(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.
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Root your phone and degoogle it if it doesn’t have LineageOS image. If it does have LineageOS image, then flash it. Oh, and don’t use Google and YouTube. Use Brave/Vivaldi for web search and Tubular for YouTube.
Bruh Brave or Vivaldi? Those are not even the best options out there
Or anything else that Google Chrome.
Yep I am not using that.
I’ve seen a lot of people using Vivaldi as “private” browser. What is the point here?
Because it’s one of the few browsers on Android that allow you to put your address bar down
Firefox?
Chromite?
Firefox is okay but most websites break on it.
I don’t see any main website being broken due to firefox
Most? Are you sure you didn’t install some extensions that break your browsing?
I had uBO and Dark Reader installed.
Those 2 might very well cause issues sometimes, you should try and fiddle around with their settings on the websites that complain, or outright whitelist them if nothing works and you want to use them, other times it really is the browser or even more often an artificial check of the user agent string (dick move on the dev’s side), so if you spoof a Chromium browser it’ll start working right away
I meant on mobile. It’s the reason why I use Vivaldi on Android.
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.
And how often. have you said stuff that you have not received advertising for? You will notice it when you get a positive match but not on a negative.
Data collecting companies can predict/rate your behavior for more then 20 years based. Since then. it has been perfected. They know that you are interested in those topics without having the need to waste resources on recording and analyzing every single audio stream.
Reporter: [REDACTED]
Reason: BSMaybe I should have removed this post, because it is ridiculous.
Oh I just checked, this is a lemmy.ml community.
Exactly, it is “A community of privacy and FOSS enthusiasts, run by Lemmy’s developers,” and not a community for spreading nonsense like Google secretly listening to your conversations to better recommend YouTube videos to you.
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.
These kinds of things never happen to me, could it be because I have all the tracking stuff disabled?? /s
Most likely the website you pirated your movies from stored cookies in your browser which then were picked up by Google/YouTube.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 then 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.
- A family member might have searched it
- An ad network might have reported on your piracy (especially now with privacy sandbox)
- Your media player might just be doing some tracking and/or insecure searching for metadata
- Siri or something might have popped open
- You googled to get to the piracy website
- You may have just looked up the movie, and the movie was popular with pirates
Don’t get too paranoid
I’ve gotten ads for things I’ve just thought about. Never said anything out loud about or did any searches related to. It was something in a video I’ve watched dozens of videos about in the past. But on this occasion, I happened to think that I kind of want one for the first time. And I just so happened to start getting ads for them right after, also for the first time. They know way more about you than you think and don’t need to listen to you.
I’ll second the recommendation for GrapheneOS. One of the available options I use is to keep mic, camera, and location off at all times until I need them. That simple toggle ability changes your privacy stance greatly.
In addition to all the GrapheneOS recommendations, there are also faraday bags. Drop the phone in while at home or wherever.
That doesn’t really help unless the bag is also soundproof; it could just as easily store what you say and send it off later.
Same thing with microwaves
Food is ready and get a video for “why do microwaves hmm?”
The youtube algorithm determined the following: people who watch the kind of videos in your history, are also interested in recording netflix shows. And it was right, because you are in fact interested in that (general) topic. This is another possible explanation.
First off, if you’re concerned about phone privacy, consider a custom OS for your phone that respects privacy such as GrapheneOS.
It’s easy to figure out that your device isn’t listening to a constant audio stream 24/7, since that would drain battery and send a lot of noticeable data over the network. However, it is entirely possible to listen for certain keywords as you mentioned, and send them encrypted with another seemingly legitimate packet. There’s no way to be 100% certain, but it is possible in theory without draining too much battery.
The steps you took are good, making sure that apps don’t have any permissions they don’t need. Privacy is a spectrum, so it’s not “all or nothing”. As I mentioned before, if you’re seriously concerned about mobile privacy and want a solution, you can get a custom operating system that can remove any privacy invasive elements. GrapheneOS also allows you to disable the camera and microphone system-wide (although this functionality is present on some other Android builds).
If it eases you any, a lot of these advertisements happen to be coincidence and trigger confirmation bias. It could be that those ads happened to show up by coincidence, or that advertisers managed predicted your interests, or that you got tracked by some other means while downloading the movie. The possibilities are nearly endless.
You should install Rethink and see how much garbage your phone constantly transmits and receives. And this is not even a kernel-level firewall, so who knows how much data Google actually exfiltrates…
I don’t know about a constant audio stream, nor about keywords, but I noticed that Google Keyboard sends out some data every time you type anything. It’s not even that subtle.
If anything, I love GrapheneOS for its “Network” permission toggle. It’s nice knowing that my keyboard (or any other unnecessary apps) can’t phone home.
GrapheneOS is certainly on my wishlist too, but Pixels are quite pricey. I guess Rethink is the poor man’s version. Just a per-app firewall.
Maybe Divest/Lineage could be an option instead. Although you have to choose a device wisely (and even among supported ones, some have trouble unlocking the bootloader), there is a chance you’d find a suitable cheaper one.
Personally no regrets spending $300 on a Pixel 7a but still painful to hand over this much.
No, your phone doesn’t listen to you 24/7. With that out of the way, there are a number of places where youtube may have gotten that info. One possibility is that someone in your household looked up the movie and maybe checked if stuff ripped from netflix is indeed full HD. And since everyone in your family is using the same NAT IP, then it’s easy for youtube to target recommendations at everyone in that household.
I don’t doubt you, but it’s worth asking if your reasons for stating that our phones don’t listen to us 24/7 haven’t changed since you first formed the opinion.
Lots of things are meso-facts (a true fact at rhetorical time we learn it, but no longer true later). Tech moves quickly. It’s worth not assuming anyone is right here, & asking: under what conditions could our phones be listening (enough to produce what OP experienced)?
The mere bandwidth cost to listen everyone’s mics at all times when people voluntarily give up profiling data already would be dumb as fuck on Google’s part.
But again, what I’m getting at here is, are we so sure it takes all that much anymore. Processing could take place in a shorter way now, more than it could when our current opinion was still true.
No need to get all Descartes about this. It’d be really trivial to prove mics are on 7/24.
Watchdog groups have been monitoring these services for years now and have yet to find the “your phone is listening 24/7” smoking gun.
Similarly 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. A phone can notice when it’s in the hands of a security expert and start acting normal.
The conditions would be that all the controls that are in place to prevent it from happening are bypassed, which no one has proven yet. For example, Apple has developed their devices (assuming not jailbroken) in such a way where the camera and microphone usage indicators are hardwired and can’t easily be bypassed by software hacks. So if your phone was listening to you all the time, then the microphone indicator light would always be on. Listening 24/7 would also drain the phone’s battery and use up so much data it would be noticeable. Another example is Siri. It is actually designed in a way where there are 2 components. The first one is local on the phone and separate from the actual Siri component. It is what’s actively listening for you to call it. Once you call it, it then activates the actual Siri that transmits your voice inputs online.
People saying it hurts battery usage, sends crazy amounts of network etc don’t seem to use the latest features from Google.
Now playing, Adaptive audio are some features of android system that Google has given in recent years which listen to our microphones all the time and serve their purpose. I have used them in the past, although it said it consumes battery, I never experienced huge battery brain. Google also says these services work on device and never leaves the device, but I assume extracting few words from my audio and sending them to their servers at frequent times wouldn’t be such a technically demanding process like everyone are stating here on this post. It entirely possible and probably happening.
