Discussed whether I liked Knix bras with a coworker today, got a bunch of Knix ads all over shortly after. And I turn my microphone access off on most apps.
My mom and I were talking about a documentary with totem poles in it, and when I got home Instagram showed me an ad to buy totem poles.
hopefully its coincidence and confirmation bias, or your conversation and the ad were both inspired by something instagram already knew, right ?
Everybody at the comments are telling about how apps indeed monitor our microphones, but have you experience apps monitoring thoughts? Exactly, mind reading! Once I thought a specific philosophical phrase (yet I don’t remember which one it was), and few minutes later a video platform recommended a deep-thought video containing such exact phrase. I didn’t even say the phrase outside of my “mind’s voice”, let alone typing/writing it. I dunno what kind of sorcery they used, but it happened a couple of times. Fact is that the app did, somehow, “read my mind”. It was this video platform only, I didn’t see other apps doing the same outside of recommending/showing things spoken near the mic or written somewhere.
I bought an iced tea with cash one day, a brand I had never bought. No points card, had left my phone in my car. Didn’t I get an Instagram ad an hour later for that iced tea.
I also found a business card for my old manager in some papers, and I put it on my desk simply for digging dust and debris out of my keyboard. I never use my desktop for social media, have never logged in on there, and ten minutes later got her as a friend suggestion on Facebook. I have nobody in common with her and worked for her for only a couple of months.
Your thoughts are influenced by your surroundings, and those listening may simply link thise topics like spotify links songs.
Could just be coincidence too.
I agree that our thoughts are somehow influenced by our surroundings, except that I’m an introvert developer person with no one actually surrounding me. While I often think about philosophy, occult and esotericism (as well as scientific concepts, in a syncretic fashion; I’m passionate by all those three branches of human knowledge, the Science, the Philosophy and the Esotericism/Occult/Beliefs), it was too much of a coincidence for such app to show exactly the phrase I was thinking before, even though it was a known philosophical phrase (but philosophy is a vast field filled with many, many phrases and concepts).
Also, for those skeptical: There’s something in human psychology field called “Emotional Facial Action Coding System” (EFACS). Our bodies “talk”, especially our faces, and we call it “body language”. There are some specialists (psychologists) that are capable of “reading” such language. Mentionable specialists are Paul Ekman (PhD) and Joe Navarro (ex-FBI and author of “What Every Body Is Talking”), as well as those within my country Vitor Santos (“Metaforando”) and Ricardo Ventura (“Não Minta Pra Mim”). There are broader specialists capable of such nonverbal reading as well, such as Derren Brown, responsible for documentaries such as “The Push”. Specialist humans are good at this, but AI is capable of detecting even subler movements. Have you noticed a camera always pointed to our faces (we call it the “selfie camera”)? It’s like having a Paul Ekman seeing your face 24/7, one that is capable of reading your nonverbal behaviors so precisely that he could actually “deduce” what exactly are you thinking.
The best way to get rid oft the spy crap entirely is to get a pixel phone and flashing GrapheneOS (de-googled Android). Dw, it’s not that hard to do, there’s a good manual. Sure you need to find alternatives to google apps, but so far I could get replacement apps for almost everything FOSS from F-Droid store. Some apps cry for play services from time to time, but only a few of them won’t work at all without them. Most of the time it can be ignored. You are able to install a defused sandboxed version if something really needs it tho. If you need an app from play store you can use Aurora Store (Foss play store client). Even E-SIM works without problems. And the best is 7 years guaranteed updates starting with the phone release. The a series is quite cheap (got Pixel 8a for ~460€). I can only recommend this setup.
Do you trust all of the apps in those 3rd party repositories? You shouldn’t.
More than some google bs. They’re open source, you could theoretically look at all the executed commands if you’re not trusting it enough. Sure it could be another binary, but I think most people doing something FOSS (meaning freetime invested not for profit, out of hobby/interest/inspiration) are reasonable enough to not do stupid stuff like that. The way big corps are trying to overtake FOSS projects is the danger. Microsoft bought GitHub to get access to all of the community built software, we should diversify, I’m agreeing. Only a few big companies have taken the internet hostage, we need to free it again. As a community, normally the internet should be a place of plurality, not a few big sites that are the main hubs for everything. That’s what it was intended for
Being open source doesn’t impart any modicum of security to an app. It does introduce the ability for someone to push malicious code to it and have it accepted by a maintainer. There’s not enough oversight and free labor available to review the code for every open source project throughly.
So, while you may not trust Google with your data, you should similarly not trust FOSS just because it’s open source and not Google.
I experienced something different the other day. I was watching despicable me 4 on my PC and at the end of the movie they sang “everybody wants to rule the world” a few hours later I went to YouTube and on the home page is a video titled “the meaning behind the lyrics of everybody wants to rule the world”. real freaky. I never searched for the song in any form on YouTube.
but if you watched the movie with your google account logged in, perhaps others who watched the movie also searched the song from the end of the movies
I watched the movie using plex media player.
And why would they affect my yt home page?