this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2026
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Honestly, I thought they already did that.
One of my motivations for becoming more privacy minded, was the amount of times a subject of conversation was delivered through an algorithm later.
It was creepy, talk about hose pipes> receive hosepipe content/ads.
I think so but now it's being marketed as a feature which is nauseating.
My creepiest experience was shopping at Lowe's and then getting recommendations on Amazon that night for drill bits and cabinet door handles. The thing is, I had purchased some drill bits at Lowe's so OK, but I had only stopped and looked at the cabinet door handles.
Your phone told advertisers you were located at Lowe's using GPS. Then your credit card company told advertisers you bought drill bits. If you looked up any cabinet door handles in the past, that data was given to advertisers too. They put all those pieces together to serve you more ads on drill bits and cabinet door handles.
A lot of stores keep track of which aisles you spend more time in, that information is then shared with their "partners" (ad networks). By the time you made it home, they had already shared that you bought bits and that your device spent a while looking at cabinet hardware.
https://easytechsolver.com/what-stores-use-bluetooth-beacons/
I'm sure there's more than a little Baader-Meinhof happening. I did expand my privacy a bit; pihole, searxng, some other stuff and I notice it less now. Or I think I do, humans are notoriously bad at this.
I have such a hard time believing it's not a phenomenon. I know coincidences happen, but mannn
I've been advertised things that my wife has talked to me about that i otherwise have no interest in. I absolutely believe my phone is listening.
Your wife probably searched them online. The advertisers got your public IP address to display ads of what was searched. It's so subtle and people leave digital bread crumbs everywhere that it gives the appearance that the phone is listening to you.
Truth be told it's more processing power and work to stream and auto transcribe everyone's audio from their phone. It's effortless to just scoop up all search and purchase data.
Yeah there's a "now playing" feature that will recognize music being played nearby, which I have found useful many times.
An AI note taker could actually be useful for some applications, like a meeting summary or play-by-play for a d&d session. It's just all the other stuff about AI that makes it shitty.
Sure. If you actively turn it on, and all involved know it's on. But this is always active as far as I'm aware.
I'm guessing it'll be toggle off, and it'll toggle itself back on every update.
In other words, they're taking your data for their use all the time, and sometimes they'll share your data with you.
You can have it off and just use the "song search" on the top menu, but yeah. I assume it just keeps itself activated even if you disable it, they just try to be less blatant about catering to you.
Anecdotally, I've only had lime 2 instances of "google was definitely listening to show me this ad" in the 6 years I've had pixels, and I've seen just as many instances with other phone types. You truly have to go out of your way to avoid the surveillance.