this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2023
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Privacy

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33
Youtube reads our conversation? (self.privacy)
submitted 1 year ago by Maxelich to c/[email protected]
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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.

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[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

No one brings up Discord? You really believe you’re talking to your friends in private? So discord pops up all those years ago and provided the service out of the kindness of their heart? For free? The terms of service is much more lawyer speak these days but when it first made it’s debut they openly admitted to recording audio and storing data. It requires your phone number for goodness sake. It’s the only app mentioned that’s actual purpose is to listen.

[–] Willifire 19 points 1 year ago (1 children)

he's using google chrome

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

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

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Switching to Firefox is always a good start.

That said, using Occam's Razor, this is probably just the algorithm pushing submarine videos in general due to that other submarine accident (OceanGate/Titan) a few weeks ago, plus a bit of confirmation bias.

PS: I almost forgot that Oxenfree II was out now. I should play that.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I haven't heard of any research results that have proven that phones or apps are actually listening to people's conversations, and am only aware of a research that has proven the opposite: https://gizmodo.com/these-academics-spent-the-last-year-testing-whether-you-1826961188

[–] ndr 15 points 1 year ago

Two things are at play here:

  1. Out of all the recommendations and ads, you only notice those who are actually relevant, so you’re biased.

  2. One would be surprised by how easy it is to predict interests and patterns based on very little information; there’s no need to spy all private conversations for that.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

I had a funny experience not too long ago. Not sure what to make of it, and it might have been a freak coincidence.

A few friends and I were talking on discord, with one friend streaming his Steam discovery queue, not sure what game to play next. At some point we started talking about 2-D platformers, and after some time one of us pointed out how it seemed that we were seeing more platformens than before. One thing led to another, and we started screwing around talking about NSFW content. About 3-5 recommendations later, that one friend started getting porn game recommendations, and not long after about half of the games recommended were 18+ and kinda stayed that way.

Obviously correlation does not prove causation, and it might have been a myriad of reasons such as him playing a trick on us, but I might be interested in knowing what Discord REALLY does with all this data it has access to.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

If you want to avoid this happening again, this guide here as a lot of alternatives and suggestions.

Some are fairly easy (switch to Firefox) while others might be slightly harder (like maybe convincing your friends to stop with discord and use something else instead) but if you'd like to have more privacy, it's all well worth it :)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Using Google Chrome is already a bad idea. Google usually listens to your conversations from your phone through gapps.

[–] Byereddithellolemmy 2 points 1 year ago

Does your friend use social media apps on their, like Facebook or Instagram? Assuming they also have YouTube logged in on that device, it's not impossible that an app may have picked up a conversation and this resulted in a targeted recommendation.

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6342839?hl=en&co=GENIE.Platform%3DDesktop

https://dma.org.uk/article/is-facebook-listening-in-to-my-conversations

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

All good answers here, here is what I got to say:

  • a lot of things could have resulted in such a thing and it is hard to give a definitive answer to your question without knowing everything I need to know, there may be and probably many privacy holes in your system and by system I mean your OS, software and your accounts settings on the internet
  • maybe you both wanna take a look at a summary of discord ToS, you might wanna keep tosdr in your bookmarks it is pretty handy and an awesome resource, anyway, are you convinced now? Ready to switch to a privacy-respecting alternative? Apparently there are some privacy-respecting Discord alternatives but IDK which to recommend as idk anything about them (at 1st I was going to recommend Telegram, matrix and signal but these are not a direct Discord alternative although you can use them to chat with your friend just fine)
  • switch to a privacy-respecting browser, I recommend Firefox to fight against the chromium/blink monopoly
  • opt out of all types of optional tracking/telemetry in everything you have
  • if you are willing to: look into setting up a system-wide ad/tracking blocker something like a PiHole or Adguard home