Google is always listening: Live Test

It's not refuted, it's just that the experiment has been contaminated and there might be multiple listening actors that are not Google: Windows' 10 Cortana, Alexa, Android/iOS phones nearby etc.

So it's either a weird coincidence or _someone_ is listening. How and who is still unclear, until the experiment is repeated in a more rigorous manner.

My hypothesis is Google running some text-to-speech from the stream, as any other form of local spying would be visible in network traces, whereas you're sending your stream to Google servers and what happens there is opaque.

Many people, me included, have seen ads after talking about a topic for the first time. My mates got Bitcoin ads just after I've spent most of an evening explaining what it was to them for the first time.

It might be the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon in play, or someone's actually listening. It's definitely something we need to explore.

EDIT: how has this dropped from the front page so quickly?

That was my initial thought too, but it seems too coincidental that when he loaded up fark.com again (at the start of the experiment) there was an ad for pet insurance, or something canine related and then on the first page there was the link to dog toys

So 2 ads for dog things before he clicked on one, seems a pretty extraordinary coincidence

One thing that wasn't clear was he closed Chrome before he started discussing the dog toys, so how was google supposed to be listening? Unless it was via a different device e.g. an android phone

EDIT: Someone in that reddit thread said something interesting though, the guy was streaming directly to YouTube so it could be plausible that Google was listening to the stream audio and using that to feed into his targeting profile