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Comment by oxide | Hacker News Reader

Or they can datamine and advertise to you based on tatoos, sexual orentation, visbile brand names, etc. Pop the mic on and get some audio at the same time to futher personalize advertisements.

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And we know they pop on the mic. Too many times have I seen advertisements based on subjects only spoken, not searched for on any device.

This is happening to me with insane regularity, although I usually notice it in Google searches rather than on Facebook. Recently I met a gentleman for the first time, who told me that he ran an planning / design industry webinar series called the "Performance Network". I'd never heard of this so he suggested I Google for it. I got as far as typing "perf" on my phone before that's what the autocomplete suggested. Freaked the hell out of both of us.

This kind of thing is now happening a few times per week. Are there any non-eavesdropping explanations for how this is possible?

Maybe through gps tracking and seeing that you two were near to eachother?

There was a great Reply All episode about this just last week. It's about facebook, but a lot of the points would apply to google. https://gimletmedia.com/episode/109-facebook-spying/

Short answer, no, they probably aren't listening. But they know enough other information about you that they don't need to.

I'm not sure what would disturb me more. Knowing they sometimes use the mic to listen to me talking (this I could prevent but not having my phone around) or that they already know so much about me that my conversations add little information to what they know about me.

Well, I can say that my experience and my g/f too, have been from conversations we've had at the house we live in and it's usually something random.

If you could show it to others you'd become rich and famous.

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