It is really tough to prove as its basically your word against google's. (As in how do you prove you didn't previously search for motorcycles)...

But, if enough people treat it as a scientific study with controls and perhaps university oversight, it could potentially proven or at least brought to many user's attention

People have tested this exact thing with Wireshark and found nothing

download wireshark...you can look yourself at every single thing that leaves your phone...empower yourself....

I'm no developer or scriptkid, but someone mentioned LinageOS with MicroG above here. I've been reading about it and from what I can tell, MicroG spoofs the signature of google so that the Google apps that require GPS installed, "think" they are installed, when in fact it is not. Maybe you could use this the other way around, to test if Youtube still customizes ads based on your phrases, when not connected to Google. At least you would know if it was client-sided or not, right?

Thank you for making this thread by the way, it's been an interesting read and I've learned a lot, both from you and other commenters.

I don't know how you would go about proving it... but I have experienced this on multiple occasions as well.

I've never visited my company's website on my phone or personal computer. But, since I say the name and talk about products daily, with my phone sitting on my work desk, I get nothing but ads for my own employer.

just constantly talk about some thing or service you would never actually talk about in your daily life. Talk about diapers all day or whatever you want. See what happens.

set it next to a radio or the tv or any audio source playing in a different language. If adds start appearing in that language its not 100% proof but it would be close enough. Or just block the apps accs to the mic.

I'd think it might be the OS itself or chrome before I looked at youtube. Chrome being #1 being also developed by google. Unless you had facebook installed.

If you have the google app installed, it constantly listens for "ok google", so it could picking up what your saying via that route

Don't make assumptions about fb. If you do the test make sure no other apps are active.

they might not be doing it above the board.

That's where I kind of think you're going off the rails. If they are tracking using voice to text (which could be done on the phone, without uploading audio to YouTube, which would make it much harder to use wireShark) that's one thing. But if they're circumventing security limits of the device, that's a recipe for bad press and I doubt Google would stoop that low. (Fb on the other hand would do it and then say oops).

A third possibility is that they don't use the Mic directly, but if there is a speech to text service on the phone, maybe they circumvent it that way. I'd be surprised, but it's possible.

Another thing to try is test it again with really unlikely things. Like "fishing poles, ice fishing, ocean fishing" presuming you never do those things. Try three total and if you see ads for all 3, that's not a coincidence. I'd make a video of it too if you can.

Tfw you surveil the entire world and fear the press

Im pretty sure these feels don't actually exist, in reality or as a trope...Big dick swings where big dick wants.

I've noticed that with things other than the YouTube app. But what can we do about it?/is it illegal?

A semi competent network engineer would have no problem tracing traffic from an app to prove this theory. Audio data isn't insignificant. That's why people are skeptical of these kind of claims.

"buy" "need" "want" "should" "get" "look at" "payday"

Speech to text, then send a couple of KB of encrypted untraceable data.

Nothing is untraceable. It would be comically easy to determine that the app is sending data when you hadn't triggered any reason for it to do so.

And just because you can track your voice leaving, you can't prove what is done and received in return. You openly give access to your mic, but can't prove what they actually use it for, unfortunately. They're crafty...

A semi competent network engineer would also know that it would never be about audio data. It will not send audio anywhere. People are "sceptical" because they are ignorant and naive as hell.
What your phone will send is data based on audio not the audio file itself. It will only look for certain keywords such as car, bike, door, school, storm, bedsheets, anything that has a market. The sent data will only have the size of bytes (most likely it contains keywords and date stamp) encrypted. The upload date of these small data can be badically anything. It might send it right after the analyzed audio, or even few hours later or at phone startup etc. No one really knows how does it work exactly but it does work.

The sent data will only have the size of bytes (most likely it contains keywords and date stamp) encrypted.

So show the encrypted data being sent. It should be a simple task.

You know, it wouldn't be that difficult to engineer a replacement Android or iPhone case that adds hard switches for the microphone, cameras, GPS, adds hard-switched multi-SIM card..

No need to prove it haha. Just go read the contract you signed when you agreed to use the service.

They also are owned by google who does the same thing. So turned by off the mic in youtube doesn’t really matter. Everything you google or if you speak near your phone at all ever is recorded

I have an S8, and I don't get ads served to me in the way everyone talks about, now that I think about it. I know it is a real thing, but I imagine it is because I deny all permissions that I can as apps are installed. If an app has undesirable behavior, I can always review the permissions as needed.

In particular, I have FB messenger restricted to text only. I don't use fb myself, but need to use my wife's account to keep in contact with her friends and family. I was extremely reticent to installing this app, because of this exact issue. But I denied it access to media. I can't do voice calls or upload directly from my camera. If I try, it requests media access.

Might look at that if you are bothered by them always listening in.

I’m not bothered by it. More I’m surprised that more people don’t know that they give permission for this in the terms.

They have been training us to mindlessly click Accept to get our cookienfor years.

Yeah it’s ingrained in us so much to just click without reading. We’re just rats in a lab at this point

This is happening on the OS level. Hell, most people probably don't turn off the Google Assistant and simply saying "Hey Google" will launch it.

Re-read the terms of service you agreed to when you made your account.

If you root android, you can tell in the software when apps are accessing hardware. I don't know why this hasn't been done more to prove this.

While I know apps are accessing mics and cameras, I also think in 95% of the cases when people think they are, they are actually using metadata and consumer predictive algorithms. People that are afraid of voice being recorded should be terrified of all the analytics done on metadata of everything they do and what companies share with eachother. Metadata is CHEAP and gives sooo much information people don't even realize. Decoding voice and especially video is EXPENSIVE. Most of the time there is not even a reason to do it.

You wouldn't be able to tell the difference if that app had a wake word but usually the wake words are the android system accessing the mic. You can tell by app so you'd still other apps accessing it. If you are worried about the android system you'd have to disable the wake words though.

There are other possibilities too. Google knows things like who you are in proximity to, so they can do things like show you ads for products that people you were near searched for.

So, for example, if your husband saw a motorcycle ad go by in a feed he was scrolling, and then paused or scrolled back up, then continued scrolling, the ad trackers would notice that there is some level of interest in that topic at that moment and note that in his ad profile. Since you hang out with him a lot and Google can see that (your phones frequently connect from the same source networks, or maybe you have geolocation turned on) they'll guess that maybe you might also be interested in motorcycles at the same time, and start showing you similar ads.

They have lots of other ways to guess about what you might be interested it too. That can make it very difficult to do tests because most of the things you can think of to test with, like real estate, tend to be things that you would think of, and ad systems are very good at guessing what sort of things you think about.

So to do a test, you probably need to do several tests using a strong random source to generate several topics from an off-line source. For example, grab a dead-tree dictionary and some dice. Roll many times to generate a list of page numbers, then go to those pages in the dictionary and toss something onto the page to select a random word. After generating a list (on paper) of about 30 random items (maybe skew it toward things you'd expect there to be advertisers for, you'll get null results if you are testing with stuff nobody sells), do your audio test over a few days, saying several phrases with the names of your test items. Maybe use phrases that include 'I wonder', 'I want', 'I need', 'What is a' and such that one might expect to be triggers.

Then keep track of the ads you see for the next few days. Any time stuff for the things in your test list show up, indicate that on your test list.

You could also divide the list in half and have someone you are often near do several searches over a couple of days for half the items, then see if you start seeing those items more often than the other half.

Wish a few would do this. My theory is the OS itself (ios and droid) has the assistants listen against an adwords list and just sends several byte ids ...

That's a good possibility, especially on phones that include hardware designed for listening for wake-words. I'm not a phone expert of any sort, but in the past some phones had hardware features that allowed them to listen for certain keywords using dedicated hardware. This prevents the wake-word feature consuming too much power. Misbehaved apps could probably use that feature for themselves (I kind of doubt that base Android has anything like that built in, but few phones actually run that, and I'm sure there are numerous unknown root vulnerabilities in various vendor distributions that apps could exploit to set up such monitoring).

Oooh, diceware. I like.

I would also use a brand new phone to do this with no apps installed or your phone completely reset to factory defaults and wiped. That will rule out any other 3rd party app transmitting it back to a google ads system or something like that too. Also don't sign in using any accounts to any apps so it can't pull down any ad profiles on you.

It may also be processing the audio on the phone itself rather than sending the recording of what you're saying up to the cloud. Then once it has picked out key words from the conversation reporting back to the advertising service and requesting videos/ads that meet the keywords of what you said.

Try going here and see if you can find any recordings with the terms you mentioned above. When I went there, there was a bunch of times that my seemed to have just recorded randomly. There were pieces of conversations I was having. Difficult to know what triggered those recordings, though.

https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity?utm_source=help&restrict=vaa

That will only display the voice recordings that were sent to their servers after the user manually activated a voice recognition event (by saying "ok google", or by accident which happens often when pressing for ex. the microphone icon on the keyboard) . If they do what is claimed they will probably keep it hidden.

That will only display the voice recordings that were sent to their servers after the user manually activated a voice recognition event

No. Not entirely true. The recordings I found on my activity were conversations I was having at work, home, in the car, etc.. and had nothing at all to do with the OK google activity. I barely use the OK google activity and don't have the microphone icon on my front screen.

I thought maybe I had google now set to always listen mode, but I cannot bring up google assistant by saying OK, google. I just tried it again.

Yet, there are recordings from as recently as 3 days ago and they are snippets of me talking while at work.

I will add that I haven't noticed youtube ads like the OP but I also don't use youtube on my phone and on my computer, I had ad blockers so I don't see ads on youtube anyway.

If they record your voice without your consent I think it is weird that they do not keep it hidden. A sniffer will probably not help as well as the traffic will be encrypted and it cannot easily analyze the traffic. I use a IDS/IPS and will check if my Android did anything weird as well. If you want to have more control over your device I can advice you to look at: https://microg.org I have to admit that I do not yet use it myself, but will soon.

I am not especially concerned myself, if they are only using the information to provide me ads through an automated system. I know there is a tradeoff if I want to use certain features/technologies. I have an Amazon Alexa in every room in the house.

It is important to be aware that it is happening, though, so you can make a decision whether or not you accept it.

I agree, good that you are at least aware. It is always about seeking a balance between ease and security. Making things too inaccessible will sooner or later cause security issues (ex. password too difficult to remember? lets write it down on a paper).

I fully automated my house as well. I use snips.ai (https://snips.ai) and use a separate network (vlan) for all my IoT devices.

I will check those out. Thanks

Yea this has been a thing

If you have google assistant on your phone (you most likely do) it will be listening all the time for the hotword, "ok, google". But in order to catch you saying those words, it must always be listening. Therefore, it is not unreasonable to assume that google could somehow use that feature to serve you with ads using other google apps like youtube.

https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/2015/10/so-google-records-all-the-microphone-audio-all-the-time-after-all/

From what I understand Google Home is "always listening" locally for the wake word. It listens in 5 second chunks or so that are constantly being overwritten, but once you say the wake word it records your whole request and uploads it.

The amount of data it would take to constantly be uploading your conversations to the cloud would be enourmous.

I am not sure if anyone is suggesting here that it is uploading conversations constantly. Obviously people would see that in their data plans. Are people suggesting that?

I think what most are suggesting is that there are a list of 'wake words' for advertising. These wake words would be recorded locally and processed locally, only sending metadata out to be used for advertising.

It doesn't have to record constantly.

Let's say that I program it remotely to set a wake word for 'bomb'. Every time it hears the word 'bomb', it begins recording a snippet just like it would have if I said 'Ok, Google'. Except in the former case, it passes that info quietly to a different server.

Al it would require is a small download to update the list of words to listen for.

I personally believe that it is only being used for advertising. I could see it being used by the government (now or in the future) in just the way I mentioned above.

They could be in cohorts with cellular and ISP companies to upload the data independent of any user metering?

The problem with that is that if you have too many wake words there can be more false positives. Wake words need to be complex and unique so they know that they're being said.

The amount of data it would take to constantly be uploading your conversations to the cloud would be enourmous.

Storage is trivial limitation for big companies especially if they're in bed with the military. I recorded one Skype conversation with a client and an hour of MP3 audio turned out around 60 MB. Last year I bought a 2 TB external hard disk for $150. Do the math.

I'm not talking about storage, but bandwith. Your network would constantly be used and your data usage would skyrocket.

You're right, I realized my mistake well after posting my comment but hoped you might not notice.

yeah! the voice command feature is not a boon, it's actually you signing away your privacy totally, think! how will a computer know that your voice is commanding it to search something online? it HAS to convert everything you say from voice to text, so it has keywords, just like it would have had you typed everything you said. Oh man, gotta disable Siri, Google, Alexa

https://wikileaks.org/vault7/

read some posts over at /r/privacy

there's some really good info over there on how to protect yourself

You have to get a job at the company, work your way into some of the more secret work, get lots of confidence from the executives, and than steal the needed documents that prove without a doubt that they are indeed doing this.

You don't have to do this. If someone hasn't already admitted it does this, someone will very soon and since we have already been living the lie.....people will graciously accept another layer of the surveilence state and all will be good again. They won't even try to fight the encroachment because really.....no one has been hurt......yet, right?

/s

Once while my phone was open on instagram, my dad and I were discussing how my dog should eat better food. Then later I saw an ad for healthy dog food, without ever looking up dog food on my phone. Only discussing it while it was on an application

This is a thing for sure. Today I recieved an ad for weighted blankets. I subject I had talked about during a phone conversation but never searched. Also in the past (when I had a google home speaker) I spoke about selling our house and a local realter added me on instagram less than an hour later. This is the beginning.. and more than likely they have been analyzing data like this for years now.

its google, you are on Android ... they know everything you are doing. Your contacts, text messages, email (if gmail), your search, everything is being catalogued by the Big G. You are on their platform after all.

As for the "Don't be Evil" that was never official policy, and has been dead for a few years already.

And proof ... no way, unless you reverse engineer Android. No one can pinpoint Facebook's mic hack, though its open knowledge they do. Now imagine the owners of the platform, who have direct access to the metal.

I want to create an app that when installed on your phone makes your phone buzz every time an app aside turns on your camera, microphone or gps aside from directly using those applications.

I think it's in their terms of service that they do use that information to serve ads, BUT they don't save it attached to your personal information.

Not defending them, but I think that's how it works.

BUT they don't save it attached to your personal information.

The way it works is that they anonymize information but still keep it under an alias that isn't the person's name. For example, instead of tracking Reddit user monkeyfear I assign you ID 17885 and collate all your data with that ID. Voila, it's not a surveillance!

Craziest one for me (which may have been a coincidence, or maybe not): I was sick at home and had the shits, couldn't get off the toilet. My ass literally hurt to wipe. So I'm sitting on the toilet for the 10th time that day scrolling through Instagram, dreading having to get up and clean myself, and what do I get an ad for? A motherfucking bidet. I wasn't Googling it, I wasn't even talking about it or anything like a bidet.

At the time I laughed pretty hard about it, looking back though maybe something more sinister was at play.

If you really want to, attach a voltmeter into the circuit plugged into your phone, ontop of the microphone, if voltage increases when you're watching videos, you are completely correct.... Please lmk your results if you do this

One of the mods on the Mandela Effect sub did an experiment on this. They only talked about Portugal and going there for vacation and what not. Making sure not to search or type anything out in regards to it. And they reported getting ads for Portugal shortly after. They said it was something they hadn't ever explored or researched, which is why they chose it for the experiment, but I'm not sure if it was specifically on YT that they encountered the ads. Wouldn't hurt to try it out to see if anything comes up.

Instagram app on the iPhone definitely does that. For example I was cooking with cream cheese and mentioned that word a buncha times while directing someone else in the kitchen. Pretty soon I had Philadelphia cream cheese ads on Instagram. Insta is one of the very few apps I have on my phone. For example I don't have Facebook, snapchat, etc.

I can't believe how quickly people forget what Edward Snowden said. Anything about an app or silicon valley company watching you was proven in 2012. The people did nothing then, will they now? I really hope so.

Ok..... I'm sorry to be the first one to tell you this if no one else has quite yet, but there are much more terrifying purposes for the microphone and other transmitters on your everyday smart phone. Google is not a functional government with a military force so I'd say they are kinda low on the list of things to worry about.

P.S....if they want you....they'll get you.

You don't have to prove it. It is true. It's beyond just YouTube and facebook, your phone is spying on you at the operating system level.

First it was echelon monitoring all electronic communications, then the patriot act, then all the shit people attribute to Snowden disclosing. Take your pick, there is proof.

Its Google as a whole, that is doing this. Between all of your search history, browsing history, location, audible conversation, and in sure the Android OS in some way (also owned by google). YouTube of course, is owned by Google.

You dont need to prove it, because it is.

I know that google uses my phone's location services to serve me ads. Because I don't have pets or anything but my son got a gold fish from a carnival one day and the next day I went into PetCo to get some stuff to try to keep the fish alive. Right after I visited that store I started getting PetCo ads on YouTube and other places. That gave me the creeps!!

Some phones have the capability to read RFID chips present in barcodes and packaging. A spying app on your phone -> enter a store -> sensor reads RFID chips -> app accesses sensor -> product data sent to ad central. It's all by design, none of that is "hack" or accidental.

Wow! Crazy. Isn't that like the "internet of things" that I have been hearing about?

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/feb/09/internet-of-things-smart-home-devices-government-surveillance-james-clapper

In the future, intelligence services might use the internet of things for identification, surveillance, monitoring, location tracking, and targeting for recruitment, says James Clapper

The tech companies have been working on this for decades now, the idea is for every grain of sand to have its own IP address, which is the purpose of IPv6 protocol.

I tested this by mentioning "cat food" around my phone about once or twice an hour for a full day. I don't own a cat.

Woke up the next morning and several different apps had cat food advertisements.

This is definitely not paranoid. This is really happening.

Example:

I am a cat person. I've never owned anything else or expressed an interest in owning anything else.

My GF comes in and says her friend has to move suddenly and can't take their pet with them and we need to adopt it. It's a lizard.

I say okay, and we discuss supplies we might need for the lizard. I mention that we might need one of those heating pads that go under the terrarium. So then I open up a web browser on my laptop and go to Amazon.

The first item that pops up on my "suggested for you" list was a terrarium heater for reptiles.

I've never searched for anything remotely like that before. We had our phones and laptops in the room. She has an iphone and I have an android. She runs the FB app on her phone; I do not. She uses an Apple laptop and I use a Windows laptop. We use both Chrome and FF.

FB app

One person having the FB app on their phone can compromise the privacy of everyone on their contact list and in their vicinity. It sounds too harsh but we should start ostracizing people who use FB.

I think they do to. Was discussing something out of the ordinary with my partner. Next day 5 ads for that same topic. Coincidence. I think not!

I install an app called 'OGyoutube'. No advs and typical google BS stuff. You also get all YT red features for free in this app.

I was texting my friends about driving for uber and 2 days later I got a thing in the mail about it. Very weird

Social media and sheep want to blow the whole "an fbi agent is watching us" out of proportion because others do it and they think its a joke

But half of it is only a joke

They do have our information, governments have to know their enemy right ? Which is us, the people Of the world

download a hacked apk that runs without root.

you wont get any adds then

me too

Start talking about something you'd never buy or research on the internet. If it is listening you'll get ads.

I already proved it anecdotally.

I am a therapist. The work I do is 100% confidential with regard to client identityi. Though I keep notes in our medical record system, I do not write details of what was said in these notes.

I had a session last year in which my client mentioned an obscure programming language. This is not something I had ever heard of or researched, and it was brought up by name only once or twice.

I freaked when the next day, Amazon sent me an email with recommended books for said programming language.

Since then, I have a no phone policy in my office and ask clients to put their phones in a Faraday bag at the front office.

for what it's worth, i live in london uk, usually have thai audio/video playing in my house. friend mentioned she'd noticed many thai related ads appearing after visiting me, asked if i'd been using her phone. which i hadn't. she'd also not been using my home's wifi.

As u/arnkk mentioned, try tuning your radio to a different language and let your phone sit with Youtube open next to it. I heard other people testing it out and resulting in ads in matching language.

Try this experiment. Works every time.

Assuming you don’t have a pet, just start talking; couple times a day about said pet saying key words like BUY, NEED, WANT etc. Do this for a couple days and I guarantee you will get your answer.

Ex: I need to go get some cat food Ex: I want to get the cat a better bed Ex: the cat needs to stop scratching my furniture

They do indeed monitor your actions and this is a foolproof way to see it in action first hand

I've never visited my company's website on my phone or personal computer. But, since I say the name and talk about products daily, with my phone sitting on my work desk, I get nothing but ads for my own employer.

Some phones have the capability to read RFID chips present in barcodes and packaging. A spying app on your phone -> enter a store -> sensor reads RFID chips -> app accesses sensor -> product data sent to ad central. It's all by design, none of that is "hack" or accidental.