I am still new regarding privacy and all that, so i am sorry for any mistakes/ newbie questions.

I and my friends were talking on Discord regarding the Oxenfree plot (a game about a time loop). One of the plot points mentions a submarine. To his surprise, He received a youtube recommendation about a nuclear-powered submarine as shown:

he was a bit spooked about this and asked if Google is listening. I asked about his browser and extensions, to which he answered that he’s using google chrome and the extensions below:

my question is: how did this happen, and what should he do next to avoid this happening again?

thank you in advance.

  • Puzzle_Sluts_4Ever@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    You are going to get a LOT of tinfoil hat conspiracies. But the simple thing to understand is: Voice recognition (speech to text) is expensive in terms of energy (compute). Sending voice data to google is expensive in terms of data and energy (data transfer). And it just isn’t necessary

    Because, odds are, your buddy searched for something Oxenfree related. And The Algorithm then decided he might be interested in submarines because he was playing Oxenfree.

    This happens every few years. People think that because they were talking about Foo, their phone was spying on them and gave them info on Foo. When the reality is, they are talking about Foo because they were reading about Bar or listening to Baz. And people who like Bar or Baz probably like Foo.

    Now, that isn’t to say that you aren’t having a LOT of leakage from any “home assistant” device like a Google Home. But for stuff like this, it is usually a lot simpler.