(I know many of you already know it but this incident I experienced made me so paranoid about using smartphones)
To start off, I’m not that deep into privacy rabbit hole but I do as much I can possibly to be private on my phone. But for the rest of phones in my family, I generally don’t care because they are not tech savvy and pushing them towards privacy would make their lives hard.
So, the other day I pirated a movie for my family and since it was on Netflix, it was a direct rip with full HD. I was explaining to my family how this looks so good as this is an direct rip off from the Netflix platform, and not a recording of a screening in a cinema hall(camrip). It was a small 2min discussion in my native language with only English words used are record, piracy and Netflix.
Later I walk off and open YouTube, and I see a 2 recommendations pop-up on my homepage, “How to record Netflix shows” & “Why can’t you screen record Netflix”. THE WHAT NOW. I felt insanely insecure as I was sure never in my life I looked this shit up and it was purely based on those words I just spoke 5min back.
I am pretty secure on my device afaik and pretty sure all the listening happened on other devices in my family. Later that day, I went and saw which all apps had microphone access, moved most of them to Ask everytime and disabled Google app which literally has all the permissions enabled.
Overall a scary and saddening experience as this might be happening to almost everyone and made me feel it the journey I took to privacy-focused, all worth it.
It’s known fact, and in 2026 AI orchestrated. You’ll observe that if you’re logged into multiple google accounts and google makes you log into one again because your session expired, you ONLY have to log into one of them. They also track association and phone location and correlate it. I’m not saying they don’t listen to your phone, just that you should assume there is a record of every tech related thing you do (including other people’s devices), parts of that record are being disseminated via data brokers on an “as needed” basis and that multiple AI models are accessing that record daily in order to see if they can infer anything about you that can be used to sell you shit, improve their predictive modeling or mold your political opinion. As you have observed, degoogling yourself isn’t sufficient. Google knows where you were (gps, wifi mapping) who else was there and what their relationship to you is. A frontier model such as Gemini can guess which person in that room was accessing pirate sites and sculpt their youtube recommendations accordingly in order to increase your engagement. They don’t have to listen to you, they just have to look at your metadata, which is barely regulatorily protected, because the industry convinced the Boomers in congress that metadata is harmless.
Welcome to late stage capitalism.