Ask HN: How can this happen without the phone covertly listening?

If you hadn't had that conversation it would not have mattered that she showed up in autocomplete. You would've thought nothing of it. It's only because you had the conversation that the name had any significance. Probably hundreds of times it autocompleted names of people from 4 years ago but since there was no corresponding conversation, you didn't take note and just looked past it.

> Someone else was mentioning a new family at their church and I caught the first names in passing

Did they happen to add them to their contacts recently or send the X&Y Smiths a message about you?

are the letter close on a standard qwerty layout from the intended friend to the "eavesdropped" name?

Could it be that you had interacted with those contacts in close succession at the time?

Do they also have iPhones? It could be as simple as the Find My network identifying that you'd been near each other (still creepy).

I am beyond convinced that our phones are hot mics to the point that my wife and I make a conscious effort to move our phones to another room when we have conversations.

There have been far too many “anecdotal” examples of me mentioning some thing/product out loud, never searching for anything related to it and then seeing ads for it over the next few days.

I resisted the conspiracy theory type explanation but it just occurs too often to be some sort of Baader-Meinhof phenomenon.

My first thought is: this is probably just coincidence. It was just a useless completion that normally would have gone totally unnoticed except for your recent conversation about this person.

It seems possible that a phone might be continually listening to background chatter and trying to extract salient/useful pieces of information to then feed into predictive assistants... but honestly that seems like a lot of computational work (especially on a device known for excellent use of its power budget), and a lot of development work. All for a very small incremental improvement in assistant UX that is probably not going to be noticed by most people.

Your phone might be listening in the background (e.g. Hey Siri needs this to work). Even with the option off (as you said), it might still be processing words on-device for better suggestions.

Another non-tinfoil explanation would be cross matching a lot of data from here and there (for example, if you had some event in calender with their names or their name was in some message/text even if you haven't called them for years) and might got its way in there too. There is probably much more going on that I don't even know, too.

The point is: while it could be phone listening, it can very well be a result of some huge data processing on your device without listening too.

edit: oh, having read the other comments, coincidence/selective bias is even more likely than anything I've written.

The easiest way to understand this isn't happening is just to hook your phone up to a proxy like Charles, you see all network requests. If speaking automatically triggers some request you'd see it immediately (and see the URL and payload)

There was a similar conspiracy when I was in the army, about phones being able to be eavesdropped/wiretapped even when turned off. In short - they can't, but people always believed there was some super secret way to do that

So you had this person's info in your contacts, and when you started autocompleting a number with a picture of them while you were in the same (geo)location (no less surrounded by other people that know/have this info), the information was autocompleted...

and your conclusion is that this is audio data being misused!?

One time I was with some friends and we tested something like this.

We chose a random thing I've never purchased, looked at, or have any interest in: "lawnmowers".

We put my phone on the table and said lawnmowers a lot, waited a few minutes, then I went to a website I know that has a lot of ads (Notebook Check - not that it matters).

Then I scrolled down and waited for an ad to load and it was FOR A LAWNMOWER. I don't even have a lawn!

>How can this happen without the phone covertly listening?

Glad to see someone else asking themselves this question, I've found myself in exactly this situation a number of times in recent years.

I've had this experience several times as well. Last time was on a date. We were talking a little bit about board games and tarot cards, and some other third thing . I have never purchased any of the three things or even browsed them on Amazon. Never get ads/recs for those on Amazon, just books. Next day, however, my Amazon recs were all for board games, tarot cards, and whatever the third thing was.

Telemetry is the catch-all phrase used to describe data captured about a device. Telemetry servers combine this information to build profiles on users. Network models of relationships between devices and user behaviours are used in recommendation engines including autocomplete results.

If you are in the same room as a cohort of people, if one or more people had been searching or messaging the X & Y Smiths, then by geolocation since you all attend the same church, you're associated as potentially interested, especially considering you already had their details saved.

There are also fuzzy logic factors, like maybe those three letters weren't in their name but were in their phone number (each number corresponds to several alphabet characters), or might have been in a message you've long since deleted but is still in your autocomplete index which combined with the geolocation weighting could have caused it to pop up as an option.

In these instances it might appear your phone is listening, but you were in the same room as some people who were probably also interested in that family, had their data in your history, and being a new connection could have boosted its relevance too. (I just saw someone else also answered that you probably only noticed this event because of the conversation, or the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon, which is also plausible)

Not saying definitively that your phone was not covertly listening but our devices are capturing and correlating a massive amount of dimensions related to our behaviours at all times, so it's not beyond reason that enough of these factors lined up to cause the autocomplete engine to suggest it as a reasonable option.

Sometimes a friend comments on how ugly some car model is in its yellow variant. Then onwards you start realizing that the streets are full of that ugly yellow car !!! How come?

Right after bringing some trivial detail into consciousness, there is a period of time where we are more aware about this arbitrary piece of data. Our brain is a pattern-matching machine, so it does the rest.

Want to know if it was the iPhone spying on you? Follow the somewhat scientific (ish) method and take note of absolutely all autocomplete suggestions and make a conscious effort to realize how much relevance they had every time. That way you'll learn to differentiate "coincidence" from coincidence.

Legion did a great little PSA about conspiracies and it fits here as well: https://youtu.be/zKYUxOQj5OA

Does the Y Smith name match perhaps by letters from the number pad?

That people can be so oblivious to the ways in which targeted advertising actually works while simultaneously so vulnerable to conspiracy theories about "hot mics" has me worried.

Do all participants have iPhones?

Apple could have an almost complete social graph. If Y Smith is the common acquaintance between you and your friend, then it would be the best second suggestion if you want to share something in that part of your social graph.

We need an led for microphone on.

It's worse:

The Analytics tools know so much about you that they can actually predict what you're thinking much of the time. They know the new family went to your church and know you would likely talk about it.

I convinced my wife of the opposite by deciding to talk about a topic we never talk about in front of our phones. She was worried that she was seeing ads for things she'd talked about and I said that it was more than likely that she had searched for similar things and was getting ads based on what she likes. She wasn't convinced.

So, we chose X. Neither of us play or follow X in any way. It's not something we'd search for or anything related to it. But we experimented with talking about X and at least one famous Xer that we could name. With our phones on the table.

We never received any advertising about X.

I hear the same thing from some of my friends, what do they have in common? They don't block trackers while surfing. Haven't heard it from people who block those. If it were really voice recognition, it shouldn't have an effect on that. I think what most people don't want to admit is how predictable they are and how easy it is to make predictions based on lots of data.

Another possible explanation could be that your extended family searched for Y Smith after the event and facebook listed it seeing that you are friends with both.

Contrary to others’ experience, I couldn’t reproduce the “talk about X and wait for an ad on X” experiment, I believe it is mostly just the mentioned Frequency illusion, or perhaps some network level thing like A and B talk about something, B later searches for that and “rightfully” get ads on it, and due to A and B’s similar profile or something A also get recommended said product.

Happens all the time. The tiny digital versions of you residing on all the servers are a better version of you. So good, they know what you want before you do. Accept that you're being surveilled, accept that you can't do anything about it and don't listen to the people who claim it's a coincidence because they're still connected to the machine.