I was sitting at a cafe with some friends, and we got onto the subject of weird anime we have watched. None of us are heavy anime consumers, so it's not really a topic that comes up often. I recalled a time I was at my brother's house a couple months ago and we got WAY too high and started digging through his Crunchyroll to find something dumb to watch, and found this movie from 2014 called "Satellite Girl and Milk Cow". So I described the premise, a guy who was turned into a literal bipedal cow by some wizard happens upon a sentient satellite that falls to earth and becomes a humanoid girl... I don't remember anything else I was REALLY high lol.
Over the next couple of minutes, I ended up saying "Sattelite Girl and Milk Cow" a couple more times. When eventually one of the friends doubted my recollection, they took out their phone to look it up. They started typing, and then stopped dead, stared at the screen for a few seconds and blurted out "What the fuck?"
They turned their phone around and they had typed "Satellite" into google and THE FIRTS RECOMMENDED RESULT was "Satellite Girl and Milk Cow". A goofy relatively obscure animated movie from 2014.
Ok, what? How? That's such a specific and obscure thing to pull as a first result. There are hundreds, if not THOUSANDS of other things that would be immediately more relevant to any random person's life than that. I don't have a smartphone so couldn't try on the spot, but when I got home, neither my laptop or desktop gave any similar behavior on multiple different search engines. It gave me a few seconds of dread that even though I have consciously made the choice to exclude myself from the constant data gathering of smartphones, other people's phones are still listening to me, which is something I hadn't really thought about before.
I'm sure plenty more people have stories like this, but the specificity and obscurity of this example is just so baffling to me, like there's NO way that it wasn't picked up as an audio cue.
I can almost feel the tinfoil hat beginning to grow out of my skull.
Here’s the Pitch Deck for ‘Active Listening’ Ad Targeting
https://archive.is/ckFB2
Look at the graphic too. At the time, they were working with Google, Facebook and Amazon.
Damn, I hate the world we live in.
I remember many years ago people used to joke that our phones were listening to us (when they likely weren't), and now they just straight up provably are, and it seems like people are just ok with it.
I haven't kept up to date on any of this or been in the spaces where this info is usually available, seeing it so easily posted from multiple sources is scary.