked and sold. All phones have active listening to enable Siri/google to respond on phrases.
It’s not a coincidence.
I have zero doubt that it listens. I have had way too many highly specific coincidences, including in multiple languages.
I wouldn’t call it listening but what it’s doing is maybe even worse. What is probably happening is that Instagram knows you were near your friend. Could be via location data on your phone, your IP addresses, or the fact you were on the same WiFi. Your friend probably engaged with this cat content. So, the next time you’re scrolling, they serve that content up to you, because they know there’s a strong chance you have the same content preferences as the friend that they know you just saw.
Maybe mine is just a coincidence, but my dad called me on Messenger and asked me if I wanted to have his old Mocca Master coffee machine. Later the same day, I saw many adverts for Mocca Master machines on Facebook.
I was just wondering this but for dogs. We’ve got a rescue that has quite the snaggletooth and the tongue cannot stay inside because of it.
I assume they are. I set a reminder on Alexa to remind me to drink water whenever it hears me cough. Still works.
Yes, phones are listening. My daughter and I play a game sometimes where we’ll put our phones on the table and talk about random obscure things. Whoever gets an ad for it first wins.
I sometimes get ads from things I said via text, not even speech. Big tech knows everything
You can turn off these settings on your phone…
They actually drain a lot of battery and when I turned ’em off my phone was running a bit smoother and battery life was extended
Look up a youtube video on how to do it, first step is enabling developer mode
Depends on how much you want to do, but for instance I have an option in my drop down menu now where I can enable/disable sensors, so mic, location, camera, light sensors and even the weight in the phone(allows you to know if phone is rotated) would stop working
Way more to it than that, cause there are a lot of options that allow them to track everything you do on your phone
It is listening, yes.
If you can talk to your phone to wake it up that means it’s always listening.
I actually wrote a paper on this during my Masters program. I spent a week monitoring a dedicated subnet on my home network and tracking every connection sent to Google’s servers. I would systematically ping Google via “hey Google” and then either ask it to do something, ask a question, or do nothing and time out. After a week I analyzed the packet sizes to try and infer if Google was “Listening in”
The analyzed essentially boiled down to the packet sizes correlating directly with what I asked Google. Obviously, the actual data was encrypted, so I couldn’t see what was actually being sent.
If Google is listening in, the data would need to be stored locally until you actually ask it to do something. It then send the stored data along with the new command.
What’s more likely is that this is just recency bias.
There is no privacy and every little dirty secret you’ve mentioned out loud has been heard by everything “smart”. You argue with bots online or perhaps becoming swayed into thinking certain ways because of the comments you read. They drive us in ways and brainwash us for $$$$$$$$$$$$. “Buy this consume that be like this do as that”
Yes it is.
A year ago or something like that i was out and about with friends i haven’t seen in at least 15 years. We hit a pub and i find a beer i haven’t had since my Uni years. And what better way to celebrate hanging out with friends from uni by ordering this beer.
So i had like 5 before it was time to wind down and go home. We talked about the beer because it was also a long time since the others drank it.
Well the day after it’s all over my damn Facebook feed… Mind you i haven’t seen this beer for since forever and it’s not running local commercial either.
But lo and behold… Suddenly it’s everywhere.
I prevented all my apps except the phone to access anything from that day forward.
Yes, just say that go want to go to Hawaii and all of a sudden you will be getting Hawaii advertisements
Even scarier. I have a few clogged pores recently and thought in my head and not out loud to anyone else about getting exfoliating pads…Guess what? I started getting suggestions/ads for exfoliating pads from Amazon a day later.
It’s not just a coincidence
Not really, it would be impossible to store and go trough a constant data stream that records 24/7. Most things that they want to know are either in your search history, YouTube watchlist, Instagram likes, or friends that looked up the same things that your phones often come close too.
Yes, we always listen OP 😀
Yes.
People love to spread paranoia about this. Yes, if you have Siri enabled it is listening 24/7. If you have an app access to your microphone, it can activate it.
Apple is not recording, analyzing, and transmitting the data recorded for Siri’s passive listening. If they were, there would be ways to detect that processing and the transmission of that data.
On iOS, if an app is using your microphone there will be a constant orange dot at the top of your screen to let you know. The apps can’t get around this. If they were listening, you’d know.
Social media and advertising companies have LOADS of data about everything you do. Where you go, who you’re with, your job, age, gender, interests, searches, all of it. You hand over all that data willingly and think nothing of it. They do not need a constant feed of your mic to target ads at you with extreme accuracy.
There are hundreds of random things you talk about in a day, almost none of them are suddenly appearing on your phone. Our brains love finding patterns, and we find patterns in truly random data. We love patterns so much that we’re notoriously bad at identifying random data, and will more likely select ordered data as “random.”
I wanna see this cat with grills, though.
Yes it f course it listens … you are just figuring this out now ?
Not only is it listening to us I sometimes think it can read my mind.
I dont have the sources handy but you can google it — yes. apps, social media ones in particular; are passively using your mic and possibly also your camera.
YES
Yes. I believe it is.
I told my wife that when she fills the water jug, that she pushes down on the water faucet and she shouldn’t do that. The next day, both our social networks were filled with ads for water faucets. Yeah, they are listening.
Yes!
My phone reads my damn mind. I’ve only ever thought about something and up come ads for it. Multiple times. Haha
There is a 93 million dollar lawsuit against Apple Siri of this. They are denying it but paying out anyway.
What’s much more likely is your phone is talking to other phones. But not directly..what picks it up is the 2nd and 3rd layer algorithms online for things like advertising. And they’re insanely good.
We did an experiment at a training course with a diverse group of unconnected people.
Test 1
We opened Facebook and checked the recommended friends. Lots of faces in the room showed up. Most of us had never met in person before.
Test 2
One person searched for diamond rings in the group and one searched for bikes
That’s all that showed up as the adverts that everyone got on various social media that day.
So if you have a convo or meeting and someone searches something online nearby you’re going to get targeted by the algos. They know roughly who is near who and what is generally being searched. Even if your phone has secure settings a few people nearby with wide open settings let the cat out of the bag.
live demonstration on YT
Anecdotal but I was in Northern Alabama at a friend’s house. We were chatting that I was looking to buy a house in South Mississippi. He had a nest or Alexa. After I left, he sent my a FB ad for exactly what I was saying in a the location we were talking about. We actually went to go look at it.
Creepy af