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.
Smartphones are not recording conversations.
Strike 1: Battery life would be enormously impacted. "Ok google" and such keywords run on specific low power hardware that THEN wake up the rest of the phone when triggered. General recording would need the full phone to always be running == very short battery life.
Strike 2: The whole combined cybersecurity field are constantly probing mobile phones (hardware and software) for security issues. If there was either code or hardware that was always listening you would have seen lots of headlines with actual proof.
The word you're looking for is "synchronicity".
I think you're mistaken. I'm not saying that smartphones are recording full conversations, but they are definitely capable of listening for keywords without their owner noticing. Auto Shazam (indefinite automatic identification of all music that plays around your phone all the time) has been a thing since 2013. How much simpler would it be to identify words being spoken around your phone and then send a short text hash of that word to a server? Also, see the post from pelespirit on this thread with information about actual, specific ad-tech for this.
I think a more likely explanation is that Google knows who your friends are, knows your friends watched this movie, and thus thinks it could be relevant to you.
Yeah, it's probably more of a correlation between all the data points at that specific time (everyone's phones in the same location and all the data points social media has on them), and the algorithm was able to piece together that information to form a guess on auto-complete. If we're really leaning hard into phones listening, then the most plausible explanation is someone in the cafe was actively using siri (or google's equivalent) while OP mentioned the anime title and it was picked up in the background.
Phones are designed to have massive talk times as is.
Most of that power is required for audio output.
But if you're just parsing for adwords? Capture and send snippets back to a server and process them there, attach them to the google/facebook ID.
Also, consider that cell phones used to have stand by charge times in the range of a week or two if left unused. Smartphones die if left unused for half a week.
I could've added that I spent 15 years working as a developer in the mobile phone industry, but in reality that shouldn't be needed. All that's necessary for you to independently verify what I wrote regarding how voice keyword triggers function and the difference in power draw between that and the full audio pathway for recording is available through the nearest search engine.
All you need to do is independently verify the claim that I have made. chefs kiss
Isn't that what people should be doing anyway? Am I missing something? If some rando tells me something without providing relevant data then (providing I care enough) I'd look it up. Otherwise, I just consider whatever they said to be untrue and move on.
Two decades ago I had a candybar dumbphone - less than two decades later I bought this tiny device (which I got when it came out two years ago) that was significantly more powerful than my full-blown computer back then, along with features nobody would've thought could be packed into something so small.
There's always newer, better, more efficient tech being developed. What were once known limitations are regularly being overcome. The advances in tech just seem to keep accelerating well past "ludicrous speed," and so to assume that such roadblocks as you describe are hurdles that will keep those determined to find a way past them at bay for a long time to come is a fool's folly, IMHO.