Ignoring Permissions

nologo

This does not have anything to do with permissions on GOS. Google et. al. have become very good at predicting, using all the data they've been hoarding from phone users. Which is why people sometimes get the impression their phone is literally listening to them.

Farron

Interesting. So how does that work if I've never typed that word in my life. I mean, how does Google get the data?

nologo

Farron complex machine learning, using not just data from you but also knowledge of trends, stuff people are talking about a lot, etcetera. People are very predictable, especially people who are online all the time, and predicting behaviour (especially consumer behaviour) patterns has been Google's main goal for years. They hoard data to predict what people will think next, will do next, will buy next... And they turned the internet into one big datapool providing their complex algorithms with just the data they need. They have no need to hack into the microphones of our phones...

LeslieFH

Farron Your friend also had an Android phone, I assume?

Google knows HE bought an astrolabe, and it knows you've spent time together recently.

de0u

Farron Were you and your friend both using the same Wi-Fi network? If so, the two devices were likely sharing the same public IP address.

Since very few people buy astrolabes, it's hard for Amazon to sell as many as they might wish. So if it seems to Amazon that somebody interested in astrolabes has acquired a new device that has never seen any astrolabe ads, wow, what an opportunity!

Novalissoide

Be aware that GrapheneOS is not officially compatible with any current or legacy Astrolabe.

Farron

My friend actually doesn't have a cell phone. Not surprising for a guy buying an astrolabe!

de0u

Farron My friend actually doesn't have a cell phone.

Does your friend also not have any computing device? If, hypothetically, you and your cellular phone visited your friend, and your phone was using your friend's Wi-Fi, and your friend bought his astrolabe using an iPad via your friend's Wi-Fi, then somebody (Amazon or otherwise) may have associated the two of you.

Farron

I've never been to his house, but I think he has a computer. But we've never shared a wifi connection.

Emmy

Farron any chance you searched for anything to do with that astrolabe on the internet on your phone or any device in your network, as part of your conversation? Or before/afterwards? Or anyone else in your house searched for the word or device?

It could be an IP association rather than eavesdropping.

GrouchyGrape

Farron something many people seem to be missing here... Unless I'm misreading, this all happened on a non-GrapheneOS phone. So, the possibility should be no surprise to anyone that Google (being a privileged system component), used its access to your microphone to listen in on a conversation, then sell/share said data with partners (i.e. Amazon).

Again, maybe I'm misreading your post. But if not, no one should be surprised here. I don't care what permissions you did/didn't revoke, Google has more control over your phone than you do, hence why we're all on GrapheneOS, to regain some control.

rerpy

GrouchyGrape Wouldn't this cause an insane increase in battery consumption? We're talking at least in the order of GB of recording and network transmissions.

calpurtmun

Even if a friend had shared a video or link with you, even if they haven't been on your wifi, those links commonly have tracking identifiers in the URL. And once you open it, then Google, Facebook, etc algorithm now has made a connection between your friend (via their share URL) and you (via your IP address). I'm sure there's lots of other connections that can exist, and with machine learning I bet it's really good and will only get better.

Edit: Also URLCheck can automatically clean tracking URLs like these when you click on them.

GrouchyGrape

rerpy many years ago, I found this and it blew my mind how much audio of my day-to-day life was recorded:
https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/6030020?hl=en&co=GENIE.Platform%3DAndroid

Farron

This Amazon listing happened, literally, within 10 minutes after we had the conversation and he left. I never searched for that term, I didn't even know what it was until he showed it to me, and I sail. And absolutely no one in my house has ever searched for it. There are just 2 of us, and neither one of us knew what that was..

Farron

Interestingly, the "recommendations" vanished about as fast as they popped up, and if I wasn't so shocked, I'd have taken a screen shot of it because no one would believe it. I jumped on the app looking for evidence of what had just happened, and when I went back through the recommendations history, it was gone, like they knew they shown their hand and they were backpedaling. You know how they keep recycling recommendations on Amazon? That never showed up again.

tempproc

Farron

A friend of mine working in digital advertisement technology explained to me that their using EULAs language "loopholes" to allow them to "listen" to you at anytime by using a passive mode of the microphone that uses libraries to essentially transcribe in pre-anoted text the conversations it picks-up, encrypt and compress the results to be sent to the operator of the system or apps you're using and sold to third party with "anonymous" unique ID (funny right?).

Don't know if anyone has every found trace of these types of process but that's why I don't trust AOSP and it makes absolutely no sense to install a ROM only to have the same system and packages with no control over them.