Ask HN: Google having access to Signal messages?

8 points·neural_thing··5 comments

A troubling thing happened to my wife today. She got an ad based on a very rare word that only appeared on her phone in an inbound Signal message. She did not type it, did not say it out loud, and did not search for it. The chances of her getting a random ad on that specific word are low (the word is enneagram). How did Google get access to her inbound Signal messages?

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Enneagrams are trending upwards. I recently heard about it on a Podcast (Tim Ferriss Podcast I think). Perhaps she subscribed to a podcast that talked about it or is in correspondence with others who have searched for the term.

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=E...

Signal has an option to send as an SMS message. To me this is preposterous. No one who uses Signal should want that option to be as easily set as it is at least on Android phones.

Also maybe she copied and pasted the term within Signal, but still left it on her keyboard?

Also it’s pretty much not a good idea at all to enable 3rd Party keyboards. Does she have one of those, for instance like with TextExpander?

If you hold your center button for 2 seconds to bring the Google Assistant the first thing it does is read the contents of your screen.

[citation needed]

https://www.androidpolice.com/2019/03/18/google-assistant-ca...

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