I was sitting at a cafe with some friends, and we got onto the subject of weird anime we have watched. None of us are heavy anime consumers, so it’s not really a topic that comes up often. I recalled a time I was at my brother’s house a couple months ago and we got WAY too high and started digging through his Crunchyroll to find something dumb to watch, and found this movie from 2014 called “Satellite Girl and Milk Cow”. So I described the premise, a guy who was turned into a literal bipedal cow by some wizard happens upon a sentient satellite that falls to earth and becomes a humanoid girl… I don’t remember anything else I was REALLY high lol.
Over the next couple of minutes, I ended up saying “Sattelite Girl and Milk Cow” a couple more times. When eventually one of the friends doubted my recollection, they took out their phone to look it up. They started typing, and then stopped dead, stared at the screen for a few seconds and blurted out “What the fuck?”
They turned their phone around and they had typed “Satellite” into google and THE FIRTS RECOMMENDED RESULT was “Satellite Girl and Milk Cow”. A goofy relatively obscure animated movie from 2014.
Ok, what? How? That’s such a specific and obscure thing to pull as a first result. There are hundreds, if not THOUSANDS of other things that would be immediately more relevant to any random person’s life than that. I don’t have a smartphone so couldn’t try on the spot, but when I got home, neither my laptop or desktop gave any similar behavior on multiple different search engines. It gave me a few seconds of dread that even though I have consciously made the choice to exclude myself from the constant data gathering of smartphones, other people’s phones are still listening to me, which is something I hadn’t really thought about before.
I’m sure plenty more people have stories like this, but the specificity and obscurity of this example is just so baffling to me, like there’s NO way that it wasn’t picked up as an audio cue.
I can almost feel the tinfoil hat beginning to grow out of my skull.
EDIT: Well, I definitely wasn’t expecting this many replies lol. I guess the strategy to get more engagement is to just be wrong on the internet. (It looks like the search recommendation might have been an insane coincidence based on some unknown spike in search activity, per the google trends data)
I think people underestimate how far along surveillance capitalism actually is
A lot of people dont realize it’s been around since the late nineties when grocery stores started storing massive datasets on customer behavior. It’s only grown since then, but even back then they were able to predict things like what you were likely to buy next or where you were in a hormonal cycle
Smartphones are not recording conversations.
Strike 1: Battery life would be enormously impacted. “Ok google” and such keywords run on specific low power hardware that THEN wake up the rest of the phone when triggered. General recording would need the full phone to always be running == very short battery life.
Strike 2: The whole combined cybersecurity field are constantly probing mobile phones (hardware and software) for security issues. If there was either code or hardware that was always listening you would have seen lots of headlines with actual proof.
The word you’re looking for is “synchronicity”.
I think a more likely explanation is that Google knows who your friends are, knows your friends watched this movie, and thus thinks it could be relevant to you.
Yeah, it’s probably more of a correlation between all the data points at that specific time (everyone’s phones in the same location and all the data points social media has on them), and the algorithm was able to piece together that information to form a guess on auto-complete. If we’re really leaning hard into phones listening, then the most plausible explanation is someone in the cafe was actively using siri (or google’s equivalent) while OP mentioned the anime title and it was picked up in the background.
Phones are designed to have massive talk times as is.
Most of that power is required for audio output.
But if you’re just parsing for adwords? Capture and send snippets back to a server and process them there, attach them to the google/facebook ID.
Also, consider that cell phones used to have stand by charge times in the range of a week or two if left unused. Smartphones die if left unused for half a week.
I could’ve added that I spent 15 years working as a developer in the mobile phone industry, but in reality that shouldn’t be needed. All that’s necessary for you to independently verify what I wrote regarding how voice keyword triggers function and the difference in power draw between that and the full audio pathway for recording is available through the nearest search engine.
All you need to do is independently verify the claim that I have made. chefs kiss
Isn’t that what people should be doing anyway? Am I missing something? If some rando tells me something without providing relevant data then (providing I care enough) I’d look it up. Otherwise, I just consider whatever they said to be untrue and move on.
But why couldn’t they have secret “wake” words that don’t actually wake, but instead have another secret functionality?
Like, you say “ok google” and it wakes, but you say “Toyota,” and it checks a box on your secret profile they use that says “he said Toyota on Friday at 12:45pm” and then you and your friend and a couple other people at the starbucks you’ve never met get ads for Tacomas for a month due to all being in the same precise location for 47 min. Or you say “bomb” and it immediately puts you on a watchlist they share with the FBI?
I’m not saying it necessarily does, but for all the “it’s impossible” people, why wouldn’t that work? Why couldn’t they hide that traffic with their normal data collection, or update and add new codewords? It at least theoretically seems possible. Sure maybe it isn’t a 24/7 hot mic, but does it need to be?
Sure. And then all the developers who have made that functionality work need to be in on the conspiracy, and all the cybersec researchers need to be also (or incompetent). And the false positive rate would be sky high due to trying to match so many different words to the waveforms.
The phones don’t listen to your conversations.
And then all the developers who have made that functionality work need to be in on the conspiracy
NDA.
and all the cybersec researchers need to be also
It’d be impossible to hide the data transfers with the rest of it? That would be something but I’m still skeptical.
And the false positive rate would be sky high due to trying to match so many different words to the waveforms.
Fair, but also, so? Who cares? Let cocaine users get ads for coke, if that means coke drinkers get it too. Besides, as I’m told by the “there’s definitely 100% no listening even for keywords” people, “they don’t need to,” by combining those keywords with the profile they already have, they could cut down on false positives.
Sure they may not “listen to your conversations” like a hot mic, and sure they may not currently have secret-functionality words, but why couldn’t they? It still seems entirely possible.
Strike 1: Battery life would be enormously impacted. “Ok google” and such keywords run on specific low power hardware that THEN wake up the rest of the phone when triggered. General recording would need the full phone to always be running == very short battery life.
I think you’re mistaken. I’m not saying that smartphones are recording full conversations, but they are definitely capable of listening for keywords without their owner noticing. Auto Shazam (indefinite automatic identification of all music that plays around your phone all the time) has been a thing since 2013. How much simpler would it be to identify words being spoken around your phone and then send a short text hash of that word to a server? Also, see the post from pelespirit on this thread with information about actual, specific ad-tech for this.
I don’t think it’s either. I think it’s reasonable to assume google knows that
- OP watched this movie
- OP and their friend both generally like anime
- OP and their friend are in the same location together
From there it can just infer a bunch of stuff (products) they might talk about.
Two decades ago I had a candybar dumbphone - less than two decades later I bought this tiny device (which I got when it came out two years ago) that was significantly more powerful than my full-blown computer back then, along with features nobody would’ve thought could be packed into something so small.
There’s always newer, better, more efficient tech being developed. What were once known limitations are regularly being overcome. The advances in tech just seem to keep accelerating well past “ludicrous speed,” and so to assume that such roadblocks as you describe are hurdles that will keep those determined to find a way past them at bay for a long time to come is a fool’s folly, IMHO.
Those wake words are indeed running on very low power consumption electronics. And it’s not like they’re made to run exclusively in the USA and listen only for the american english version of “OK Google”. No, that ASIC is made to listen to a select set of phonemes from the most common languages. It then feeds a tokenized representation of what was spoken to whatever needs it downstream. The wake word is programmable - a series of phoneme tokens. But what about the rest? Cache them somewhere and next time the phone is woken up transmit them to google for ad processing.
“Strike 2” applies even in that scenario.
Where are these mythical security engineers that volunteer their time and expertise to delid ASICs and reverse engineer their functionality?
waving
Not sure what you mean with “mythical” though - whenever we’re allowed to talk publicly about something we happily do.
(My own speciality is in IoT devices, others focus on mobiles)
I had an in person conversation with my doctor about a highly specific and unusual medical condition and on the way home Instagram decided to show me an ad for it.
Instagram was immediately uninstalled.
Medicine commercials are always such a weird thing in my head, too… Especially the incredibly nonspecific ones blasted blindly from the TV, which doesn’t have any of this invasive targeted advertising…
cheerful music plays
[Happy, diverse group of people having a picnic]
[picturesque background of a rainbow and puffy clouds with a person raising their arms triumphantly]
“Ask your doctor if Plapbamba is right for you.”
[Child hugs older person in slow motion]Yeah but WHAT IS IT FOR?
Half the time I don’t even know what the commercial is. There’s people running in fields or flying kites or swimming in the ocean. Like, that is the greatest disease ever. How do you get that? That disease comes with a hot chick and a puppy.
Ya gotta ask your doctor 😂
Uninstalling Instagram likely won’t do anything. Even if you don’t have an account they’ll track you all across the web and apps via third-party tracking, it’s why people (like me) go out of their way to download huge blocklists of hostnames.
They could have tracked me, if I had searched for the term. I hadn’t been able to do the search yet, but somehow Instagram fed me an ad about it.
Scenario was this:
Talked to my doctor about it.
Drove home (phone in my bag).
Got home, opened my phone, Instagram ad.This also wasn’t a generic term, it was the specific phrase the doctor used.
Since uninstalling Instagram, I have not seen another ad for it.
Your doctor searched for it, and both of you were in the same location.
Also, coincidences happen. You probably got tons of ads that seem random until one of them is eerily right.
META definitely spies, if the facebook login wasnt so obvious of datamining.
I don’t watch anime, don’t use Google, and browse on Linux using Librewolf. I pulled up chrome on my android phone, went to Google, and typed in satellite. “Satellite girl and milk cow” was the third autocomplete option.
Huh, thank you for that. Very strange, looking at the google trends it has very little interest aside from a few blips between otherwise flat 0 interest over the last 5 years. There IS a small spike in interest occurring right now, so perhaps this is indeed some insane coincidence.
@SoleInvictus@lemmy.blahaj.zone @Bags@piefed.social
I don’t watch anime, I browse on Linux, but I often use Google.
I pulled up Chrome on my desktop (connected to the same account from Android) and typed in “Satellite”. None of the suggestions involved “girl and milk cow”:
- Satellite Map
- Satellite Images
- Satellite Imagery
- Satellite Tracker
- Satellite Weather
- Satellite Internet
- Satellite [a product from a billionaire that I refuse to mention]
- Satellite PhoneI sometimes access NASA and satellite imagery (SOHO and LASCO), hence the “Satellite imagery” suggestions. I also access cartography quite frequently, hence the “Satellite map”. Anime is such a very absent thing from my personal interests (and Google, of course, knows this), hence the absence of anime suggestions.
Yes, phones listen, electronic devices can be made to listen, and it have been happening before LLMs came into being, “ECHELON” (from the 60s) is worthy mentioning. Even the Scunthorpe Problem isn’t new: saying “bomb” on a landline phone used to trigger automatic recording of the calls for “national security purposes” (even though the mentioned “bomb” was some kind of gossiping between two friends). AI just made it “easier” as electronic devices have lots of power, thus decentralizing part of the data processing from their servers.
And while I may sound like some tinfoil hat (I indeed was at some point of my existence) I don’t say this with legitimate concern: I simply don’t care anymore (at least, not fully), sometimes I even dare to say… explicitly “concerning” things… near “my” phone, and I don’t care… Because it already knows who I am anyways.
On DDG in Firefox Focus I had to go to “satellite gi” to get Satellite Girl and Milk Cow as an autocomplete.
I feel like this could be an internet challenge.
“How many letters do YOU need to type before you get to Satellite Girl and Milk Cow?”
They don’t need to listen to your microphone. Reality is a lot more horrifying.
They know you visited your brother, since both phones location was shared. Your brother obviously searched for the term at least on crunchyroll but most likely as well on Google.
They also know you visited your friends, since the location is shared.
So they just continue the line.
They have an entire psychological profile of you, your brother and your friends. They know you better than you do yourself.
Most of the time you don’t notice because it isn’t obvious. But sometimes they get something right and it feels earily.
He said he doesn’t have a smart phone how do they know the two people are near.
Big tech still tracks you, even if you don’t own a smartphone, via your friends’ smartphones.
Data such as WiFi, cell, and Bluetooth it is already possible to accurately track people who are privacy conscious by building a “ghost” profile of you.
This is how Facebook or LinkedIn automatically suggest people you’ve met when you sign up, even if you’ve never used their services or have owned a smartphone before.
Privacy consciousness is only as good as the weakest link in an entire social network.
Here’s the Pitch Deck for ‘Active Listening’ Ad Targeting
The slide deck provides more information, and raises more questions, about CMG’s advertised capability which it calls Active Listening. In December, 404 Media first reported on Active Listening’s existence using pitches from CMG’s website before the company deleted that information. The presentation, which the company has sent to at least one company it was courting to buy its Active Listening services, shows how CMG was marketing the product to companies who may want to target potential customers based on data allegedly sourced from device microphones. Google has kicked CMG from its advertising Partners Program after 404 Media asked Google for comment on the slide deck.
Look at the graphic too. At the time, they were working with Google, Facebook and Amazon.
Damn, I hate the world we live in.
I remember many years ago people used to joke that our phones were listening to us (when they likely weren’t), and now they just straight up provably are, and it seems like people are just ok with it.
I haven’t kept up to date on any of this or been in the spaces where this info is usually available, seeing it so easily posted from multiple sources is scary.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=%2Fm%2F0_z2zn7&hl=en-GB
Are you in Arizona?(looked again and it gave Alaska, not sure what’s going on there)Spike in the past week or so of interest for some reason. Perhaps it has come up somewhere else recently to prime you to discuss it with your friends.
Security researchers have been looking hard for any proof of this for decades now. Humans are just super predictable even when it feels like what we do is completely random.
We watched it like last October, so way before that spike…
Maybe that spike was us talking about it yesterday and the one search my friend did, and this thread…
Looking at the 5 year trend in the USA, and how there are only 2 blips in interest and a flatline 0 background interest otherwise shows me that the movie is indeed as obscure as I thought. My one mental offramp was that it was actually popular in some other community somewhere and I just hadn’t heard of it. Even the Worldwide 5 year graph has a LOT of 0 flatline… Which makes it all the stranger.
And all the people saying it was some correlation between our phones being together or something… I don’t have a smartphone. I never searched for the movie on any device I own, the only device it was played on or even typed the words into was my brother’s crunchyroll app on his TV (which is indeed one point of collection). We live in different states, and I have never logged into any of my accounts on his TV. I hadn’t spoken the words aloud in over 6 months. I have one point of social media, an Instagram, where I interact with 0 other accounts and simply post my photography. This friend does not have an instagram. I can’t find any reasonable thread that could connect anything to my friends’ phone. He had definitely never heard of the movie before, hence why he went to go look it up. And again, none of us are heavy anime consumers, so it’s not like he’s searching anime on his phone all day.
I dont care what anyone says. Ive seen this happen like 10-20 times personally so they are definitely paying attention somehow. Most recently someone nearby mentioned a movie monsoon wedding. Go back home and its my #1 youtube recommendation despite never being there before.
It’s a well known fact that our smartphones report back tracking and other info. There are some harmless reasons what you described could happen, but you are right to be suspicious.
If you’re using a cell phone you are submitting to surveillance. This is the world we live in.
Going back for years, the “Is _____ listening to my conversations?” question has been asked with various improbable coincidences given as proof. But the answer has always been (and I think it is even scarier than the proposition) “maybe? But they don’t really need to.”
It’s not a big leap to assume you might have interest in that show if your network traffic was coming from the same IP address at the same time that Crunchyroll was playing, or even the same location at a different time; it doesn’t really matter. They’ll add it to their profile of you. Then you and your friends get together, maybe multiple times before this conversation, and your devices get associated with each other: Maybe its location data, maybe its being on a shared network, maybe its Bluetooth proximity, it could be any number of things and it doesn’t really matter which. Now if y’all are together for a while then google/facebook/amazon/whatever can reasonably infer that you talked about things (or at the very least share some interests). And what would you folks be talking about? Things that they are interested in! So then while y’all are together, and a little bit after, [Tech Company] can boost your friends search/ads/recommendations with data from your profile. It’s all just a game of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon and the big players just have access to so much data and processing that they can play the game that well.
I replied something similar to another comment, but:
*I don’t have a smartphone.
*The movie was played on my brother’s TV, in another state, in which I have never logged into any of my accounts on the device.
*I have never brought my laptop to his house, so have never had any of my accounts associated with his home network.
*We watched the movie last October (10 months ago).
*I have never said the name of the movie aloud other than at my brother’s house 10 months ago, and yesterday at the cafe.
*I have never searched the movie on any device I own.
*I have only been friends with this new person for ~1 month.I am utterly failing to see any logical thread that can connect these…
My brother and I are friends on Steam and follow each other on Instagram, but those are the only connections I can think of… This new friend doesn’t have instagram and we have never interacted on Steam (I don’t even know if he has an account)… We have tagged each other on Discord, but are not “friends”, and my brother doesn’t have discord…
If the web of info really goes that deep to make this event occur, that is almost scarier than his phone listening to us talk.
If I type in “satellite gir” the first result is that anime and some song with a similar name. This is creepy but I don’t necessarily think it’s evidence of audio surveillance. If the show is similar to other things your friend watches it might just be more likely in the search results.
I honestly don’t even think it’s that obscure. it has been nominated for (and won) several awards, for example
when searching “satellite gi” it’s the 3rd result on google for me (on firefox ios, not logged in, in private mode, as someone who very rarely uses google these days) and the 1st on english Wikipedia (using the ios app’s search)
They don’t need phone microphones to get this info, the data they have and profile they build are already as good as microphone data. Even if you are privacy conscious, surveillance tech still builds a profile of you based on data on your friends, family etc.
It’s likely Google already got your brother’s crunchyroll viewing history. The fact that you were both supposedly high would’ve have made it very obvious as an erratic/unusual event. Google then kept this info and used it to ultimately suggest this to your friends, using a “ghost” profile of you. Satellites aren’t exactly something people look up very often.
Yesterday I was in the car with my boyfriend and he told me about some skit show where a character says “Do it lady!” and we laughed and said the phrase about 5 times. When I got home I opened YouTube and the first recommendation was that skit. I’ve never watched the skit before and it’s not something I typically watch. Creeped me out.
Yeah - your boyfriend had watched the video. Your phone was then next to your boyfriends for some amount of time. That’s a well known location datapoint for ad targeting (and is the reason for why people freaked out when Facebook started recommending their therapist as “person you might know” etc).
You saw the strongest experience, maybe, but definitely not the strongest evidence, if any at all.
Uninstall the following apps:
- Anything google
- Anything facebook
- Anything amazon
That’s not an exhaustive list. But the reality is those companies make money by spying on you in order to serve you ads. They have been caught red handed multiple times breaking out of the OS sandbox to get permissions the apps were otherwise not granted - to spy on you. Don’t trust them. If you need one of those services, use your phone’s browser.
thats why its important to always have UBLOCK origin, or anything that blocks on at all times.
I got an even better spying moment a week ago: Was at a company party talking to a colleague about streaming services, including crunchyroll.
A few hours later I get an email from crunchyroll telling me to watch demon slayer for x amount. Now I do have a crunchyroll account but I haven’t used it in YEARS amd never once seen an email, but when I mention crunchyroll like 2 or 3 times I get an email? Yeah nah that ain’t a coincidence
It may not be a coincidence, but the described correlation does not prove the causation.
The microphone is a shittier version of what they’re actually doing: refining a database on each and every one of us in real-time, including those people, places, events, etc. we interact with.
I get why “listening via microphone” is where people’s imaginations go first, but the truth of it is far more insidious than that sinplistic outmoded answer —and I’m not exaggerating in the slightest.
