(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.
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.
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.
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.
Doesn’t matter, google is well known for tracking related accounts using a variety of methods - be it location data, connected IP, tracking cookies, device proximity, even things like usage habits, etc.
Can confirm. I have a few accounts for keeping different interests separate in YT. I also keep those accounts in different container tabs, but recommendations tend to leak anyway. Google knows what I’m up to.
This is very much believable, and a thousand times more believable than your phone listening to you to send you ads.
2 accounts consistently reporting the same IP, location and user habits etc being linked is more absurd than nobody ever noticing excessive uploaded data from their phones? It is very easy to monitor the amount of uploaded and downloaded data on a device, lots of people would have noticed by now. The amount of storage, bandwidth and processing power that would be required to monitor the audio from hundreds of millions of android users globally 24/7 would make this the dumbest business decision ever when there are so many easier and efficient ways to track users.
It’s not absurd at all. They know the IPs, they know those devices use the same network, and they also know where they are located pretty accurately: the Google Street View cars also scan for WiFi networks and map them to their location.
2 devices consistently connected to the same router, to the same network, in the same place… must belong to the same person or to 2 people sharing a home. If cookies set by other websites and seen by Google show similar browsing habits, it’s probably the same person.