cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/2862582
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.
That answers how it happens. My guess is that he googled things relating to submarines or his browsing behavior regarding that game caused him to be grouped as potentially interested in submarines. If you are using chrome everything you do will be collected and used for marketing. No amount of extensions will save that since the browser itself is spying. If you want to minimize this happening you have to switch browser (brave is the closest to chrome) and stop using google for search.
This is probably what happened. If you use Google, YouTube and Chrome and esp if you are logged into ur Google account those don't matter too much..
The discord vc isn't private but listening to a conversation in real time and picking out key points, who said what and then translating that to recommendations seems a challenge but not impossible. A speech model could do this but that would be quite insane. It seems more likely that the recommendation was based of off previous searches and predicted correctly.
If Dc was listening like that I would expect to see some weird shit cos I talk random stuff in dc voice