Stop Listening Please, Google

Google can reasonably infer people that live together based on billing addresses, location, etc. If your roommates pay particular attention to certain media (a video, a song, etc), it's more likely to show up on your recommended media.

In this post, chances are that Google classed each user as being socially close and based its recommendations on that. It's uncanny, but with how much Google data has, eavesdropping is unnecessary for this use case.

Could easily be a correlation thing, rather than a causation thing.

It would not be hard to believe that the friends were talking about the songs because they're trending as "90's throwback" or whatever, and then YouTube suggested those songs because they're trending.

I think the friend graph explains most of these away, along with coincidences.

If your Spotify friends listen to a specific song, it kinda makes sense for them to recommend it to you as well. They may have also given their friend "the aux" at some point which would train the algorithm on their music, so it's just bringing those songs back up (this one happens to me _a lot_)

A while back (I believe May 2020) I did an experiment. I kept a phone in isolation for 3 days and recorded all the network traffic. Then I took the same phone and put it up against a speaker that played a podcast archive continuously over a 3 day period. Then I did another 3 days of silence and a different archive of podcasts for 3 days. At the end I had 24 days of phone network pcaps (4 sets of 3 days audio + 3 days silence).

I made sure that the phone was able to transcribe the audio coming from the speakers when I put the keyboard in dictation mode just to make sure that it could "hear" the conversations from the speaker.

I tried hard to find statistical anomalies or pattern differences in the sets but I was unable to extract anything that could yield any type of change detection corresponding to when they happened (silence to podcast or podcast to silence) or anything that could differentiate the content. I had timestamps, hoping to find spikes, say, during commercials where a bunch of brand names get mentioned. There were no such spikes and the traffic was frustratingly uniform and appeared to be completely independent of the experiment I was running.

The phone had google assistant, facebook, instagram, tiktok, and snapchat installed among other applications. All the accounts were logged in and I occasionally adb'd over to the device to make sure the applications appeared in memory in a ps list.

Now of course, absence of evidence doesn't show evidence of absence and maybe I am just too incompetent to see what's going on but I was unable to find any hard evidence using this method.

I of course was really hoping for the opposite and to come forth with some industry shattering announcement, but if there's something there I at least wasn't able to find it in the wire.

I encourage others to repeat this and refute my inconclusive results - that'd be great. It's an easy enough experiment to do. Happy hunting.

The creepy thing is not that Google is listening to you. (They're not. Period.) It's that they can get so good that they can convince a large segment of the population that they _are_ listening to you.

As others have said, correlating your friends' activity with your colocation and other similar habits is enough.