A while back (I believe May 2020) I did an experiment. I kept a phone in isolation for 3 days and recorded all the network traffic. Then I took the same phone and put it up against a speaker that played a podcast archive continuously over a 3 day period. Then I did another 3 days of silence and a different archive of podcasts for 3 days. At the end I had 24 days of phone network pcaps (4 sets of 3 days audio + 3 days silence).<p>I made sure that the phone was able to transcribe the audio coming from the speakers when I put the keyboard in dictation mode just to make sure that it could "hear" the conversations from the speaker.<p>I tried hard to find statistical anomalies or pattern differences in the sets but I was unable to extract anything that could yield any type of change detection corresponding to when they happened (silence to podcast or podcast to silence) or anything that could differentiate the content. I had timestamps, hoping to find spikes, say, during commercials where a bunch of brand names get mentioned. There were no such spikes and the traffic was frustratingly uniform and appeared to be completely independent of the experiment I was running.<p>The phone had google assistant, facebook, instagram, tiktok, and snapchat installed among other applications. All the accounts were logged in and I occasionally adb'd over to the device to make sure the applications appeared in memory in a ps list.<p>Now of course, absence of evidence doesn't show evidence of absence and maybe I am just too incompetent to see what's going on but I was unable to find any hard evidence using this method.<p>I of course was really hoping for the opposite and to come forth with some industry shattering announcement, but if there's something there I at least wasn't able to find it in the wire.<p>I encourage others to repeat this and refute my inconclusive results - that'd be great. It's an easy enough experiment to do. Happy hunting.
There are two aspects that discredit these types of claims: The banal explanation, and the extreme risk Google would be taking by doing this.<p>The banal explanation is that life is really complicated, and a coincidence of this nature is unimpressive. This could be as subtle as a video you watched said something that was worded similarly to lyrics in one of their songs that stuck around and made you think of it a day later. It doesn't take many people to later search for that song for the algorithms to pick up on it and start suggesting it.<p>For the risk, Google has had a history of a very open culture. Many people within the company have strong ethical convictions. To do a project like this, you'd have to selectively recruit a sub-selection of employees who don't have these convictions, and manage to provide data streams to other teams algorithms. This is without anyone noticing that, hey, that team sure is using a lot of ML resources or my device sure is uploading a lot of data. This is all on top of the legal risk of saying you're not listening while also doing so. I can't imagine that getting past a legal review.<p>I think there are a lot of good examples of big companies abusing their power, but this isn't one of them.
Could easily be a correlation thing, rather than a causation thing.<p>It would not be hard to believe that the friends were talking about the songs <i>because</i> they're trending as "90's throwback" or whatever, and then YouTube suggested those songs because they're trending.
A while back I was casually driving home in my car in the wee-hours of the night. This is when I also had an XM subscription in my car so it was that long ago, well before Spotify/Pandora where one can listen to whatever you want at the moment. Anyway, I was browsing all the XM channels and for some reason "The Flame" by Cheap Trick popped into my head and I was in the mood for it. While channel surfing I came across the unmistakable guitar chords of the song just beginning. It was super eerie and to this day an unforgettable coincidence.<p>"Stop reading my thoughts Please, XM"<p>The point is - in our long lives, stuff like this happens through shear probability alone several times. An advanced search algorithm designed to predict songs based on past history, and who knows how many other available inputs, isn't even in the same realm of weirdness as feeling a song and it appears on the radio.
The creepy thing is not that Google is listening to you. (They're not. Period.) It's that they can get so good that they can convince a large segment of the population that they _are_ listening to you.<p>As others have said, correlating your friends' activity with your colocation and other similar habits is enough.
I've heard this anecdote from so many people in so many different contexts that I'm beginning to get suspicious about the common "benign" explanations like graphs of friends, their interests, location tracking, etc.<p>Do we an in-depth analysis done somewhere that proves / disproves the theory of an actual microphone / STT being used either in Android / iOS itself or by a running app?
Can anyone (perhaps a former employee) confirm this behavior. I can’t tell if I’m imaging connections or the words spoken are being ingested by the ad machine.<p>It seems like a huge overreach to be listening, the microphone privilege I could see being abused for this, but it just seems so wrong.
A couple of the most popular hits from 30 years ago. Are you sure you didn’t hear them on some advert recently? Seems less likely that Google discovered your obscure love for Nirvana from a conversation you had.
They have enough data to model you in the machine, together with whoever you are talking to. Just like was shown in black mirror or westworld. No need for listening, you already live in their server.
I like to refer to this system that is always listening as The Daemon because I like to assume it has a commen backend. Also lookup the book Daemon by Daniel Suarez it is pretty great
Do you have Hotword detection or Google home in the house. Sometimes they trigger for wrong keyword. Could it be that they got triggered and added these songs?
I read articles like this and then understand why the average person thinks that Bill Gates implanted a chip in them via the covid vaccine.<p>To anyone who has worked on mobile devices or ad tech, this sounds as silly as your uncle telling you about the covid chip and how vaccines cause heart attacks.