Posted on 08/20/2019 4:42:25 AM PDT by CA_soon_gone
Has this happened to you? A couple of nights ago I was awoken by the sound of a mountain lion howling just outside the kitchen window. If you've never heard this it's a very unique sound. My wife and I talked about it in the kitchen the next morning. My cell phone was sitting on the counter at the time. Last night I was killing time watching random youtube stuff. I decided I wanted to find some videos on mountaineering. I went to search and started typing. I had just started and entered mount.. and the very first suggestion was "mountain lion scream". Are they always listening?
They only listen to what is said after you call their name. Right.
Yes, and so is Amazon. I have six Echo devices in my house. I've taken to muting all the mic's on them when I don't want to listen to music.
Contemplating getting rid of all of them, the problem for me is they've become so useful. My favorite task is to go through my kitchen cabinets and create my grocery list using a skill I wrote. I have it connected to my daily calendar so I know where I need to be ahead of time, I can make calls with it (including yelling "Alexa, call 9-11" and then tell it to open the garage door in case I fall so emergency personnel can get in my house.)
That is the problem with technology like this though, isn't it? It's so easy to weave into our daily lives and increase convenience that we become spied upon and listened to.
I've had a similar experience as you where ads pop-up in my browser that are related to discussions I've had in my home and that's why I mute the mic's now.
There is an article on the interwebs about how to delete all the files that Amazon and Google have from listening to you if you care to find it, and one about how to disable that feature on Alexa. I'd post it, I'm on my way out the door to work ...
haven’t heard a mountain lion, but have heard bobcat- very eerie sounding- and them ost eerie sounding animals I’ve heard are racoons- no lie, they make like 5 0r 6 sounds that sound like pigs, monkeys, lion, bear, even a weird sound that can onmly be described as the ‘big foot’ soudns they do when tryign to call in the myth- it’s really freaky when they get fighting- I’d hate to be lost at night i nwoods and hear that
“There is an article on the interwebs about how to delete all the files that Amazon and Google have from listening to you if you care to find “
You can delete them; that is YOUR ACCESS to them. They don’t show up for you any more. Google keeps them.
Seems like a stretch for Google to listen to talk and to update their search suggestions based on it. More than likely other people have searched for the same thing.
If someone is paranoid about the danmed thing “listening” then he should rip it out and throw it away!
You could just ask Alexa to post it for you.
So we know they are listening all the time. The question is, do they keep/search/index anything they hear and perform speech-to-text on? I would bet you if you're phone is connected to WiFi they figure you'll never notice a little extra data/traffic out, and they occasionally send a few packets of compressed information.
This should be easy enough to test. I'll come up with an oddball topic, talk about it within "earshot" of my phone, then see what pops up online... ;-)
Perhaps your wife had searched the term in response to hearing it?
“I would bet you if you’re phone is connected to WiFi they figure you’ll never notice a little extra data/traffic out, and they occasionally send a few packets of compressed information.”
Your android connects to Google’s servers 3000+ times a day. What apps you open, your location coarse and fine, the websites you visit using chrome, contacts updates, who you called and on and on. You already don’t notice.
Just for fun, try an experiment. Purposely in the presence of the phone, Talk with someone about something benign like the cat being sick and needing to call the vet. Pay attention to what ads you are served on websites and in Gmail for the next few days.
I do not have Alexa, Google Nonsense, Siri, or any of the other listening devices. My home is as bug free as I can make it.
Not a tinfoil situation at all. Seriously.
My daughter in law had it even worse. She was talking to a friend in her house about something. She had never searched the item or anything. And all of a sudden, ads started showing up when she accessed the internet for the very item. I can’t remember what it was, but it caught her attention because it was something very odd, that nobody normally discusses.
Her take: “I talked about it with the phone in the room, and now people on the internet are trying to sell it to me.”
If it has a microphone then they are.
Yep... Sure does.
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