Can Google Read Your Mind Before A Search?

Discussion in 'Gadgets & Tech Talk' started by Lon Tanner, Nov 5, 2020.

  1. Lon Tanner

    Lon Tanner Supreme Member
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    I can't understand how Google can anticipate exactly what I am searching for before I type the request and then get me to the site. It's a bit SPOOKY.
     
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  2. Jeff Elohim

    Jeff Elohim Very Well-Known Member
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    It uses AI (Artificial Computer Intelligence) , and has a complete history of everything you ever thought when on a computer or cell phone. (close, not exactly, as follows)
    It knows you buying habits, travel locations, credit cards, books you like, vitamins you take, medicines you get,
    how long you'be taken 'em, knows all the vehicles you had, any tickets you got, every movie you watched..
    what you shop for at the grocery or hardware or other stores,
    and basically a lot more than you know or remember about yourself.

    One reported got to do a story about the gooooogle server complex - from the inner terminal, they allowed her to type in her identification to see what was on record ----

    EVERYTHING she had ever typed while online was recorded and saved and organized in her 'file'....
    Along with all of her relatives, addresses, phone numbers, neighbors, organizations she was in, everything....

    Now a lot of people's heart rates, breathing rates, blood pressure, temperature, is recorded also...
    as well as their location all the time, when they are awake or asleep, when they are good or bad,
    everything....

    ;(
     
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  3. Nancy Hart

    Nancy Hart Veteran Member
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    Yeah, and a few days later you get a brochure in snail mail about the same item. That's really spooky.
     
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  4. Shirley Martin

    Shirley Martin Supreme Member
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    They are watching us. :D

    [​IMG]
     
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  5. Hedi Mitchell

    Hedi Mitchell Supreme Member
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    YES and I do not like that!
     
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  6. Al Amoling

    Al Amoling Veteran Member
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    That's the reason that I don't use anything that's associated with Google
     
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  7. John Brunner

    John Brunner Senior Staff
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    I remember watching The Tonight Show reruns, and as has become my habit, I'm on my laptop while TV is on. It makes it easy to look up the legacy actors & actresses I grew up with. So I looked up Johnny Carson's biography, and then I started getting ads for Tonight Show DVDs on my Yahoo home page.

    It's invasive.

    That's when I stopped using Yahoo as my home page.
    I've been using DuckDuckGo as my search engine for a while.
     
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  8. Don Alaska

    Don Alaska Supreme Member
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    You can use DuckDuckGo embedded in Brave for the most security in surfing. Gmail is also the least secure email system out there--worse than Yahoo. Gmail automatically copies any attachments to their files. No one knows what they really do with all those photos and such, perhaps send them into facial recognition somehow.
     
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  9. John Brunner

    John Brunner Senior Staff
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    I've never heard of Brave. I've been using Firefox.
     
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  10. Don Alaska

    Don Alaska Supreme Member
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    Look for it. You can even earn money on Brave, but it does mean allowing them to track you. At least the are open about it and don't track you at all if you say "no".
     
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  11. Hugh Manely

    Hugh Manely Very Well-Known Member
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    No, I've never had a problem with that.
    Its probably because I've always been a little scatterbrained, or at least that attribute has been leveled at me several times.

    Of course, in my career as a math instructor, several times on my student evaluations, that was often an accusation given more than once (one has to be a little "off" to teach math)
    So, I think Google is confused about me, because I ramble from thing to thing when I'm surfing the web.

    It reminds me of some actors of old I used to watch when I was a kid. One, for example was a Spanish actor named Luis Alberni, who was accused of playing those roles.
    Here is a picture of him, looking as if he is confused. (this reminds me of how I feel sometimes when I'm on my computer)

    [​IMG]
     
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  12. John Brunner

    John Brunner Senior Staff
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    I just looked up Señor Alberni. He played in over 170 movies!!!!! And he didn't even arrive in the states until he was 26 years old. He had an uncredited role in The 10 Commandments as "Old Hebrew at Moses' House." He would have been around 70 at the time.

    All those movies and I don't really recall seeing him in any specific one.
     
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  13. Ken Anderson

    Ken Anderson Senior Staff
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    A couple of weeks ago, when I got my Mini Mac, I was setting up all my accounts on the new computer. When I logged into my Google account, I was presented with a warning. The warning included a long list of accounts in which I have used identical or similar passwords. Most of them were to sites that I haven't been to in ages, or to ones like Yahoo, where I am not particularly concerned about security, but the scary thing wasn't that I had used the same (or similar) passwords in several places, but that Google knew all of my passwords. Why does Google have access to my accounts outside of my Google account?

    I rarely even use Google as a search engine and I don't generally log into my account when I look for something on YouTube.

    Years ago, when I was making a fairly good living through affiliate marketing, I had forty or fifty different websites, many of them registered under different names and using different hosting companies, yet Google knew every site that was connected to me.

    This isn't restricted to Google, either. If you have both a Facebook account and an iPhone, try having a verbal conversation about a product in front of your iPhone. The chances are very good that if Facebook has an advertiser that matches the product that you were discussing in the (perceived) privacy of your own home, Facebook will start presenting you with ads for that product.
     
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    Last edited: Apr 29, 2021
  14. John Brunner

    John Brunner Senior Staff
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    Are you saying that Apple shares the data with Facebook, or is this an issue with Facebook being loaded on an iPhone??

    This reminds me of the Alexi product. It does not "sleep." It listens to everything...it has to in order to recognize its name and then "wake up." But it also records your every conversation. A guy somehow stumbled upon Amazon's internet stash of recordings of his neighbor's conversation with his wife about redecorating or something like that. When he asked the neighbor how that project was going, his neighbor freaked out. There was an article going around the web at the time. The people behind Alexa said they do that so as to anticipate what you want and to provide a better service, yada yada yada.

    Here are a couple of downplayed events and articles:

    Alexa creepily recorded a family's private conversations, sent them to business associate
    Here’s How to Turn Your Neighbor’s Amazon Echo into a Remote Listening Device
    Alexa Is Listening All The Time: Here's How To Stop It
    Amazon's Alexa recorded private conversation and sent it to random contact
     
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  15. Ken Anderson

    Ken Anderson Senior Staff
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    I won't pretend to understand the technology, but the former seems the most likely because I don't, and have never accessed Facebook through my iPhone, not because I had qualms about logging into Facebook through my iPhone but because my Facebook password is too long and convoluted for me to type in, and I rarely access the Internet through my iPhone anyhow. My only Alexa products are my Kindles, but they are always turned off when not in use. My iPhone isn't.
     
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