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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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
Two things are at play here:
Out of all the recommendations and ads, you only notice those who are actually relevant, so you’re biased.
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.
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.