(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.
I am surprised by the response I got from majority here. I thought the people who are privacy-focused, wouldn’t give the benefit of doubt to Google of all companies. But it isn’t the case here. Everyone here just assumes and believes strongly it isn’t technically not possible which is really the case when you look at the other services offered by Google.
Google app which is pre-installed is pretty a forced voice assistant on everyone on android.
yeah the level of technical competence on this site has plummeted since the influx of the reddit crowd.
just enough consumer tech enthusiast knowledge to delude themselves they can smugly and self righteously shit on the average non-tech person.
and now they’re the majority, drowning out legitimate curiosity by loudly parroting headlines from articles they didn’t even read. slowly turning lemmy into the regurgitated reddit pop media shithole they wanted to escape.
this topic is especially difficult because of the clear emotional desire for it not to be true. hence the degree of fragile cope in this thread.
thankfully not everyone here is a lost cause, and you’ve been given some good advice on delineating the other possible causes for what you’ve observed. when we do a careful analysis we must ofc consider all possibilities.
what i’ve not seen properly acknowledged in this thread, however, is that the possibility of alternative explanations doesn’t preclude the possibility of voice-based surveillance either.
I get your feeling :) Don’t worry the silent majority is on your side. However they won’t comment because they fear from being banned or backslashed…
While It can’t be proven or disapproven, I also had my share of strange coincidence where my mind goes “Huh? How is that even possible?”… Kinda strange feeling! But that feeling gave me the push to the privacy route maybe in a rather to extreme direction? Always follow your guts when there’s to much noise to make a clear decision.
You will never get full 100% privacy or anonymity, however you can make your data as much as difficult to get and waste some of their resource and time :).
Good luck !