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.
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.