scarily… They don’t need to to be this creepy, but even I’m a tad baffled by this.
Yesterday me and a few friends were at a pub quiz, of course no phones allowed, so none were used.
It came down to a tie break question of my team and another. “What is the run time of the Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the ring” according to IMDb.
We answered and went about our day. Today my friend from my team messaged me - top post on his “today feed” is an article published 23 hours ago…
Forgive the pointless red circle… I didnt take the screenshot.
My friend isn’t a privacy conscience person by any means, but he didnt open IMDb or google anything to do with the franchise and hasn’t for many months prior. I’m aware its most likely an incredible coincidence, but when stuff like this happens I can easily understand why many people are convinced everyone’s doom brick is listening to them…
Phones absolutely listen. But they probably process the speech locally, unless there’s a trigger word flagged, and send mostly text.
But then it was found Google would upload the audio when a zipper sound was heard, so who knows how often your triggering spy conditions.
One day I had my phone charging on the same table I was measuring a liquid from two glass dropper bottles. The phone heard me shaking the bottles, clinking the glass pipettes, and dropping the liquid into water. I’ve never ever talked about dropper bottles as I didn’t know what they are called before this incident. I had bought the liquids with their bottles about a month before, and I’ve only ever referred to them by the brand name of the liquid.
My Quora feed 20 minutes later:
“What are the advantages of using dropper bottles in chemical processes?”
More incidents: https://www.quora.com/Is-Quora-listening-to-my-conversations-Why-do-suggestions-pop-up-relating-to-what-I-am-talking-to-my-friends-family-about-offline/answer/Harri-K-Hiltunen