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.
Going back for years, the “Is _____ listening to my conversations?” question has been asked with various improbable coincidences given as proof. But the answer has always been (and I think it is even scarier than the proposition) “maybe? But they don’t really need to.”
It’s not a big leap to assume you might have interest in that show if your network traffic was coming from the same IP address at the same time that Crunchyroll was playing, or even the same location at a different time; it doesn’t really matter. They’ll add it to their profile of you. Then you and your friends get together, maybe multiple times before this conversation, and your devices get associated with each other: Maybe its location data, maybe its being on a shared network, maybe its Bluetooth proximity, it could be any number of things and it doesn’t really matter which. Now if y’all are together for a while then google/facebook/amazon/whatever can reasonably infer that you talked about things (or at the very least share some interests). And what would you folks be talking about? Things that they are interested in! So then while y’all are together, and a little bit after, [Tech Company] can boost your friends search/ads/recommendations with data from your profile. It’s all just a game of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon and the big players just have access to so much data and processing that they can play the game that well.
I replied something similar to another comment, but:
*I don't have a smartphone.
*The movie was played on my brother's TV, in another state, in which I have never logged into any of my accounts on the device.
*I have never brought my laptop to his house, so have never had any of my accounts associated with his home network.
*We watched the movie last October (10 months ago).
*I have never said the name of the movie aloud other than at my brother's house 10 months ago, and yesterday at the cafe.
*I have never searched the movie on any device I own.
*I have only been friends with this new person for ~1 month.
I am utterly failing to see any logical thread that can connect these...
My brother and I are friends on Steam and follow each other on Instagram, but those are the only connections I can think of... This new friend doesn't have instagram and we have never interacted on Steam (I don't even know if he has an account)... We have tagged each other on Discord, but are not "friends", and my brother doesn't have discord...
If the web of info really goes that deep to make this event occur, that is almost scarier than his phone listening to us talk.