Maybe Google really is watching....

[Peri]

A while ago I posted up how, while sitting at home, my wife had asked me if I'd ever watched a very long running British soap called 'Emmerdale Farm'.
I replied "I used to watch it when I was a kid, with my Mom......when it had Amos and Mr Wilkes in it".
Next day my Amazon had DVD box sets of 'classic Emmerdale' from the 70's in my 'suggested items'

Spooky enough.

Today, I'm at work (in a college), talking rubbish with three other engineers in the staff room. We get talking about pneumatics and robotics.
A colleague asks if I'd seen the robots performing Motorhead's 'Ace of Spades'?
'No' I said, so he opens up his browser, goes to YouTube and finds the video.

About 3 years ago I'd seen a similar video with performing KUKA robots called 'Automatica', so I ask if he's seen it.
'No' he said.
So I get out of my chair, go over to his computer, to his YouTube tab (where he isn't even signed in to it), and search for the video, which we watch.

I get home this evening, open up YouTube, and guess what's in my recommendations?

 

[baldkev]

Yes. Its phoned linked.... a few months back i was searching for tracked dumpers and mini diggers. I had my brother and another guy work with me for a day and both of them got bombarded with plant sales links etc. It turns out they know when you spend time around other people due to phone signal and then start spamming with similar things!

I might start looking up s and m kit for a laugh

 

[redefined_cycles]

Hi Peri. Yes, if you go into settings you can turn off a few that allows it to (at least pretend) stop snooping and giving you suggestions on life. I turned mine off a long time ago and stopped getting these sorts of suggestions (linked to what I'd been speaking about privately). Only problem is that when you then use voice typing etc, the settings been turned off so won't allow it.

Don't forget that Google were in the process of setting up with the Chinese govt to allow the search results and information to all be in line with what the Chinese govt want their population to know (ie. the CCP version of it). Can't remember if it actually went ahead...

 

[Mark65]

Snowden warned people of the snooping capabilities of smart phones for governments and since the big corporations are as they say in bed with the governments it comes as no surprise.
I saw a video on it once testing the tracking capabilities and the only way to actually prevent it all was to remove the battery and sim, but of course you cant remove most these days.

 

[Homeless Squirrel]

Yes. Its phoned linked.... a few months back i was searching for tracked dumpers and mini diggers. I had my brother and another guy work with me for a day and both of them got bombarded with plant sales links etc. It turns out they know when you spend time around other people due to phone signal and then start spamming with similar things!

I might start looking up s and m kit for a laugh

Search Boston tea Party sends Google etc into overdrive!

 

[Phil Pascoe]

I had according to Faceslap two people who wished to befriend me. The first I would cheerfully see dead and second had died months before.

 

[alan895]

Someone I used to work with believed that if you searched the term "Google" in Google it would make it crash, if only that were true...

 

[artie]

I had according to Faceslap two people who wished to befriend me. The first I would cheerfully see dead and second had died months before.

My sister liked a post I made two weeks after we buried her.

 

[recipio]

Someone once told me that if you try to photocopy a dollar a signal is sent to some FBI dept in Washington.. Never knew if he was taking the p##s but I wouldn't be surprised if it were true.

 

[D_W]

devices all get rights to collect bits of data and sell them.

The likely route in this case is a phone or something else that identified certain bits of data (not like recording an entire conversation, but google does actually keep those from android if you don't opt out - different here) and then packaged those and sold them.

I talked about a shop vac at one point to someone and came to either this site or another forum and had 8 copies of an ad for some Bee-yellow metal canister shop vac. I'll bet it cost a fair bit for them to pay to find me.

I didn't buy the vac. I must've said "shop vac" just right.

Typing this in chrome will end with the same ads.

One of the more humorous errors in data selling is that I've sold a lot of guitars. When I listed them, it was usually on reverb. Reverb and google ads were so precise at knowing that I had an association with them that my own listings were served to me on unrelated websites all the time. I guess when you're the lister, the site records how strong your association is to the listing and it looks the same as some dude who views a listing three or four times and that's probably valuable in ad terms (the latter) as it'd be associated with a higher chance of buying than a quick view and not.

TVs, microwaves, anything connected to the internet for "your convenience" is really in your house to collect verbal bits or visual cues to figure out what to advertise to you.

Humorous a few years ago when people were outraged that samsung TVs with cameras on them were recording information when the TV was off. Samsung claimed it was a flaw. The news stories were way off base "they're invading our privacy - it's creepy!".

No, the real reason is more boring - there's no meaningful fine to stop them from collecting audio and visual cues in your house, stripping them of everything except the valuable part and selling the product related bits to someone else.

It's probably only ego that makes people think some corporation is interested in seeing them in dingy clothes.

Facebook has had many "unexpected glitches" that resulted in collecting billions of tidbits of marketable information from people who declined to allow it.

Long story, if you say anything marketable - at all - facts, items, music, media, your device is probably going to capture it. Sometimes even if it's "off". probably will harvest bits of information collected by devices within a short range, too.

 

[clogs]

it can be handy....saves looking up stuff all the time.....
we often talk about old furniture on auction sites other than ebay.....
Now for the best bit we have a big apple comp in the caravan.....it faces the bed....
I wonder what info that produces ......hahaha....naughty......

 

[seanf]

Someone once told me that if you try to photocopy a dollar a signal is sent to some FBI dept in Washington.. Never knew if he was taking the p##s but I wouldn't be surprised if it were true.

The FBI part is rubbish, but thanks to the so called EURion constellation most scanners, printers, photocopiers and image editing software will have measures to avoid copying money. You can see an example using a Euro note here

Sean

 

[Terry - Somerset]

I work on the basis that all data is collected - and if of any value will be exploited, bundled and sold.

Mostly I suspect there is far too much data to do anything with - personally I am not important enough, and don't frequent sites that may interest the authorities - eg: how to make a bomb, child ****, political extremism etc.

However, I will not have an Alexa in the house, my laptop (in theory) deletes all cookies as soon as I shut down. For some reason Spotify managed to install itself on my system - uninstalled immediately.

There are almost certainly subtleties of which I am unaware - eg: if I uninstall an app, is it really deleted, or are Microsoft simply telling me it is deleted to make me happy.

Am I a classic sufferer of paranoid delusions, or a realist.

 

[Flynnwood]

@Peri Did you see The Great Hack? Similar issue.

 

[Homeless Squirrel]

Anything with a camera can be turned on remotely! Councils was using software sourced from somewhere most likely Israel? that turned on cams so they could see anything of interest around house it quietly got covered over so not used again! or did it?
Even Zucky bucky from Bumbook covers his laptop camera.
My Smart/dumb phone has a bit of tape over camera as they turn it on odd times(check in device storage files .Face!) i delete it often. Happens when screen comes on from when timed out so goes to wallpaper/lock screen suddenly goes black as you click to reopen phone.

Anything pc has a backdoor from CPU/Drives/GPU's they comply with NSA etc
Know someone that had a Samsung TV which had an issue rang support guy on other end was changing things on it and watching them as said stay sitting of sofa!
Your device's GPS is always on even if off to you and google etc harvest info as you move about of others details inc wifi passwords etc
Go into settings and see whats running! Bluetooth you can't stop/disable it's always on but not to you. but much more is running using battery up.

 

[thetyreman]

as snowden has pointed out in interviews the problem is companies like apple, samsung e.t.c are not giving people the option to opt out of any of these things, he recommends making a faraday cage and putting the phone into that when you're talking about things you don't want google to know about, he claims even in airplane mode they can still harvest data and even possibly when it's switched off, GCHQ and the NSA know a lot more about you than you think.

 

[selectortone]

GCHQ and the NSA know a lot more about you than you think.

I'm sure they're glued to their listening devices following the gripping saga of my daily routine.

 

[thetyreman]

I'm sure they're glued to their listening devices following the gripping saga of my daily routine.

how does google know I like the album 'beneath the mask' by chick corea's elektric band? that's very specific, I have it on minidisc and none of my devices were connected to the internet yet it suddenly shows up in my youtube feed, it's beyond creepy.

 

[niemeyjt]

Snowden warned people of the snooping capabilities of smart phones for governments and since the big corporations are as they say in bed with the governments it comes as no surprise.
I saw a video on it once testing the tracking capabilities and the only way to actually prevent it all was to remove the battery and sim, but of course you cant remove most these days.

Fairphone and /e/

Removable battery and no Google.

 

[D_W]

I work on the basis that all data is collected - and if of any value will be exploited, bundled and sold.

Mostly I suspect there is far too much data to do anything with - personally I am not important enough, and don't frequent sites that may interest the authorities - eg: how to make a bomb, child ****, political extremism etc.

However, I will not have an Alexa in the house, my laptop (in theory) deletes all cookies as soon as I shut down. For some reason Spotify managed to install itself on my system - uninstalled immediately.

There are almost certainly subtleties of which I am unaware - eg: if I uninstall an app, is it really deleted, or are Microsoft simply telling me it is deleted to make me happy.

Am I a classic sufferer of paranoid delusions, or a realist.

I call this school of fish. There's probably something in the absence of any crime that authorities could find interesting. Maybe you've driven a car with something obscuring your vision to the right because you were hauling wood, etc. Maybe you were notified of something 3 years later that should've been followed up with in submitting revised taxes but didn't do it.

But the authorities aren't interested in every fish in the school. They're interested in the fish that bites the tails off of other fish so that they die, or whatever else.

However, a group of sales fish will see if they can figure out how to sell 100 different things to every single fish.

And that's really what we have. The sensational stories talk about how you're no longer safe as data is collected on everything. It is, and google holds huge volumes and i'm sure everyone else does. But they're not trying to figure out how to see you in your britches on a sunday morning and report that it looks like you drank on saturday and you're overweight. They're holding it until they figure out how it's valuable for pitching something to you, or selling the information to someone else who wants to.

I would bet a lot of the bits of data that are held that google and others haven't figured out how to mine are held just because they are figuring out how to mine them instead of just throwing them out. Marginal audio, whatever. Just like gold miners will go through tailings from a century ago - there's still some gold in the tailings, it's just a matter of the value of it being worth getting out.