(I know many of you already know it but this incident I experienced made me so paranoid about using smartphones)

To start off, I’m not that deep into privacy rabbit hole but I do as much I can possibly to be private on my phone. But for the rest of phones in my family, I generally don’t care because they are not tech savvy and pushing them towards privacy would make their lives hard.

So, the other day I pirated a movie for my family and since it was on Netflix, it was a direct rip with full HD. I was explaining to my family how this looks so good as this is an direct rip off from the Netflix platform, and not a recording of a screening in a cinema hall(camrip). It was a small 2min discussion in my native language with only English words used are record, piracy and Netflix.

Later I walk off and open YouTube, and I see a 2 recommendations pop-up on my homepage, “How to record Netflix shows” & “Why can’t you screen record Netflix”. THE WHAT NOW. I felt insanely insecure as I was sure never in my life I looked this shit up and it was purely based on those words I just spoke 5min back.

I am pretty secure on my device afaik and pretty sure all the listening happened on other devices in my family. Later that day, I went and saw which all apps had microphone access, moved most of them to Ask everytime and disabled Google app which literally has all the permissions enabled.

Overall a scary and saddening experience as this might be happening to almost everyone and made me feel it the journey I took to privacy-focused, all worth it.

    • Tehdastehdas@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      9 months ago

      A phone can notice when it’s in the hands of a security expert and start acting normal. Before dieselgate, Volkswagen cars had been emissions tested for years without finding anything suspicious. Turned out VW used the car’s sensors to detect when it was being tested.

      • xor@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        2·
        3 months ago

        on a side note, many viruses and malware detect programming tools and delete themselves if they’re there…

  • ElectroLisa@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    2·
    9 months ago

    Most likely the website you pirated your movies from stored cookies in your browser which then were picked up by Google/YouTube.

    • Kairos@lemmy.today
      1·
      9 months ago

      That’s not how that works. There were likely ads on the page which brings in Google cookies and shows the page the user is on.

      OP make sure all third party cookies are blocked. They’re not needed anymore.

    • zerozaku@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      0·
      9 months ago

      There is one more thing I haven’t mentioned here. The device where I pirated the movie is different and is on different Google account and my Google account on which I opened the YouTube was different.

      • N4CHEM@lemmy.ml
        0·
        9 months ago

        You just mentioned 2 different Google accounts: if your devices are connected to Google accounts they are already getting a lot of information from you that way, and Google knows that those 2 accounts are related.

        • zerozaku@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
          01·
          9 months ago

          That’s absurd to think they link two different Google accounts and recommend stuff on YouTube. This is less believable than them listening to mic 24/7.

          Also the device I pirated content on, has only one Google account registered.

  • Chozo@fedia.io
    1·
    9 months ago

    Listening to audio would be the least effective and most expensive method of data collection for advertisers. It’s not happening. They already have literally over a million data points on you, there’s nothing useful for them to glean from your audio that they don’t already have ad nauseum.

    You see thousands of ads and recommendations every day. You finally found one that was relevant to you. It’s not that deep.

  • otp@sh.itjust.works
    1·
    9 months ago

    Yet again, someone mistakes an anecdote for evidence. And evidence is also not the plural form of anecdote.

    I’m sure we have people here who are tech-savvy enough to have actually examined the kinds of data that their phone is sharing.

    If you have something like Google Home or Amazon Alexa, then yeah, those would be sending voice data back, and yeah, they could probably use it for advertising. But as far as I know, there is no evidence that phones are “always listening” and “always sending information back” when they’re idle.

  • davel@lemmy.mlEnglish
    0·
    9 months ago

    Reporter: [REDACTED]
    Reason: BS

    Maybe I should have removed this post, because it is ridiculous.