10 ms·

I visited a friend who is watching Breaking Bad. Now clips appear on my YouTube?

• paul7986 4y ago
  I believe it's your phone's microphone
• edmcnulty101 4y ago
  I went to a wedding and chatted with someone for 5 minutes and the next day they were a suggested friend on Facebook. Never seen that person before in my life.
  • markstos 4y ago
    Was the wedding a Facebook event that you RSVPed for?
    • edmcnulty101 4y ago
      I don't even know how to RSVP for a Facebook event.
  • jstx1 4y ago
    This one is easy - Facebook recommends people based on geolocation. It's very common to get friend suggestions to people you've met, or just been in the same building with.
    • edmcnulty101 4y ago
      Oh I know. That's creepy to me.
    • weberer 4y ago
      Now the problem is how Facebook got your geolocation data.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • agrajag 4y ago
    Geolocation data from the phones could have been used to show you both were in about the same place at about the same time.
  • ocharles 4y ago
    I believe Facebook recommendations are somewhat bidirectional - if they visited your Facebook page (by searching you, even if they didn't add you), I think Facebook will recommend that you add them.
  • 13of40 4y ago
    I've got a million of these, but one of the weirdest ones was when a friend of mine suggested we go to one of the islands northwest of Seattle for the weekend. The next day, I was googling "things to do in..." and it autocompleted to the island's name, even though it's a relative backwater compared to some of the other places around. Best I can figure is he googled it, they saw us in proximity to each other, then predicted that we were planning to go there.
• burntoutfire 4y ago
  Happened to me as well. I suspect that your Android phone noticed his Wifi network, mapped it to his Google id, and now yours and his YT accounts are partially sharing recomendations. That's the least pernicious mechanism I can come up with at least.
  • kyriakos 4y ago
    He used iPhone
    • burntoutfire 4y ago
      Then it's more suspicious. Perhaps Google apps with access to localization (such as Maps) could still do the same thing, on an iPhone?
  • the_only_law 4y ago
    I've had similar things happen when all I did was discuss something with my brother on a phone call, and next thing you know I'm getting ads for it. I'm willingly to believe it was coincidence, but I am suspicious.
• Knufen 4y ago
  Pure guessing but your phoned showed your location and what you were watching (through your friends data), and thus recommends Breaking Bad to you now.
  • postsantum 4y ago
    Not even location, just OP's phone discovered that a router with a unique MAC that just LOVES streaming BB is sometimes nearby. Google's "AI" dictates that means OP would absolutely love BB too, it might be flawed logic but it probably works
• quasimodem 4y ago
  I had a 5 minute conversation with my niece at the park about rotary phones and now my feed is full of rotary phone-related articles. This happens more times than I can remember.
  • noslenwerdna 4y ago
    Your niece searched for rotary phones?
    • quasimodem 4y ago
      That's a good theory. I'm not on any social networks, however I do email her, so perhaps Google associates me to her via my contacts list?
  • svnt 4y ago
    The implication is it listens to you? Or she searched rotary phones after you spent an hour or two in the same places?
    • quasimodem 4y ago
      My gut reaction is that it listens to me, either directly or via some app, but I know Google has refuted this fact. I suppose this is testable too, so I tend to fall on the confirmation bias side of things.
  • jhugo 4y ago
    The conversation didn't prompt you to look up any rotary-phone-related content?
    • quasimodem 4y ago
      I am confident it did not, that conversation was out of my mind as soon as it ended, which was why I was so surprised to see it dredged up again in my feed.
• netsharc 4y ago
  I can't help but think these are confirmation bias events (if the clips were for "Battlestar Galactica" and not BB you wouldn't be writing about it), but similar things happened to me too: - I walked by an e-bike store, stopped to look at the model displayed on the window, a few days later I got ads for e-bikes on Instagram (I can't remember now if it's for the particular store's brand). - I opened Instagram at a carwash, a few days later, ads for car-detailing services - here I have a strong feeling it used my location data.
  • euos 4y ago
    Location. Bike store paid for ads in the city (or county)
  • tveita 4y ago
    You can't be paranoid enough to imagine the disgusting amount of location data being slurped up by unscrupulous apps and traded for any purpose at all. Targeting ads based on having been near or in a store is completely standard. https://blog.citizennet.com/how-to-measure-store-visits-on-facebook-and-instagram https://blog.citizennet.com/how-to-measure-store-visits-on-f... > By using location services on cell phones and 3rd party satellite imagery and mapping data, Facebook is able to tell you if someone visited your store within 28 days of clicking on your ad, all while filtering out employees or people who move past your stores without going in. > Facebook can't measure all store visits. This is because some people don't have location services turned on in their phone, or are not recognizable by 3rd parties. https://www.placeiq.com/audiences/ https://www.placeiq.com/audiences/ > Reach audiences who visit your location on a regular basis > Reach audiences who regularly visit your competitor’s locations > Message audiences who regularly commute past your location
• spicyramen_ 4y ago
• zacherates 4y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion
• briga 4y ago
  Have you used his Chromecast or connected to his wifi? I’ve noticed lots of misdirected targeted ads after doing this
• treeman79 4y ago
  Your phone is now associated with his IP address/location now. Targeting individual is hard. But targeting people at a location/up is not. Data is usually refreshed monthly. He may also see ads for things you search for.
• bbor 4y ago
  Location tracking - they don’t use the mic as many suspect, but definitely know where you were and who you were with, and presumably what you were watching if it was google-linked. Perhaps there’s Bluetooth/wifi mechanisms in there too to make it easier but it’s the same idea. That said I don’t see why they’d do that for YouTube recommended… maybe coincidence
  • weberer 4y ago
    >they don’t use the mic as many suspect Unfortunately, there's no way to confirm that since the only phone out there with a hardware microphone switch is the Pinephone.
    • capitalsigma 4y ago
      You would expect it to consume quite a lot of power and/or bandwidth if the mic was always on.
      • treis 4y ago
        They do it for music identification these days.
        • smegsicle 4y ago
          which is such a halfhearted excuse too- "why are you randomly sampling audio around me and phoning home about it?" "uhh.... shazaam?"
          • Rebelgecko 4y ago
            I thought that was all done on-device?
            • treis 4y ago
              I'm not sure. Just pointing out that it doesn't necessarily have to use a lot of power or bandwidth to have the mic always on.
• ocharles 4y ago
  Honestly I would love to see it be the norm, maybe even law, that a recommendation is accompanied by a reason for the recommendation. Is this because I watched a similar video? Or is it because you snooped on my microphone when I was at the local cafe?
  • thegeomaster 4y ago
    You just put in a pile of all the data you know about the user and session into a pile of linear algebra (some ML-based recommendation system or whatever), and recommendations come out. In other words, I doubt they even know the reason for any particular one.
  • FredPret 4y ago
    This might not be possible - there are many inputs into the model; it would be impossible to trace which one tipped the scale. Better to make listening on the mic illegal, punishable by prison time for the execs.
    • NateEag 4y ago
      > This might not be possible - there are many inputs into the model; it would be impossible to trace which one tipped the scale. I am not a fan of problem-solving via legislation, but I wouldn't lose a lot of sleep if Big Tech was no longer allowed to burn billions of CPU cycles on making opaque, inexplicable guesses as to what ads are most likely to make them money if shoved in front of my eyeballs.
      • FredPret 4y ago
        I get the annoyance, but also, targeted ads means both a more efficient economy and information environment. Mass ads means more money goes into ads and ads are irrelevant to many people. Only big co’s can afford mass ads. Targeted ads means ad money is vastly more efficient, and your information environment is less cluttered. One-man shops can afford targeted ads. I like seeing relevant ads. I like supporting small businesses targeting me. Privacy isn’t a concern either because the three-letter agencies can find out whatever they want about me if they want anyway. FWIW, I’m not in advertising.
• encryptluks2 4y ago
  I sometimes wonder if phones are actively recording audio, but more likely these companies are all sharing data or some app on your phone is doing it. No matter how much I change my privacy settings to the max, I still have the same things happen to me where it is extremely unsettling.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• tgsovlerkhgsel 4y ago
  This is pure speculation, in descending order of probability: - Random coincidence, which you notice in the one case where it happens but not in the 99 cases where it does not. - You did search for it or something related. Or, you got one clip due to one of the other reasons, clicked it, now you're getting more. - Correlation via IP - Correlation via location Since we're talking about YouTube recommendations, not ads, I kinda doubt the last two though. That would provide very little benefit and be a huge privacy risk. Location is certainly considered to some extent, but I would expect this to be on a country/region level, not city and certainly not fine enough for your friend to meaningfully influence it.
  • brigade 4y ago
    Search history including Google search history, I’ve found. I also completely believe that YouTube correlates via IP for at least not-logged-in views (or at least tries to associate to accounts even if they've never logged in); I get bleedover to my iPad from my completely disassociated PC but not my Mac that’s logged into a different account. (Also maybe I put too much effort into tailoring my own YouTube recommendations, but 99% of the time when they start going awry, I have a pretty good idea what triggered it. Random coincidences don't happen...)
    • samspenc 4y ago
      Like others have commented, I too am very certain Youtube uses IP address. My family and I are behind the same cable modem, and oftentimes my family's Youtube "related videos" will start popping up in my Youtube home page, and vice versa, even though I have no interest in or have watched those videos. Interestingly, I seem to recollect this happening only in the past few months or so, maybe a feature they turned on recently?
  • soheil 4y ago
    I think if the IP is detected as used by one person the recommendation engines relies on it more heavily. For example in an office the same IP is used by many so its weight in the recommendation engine is relatively low. Additionally more and more ISPs are using longer lasting DHCP leases. I know my Comcast IP hasn't changed for over a year. This can better tie a person to the same IP.
• eptcyka 4y ago
  I wouldn't be surprised if it was content ID'd by your smart devices either by mic or by the accelerometer.
  • SnowHill9902 4y ago
    How would the accelerometer ID work?
    • eptcyka 4y ago
      Accelerometers can be used to detect speech, with a high enough resolution they essentially can be used like microphones. The audio data inferred doesn't need to be good enough for humans, just good enough for some AI algorithms to produce a perceptual hash.
  • wutbrodo 4y ago
    Content ID'd by the accelerometer? How does this work?
• jeroenhd 4y ago
  It depends on your privacy settings, the local privacy laws in effect, and what you did over at your friend's place. If you watched the episodes on a device connected to your Google account in any way I think the answer would be obvious. Another reason you might be seeing ads for it is that you might've looked up an actor or character on your phone which Google linked back to the show. It's also possible that Google noticed your account was suddenly shared by someone who showed interest in the show and "infected" your account. Another possibility is that Google picked up on the show if you used a Chromecast on the same network to watch an episode; media controls are broadcast throughout the network. There are more far fetched reasons. For example, if your location history is on and the neighbourhood where your friend lives is seeing a sudden spike in interest in Breaking Bad (watch parties? Idk), you may have been flagged as interested purely by geographical proximity. It can also be a combination of Baader-Meinhof and your behaviour around the ad (looking at it longer, possibly unintentionally out of surprise) that reinforced the topic in your ad preferences. Tl;dr, Google can learn a lot about you through indirect means. It's kind of their business model. Compare to the famous case where a supermarket knew someone in a US household was pregnant before the other family members did based on purchasing behaviour. It's scary how much you can tell about a person from their shopping patterns alone and Google has their hands in so much more. None of this should probably be happening if you've disabled personalised ads (https://adssettings.google.com/ https://adssettings.google.com/), at least not on Google's platform.
• latency-guy 4y ago
  There was a private showing of the next episode of Better Call Saul yesterday at a film festival of sorts, the rest of us won't see that episode until July. It's probably just trending topic and you fit a similar profile to people that would watch the show/Breaking Bad. My viewing habits are pretty stable and I noticed I get recommendations for The Wire even after resetting all my cookies as well as not logging in to my Google account
• notatoad 4y ago
  how did you watch the episode? many streaming services, devices, or smart TVs track what you're watching. or more likely, you googled something breaking bad related while watching or talking about it. or even more likely, it's a coincidence. my youtube recommendations also had a breaking bad clip in them yesterday, despite me not watching it, talking about it, or thinking about it. better call saul season ended recently, and people are searching for breaking bad clips. it doesn't have to be more complicated than that.
• libertine 4y ago
  Just so you know, over the past couple of weeks I've been getting clips of Breaking Bad recommended to me - which I think it's something that's just trending and it's getting a lot of views. I think it's random coincidence BB is getting traction now. (Before BB was The Sopranos clips)
• somehnacct3757 4y ago
  Location-based tracking. In this case, your phone was on your friend's wifi so they know whatever that wifi was doing while you were there, you were in the room. Unless you've already completely de-googled your life, this is the most straightforward way to link you to the activity. All it would take is for you to have pinged Google's servers with that phone just once, ever, and they've got it fingerprinted. So when it shows up on the same network accessing YouTube, they placed you. One use of Google Maps, Google Home, logging into Gmail or YouTube is all it takes to compromise a phone.
• lifeencoder 4y ago
  "got connected to her wifi" thats the reason you are getting the recommendation. Youtube stores the data of videos watched using wifi and then tries to recommend other devices connected on the wifi. Reason 2: have you talked anything about the show ? because it has been conspired and seen that google listens thru our microphone in devices and recommend ads even if you haven't searched for them. tldr: Reason 1: Wifi cache. Reason 2: Microphone tracking.
• quanto 4y ago
  Happened to me except even more far fetched: I shared a car ride with a friend for 20 min, and my colleague, being knowledgeable in trivia, mentioned an obscure historical figure that I couldn't even spell the last name of. I came back home, and on my Google feed there he was, the obscure historical figure with his last name fully spelled out in a biography. I never connected to my colleague's network in any form (we were in his car); I didn't search for this historical figure (I don't even know how to spell the name correctly). And most definitely not a coincidence as I had never heard of this person before or after the brief mentioning by my colleague. I don't think my colleague searched for this person on his phone recently either as it was some trivia knowledge he randomly recalled. This happened several times with this particular colleague as he likes to mention random trivia. I have yet to find a plausible mechanism for this phenomenon (unless it is an open mic).
  • fwip 4y ago
    Could it be that your colleague just spent the morning googling these subjects, and Google notices a correlation between the stuff your colleague googles and the stuff you later look up? e.g: it's using location-tracking to link you two, not an open mic and realtime transcription.
  • Jabbles 4y ago
    Sounds like certain videos about historical trivia start trending and your colleague watches them before you do.
    • misslibby 4y ago
      Yeah, there must have been a reason the colleague came up with that obscure historical person, certainly not random.
  • t_mann 4y ago
    My explanation would be fairly trivial: those videos were currently being pushed more broadly by the YT algorithm (propably based on some rough demographics that you two share - age, gender, location, broad interests...). You two probably saw a lot more of the same videos that you didn't talk about. PS: my understanding is that a lot of social media sites use a strategy where they somewhat randomly push single posts by reliable creators, to make sure that those stay hooked as well. So that could be an explanation why you'd suddenly see something a bit more niche.
• 3dprintscanner 4y ago
  I listened to a podcast which mentioned a relatively obscure topic in passing using the basic samsung music app on my phone which didn't have a SIM card in, location turned on or an internet connection. Later that day I see an advert for said obscure topic served on a web page. Is it possible that there is someone transcribing podcasts or at least scraping databases of their RSS feeds and somehow my music player app is broadcasting that I've listened to a particular file(after receiving an internet connection)? The alternative is that the machines really are listening.
  • mmiyer 4y ago
    More likely it is the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon [1] 1.https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion
  • wallmountedtv 4y ago
    Its most likely paranoia paired with the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon[1] rather than a big conspiracy of "the machines are listening". 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion
    • convolvatron 4y ago
      but...we actually know they are, just not how much
  • krackpot 4y ago
    You would have had to at some point download the podcast, so at that point before they served the download to you, they would have used your IP to serve you a relevant ad based on that location data and inserted it into the podcast. A lot more podcasts are doing this unfortunately. I don't remember the name of major platform or company enabling this.
• speedgoose 4y ago
  I’m not convinced YouTube is using such data for its recommendations engine. We are talking about the app’ that serves you ads in languages you don’t speak whenever you travel abroad.
  • robonerd 4y ago
    Visit a friend who watches Breaking Bad? Advertise breaking bad. Visit a country that speaks German? Advertise in German. Seems consistent to me, not a contradiction.
    • speedgoose 4y ago
      That’s a good point.
• happy-go-lucky 4y ago
  They must have signed in to YouTube with their Google Account and you may be one of their Contacts. Just a wild guess.
• entropicgravity 4y ago
  Samsung TV's are known to do this kind of thing when they are within ear shot of people talking. If your phone has been set to allow access to its microphone for all the apps (or some other combination of unexpected apps), just as Android will activate the "location" permission from time to time on an update, then this kind of thing would not be surprising. Check your permissions.
• Apreche 4y ago
  Confirmation bias.
• batirch 4y ago
  This happened to me in 2018. We were chatting with an acquaintance about horse racing. I never showed an interest in that topic or visited the location. Just after 5 mins he left I received an ad from Instagram on Horse Racing competition which was happening in the same city. My only assumption was Instagram/Facebook was somehow listening our conversation.
  • Supermancho 4y ago
    What's worse is that my wife and I were talking about particular states, then the spam calls we started to get had area codes from those states. Once is a coincidence. 5 times is a pattern. Since we don't leave any apps open on our Android phones, we assume it's because Google was listening (their version of Siri is Bixby, which we use from time to time) then selling that information. It was probably a one-off, since this was only for a short window of time (2 weeks), but it was blatant.
    • ffhhj 4y ago
      I keep disabling Bixby permissions (x5 apps) and Android re-enables them on updates or whether I left some "allow to change system settings" checked, it's a huge information drainage.
    • navjack27 4y ago
      > we don't leave any apps open So you force stop everything?
      • Supermancho 4y ago
        If we have to.
  • filoleg 4y ago
    Were you friends with that acquaintance on fb/instagram? Were you on the same wifi/network? If the answer to either of those two is "yes", and if your friend googled or liked/followed horse racing content on instagram/fb, then the algo can easily determine that indeed you might be interested in it and recommend it to you. Requires zero horse racing related searches on your own devices, just requires a person with a first degree connection to you doing those searches. If the system knows that your close social link with some similar interests interacts (searching, reading, liking, following, chatting about online with others, etc.) a lot with a specific type of content, it is a pretty straightforward idea to suggest that specific type of content to you, even if you didn't interact with that type of content online yourself yet.
• pacifika 4y ago
  The problem if we have to guess then the process isn’t transparent
  • robonerd 4y ago
    It's fertile ground for the formation of modern superstition.
• GenerocUsername 4y ago
  I've worked with Adobe Target and the Adobe Experience Cloud, both are used for marketing... Their own docs love to use terms like 'household' because they know their techniques are not good at targeting true individuals but instead groups of users with overlapping identifiers such as IP, devices, location
• artemkubatkin 4y ago
  Its called Baader Meinhof phenomenon - https://science.howstuffworks.com/life/inside-the-mind/human-brain/baader-meinhof-phenomenon.htm https://science.howstuffworks.com/life/inside-the-mind/human...
• davidweatherall 4y ago
  What app / medium did you use to watch Breaking Bad?
• robonerd 4y ago
  I regularly chat about obscure music with people who are essentially strangers to me, I don't know their real names, locations, etc, but we share a lot of youtube links to music videos that have a few thousand views, averaging maybe a few views a day. I believe this connection is picked up and reflected in our youtube recommendations, evidenced by recommendations that have nothing to do with music but seemingly relate to the interests of the people I share music recommendations with. For instance, one of these friends recommends the song National Pastime - Pictures On Your Wall and sends me a link to it on youtube (~4k views over 7 years.) We probably both watch it at the same time, and might have been the only two people to watch it that day. For the next day or so, youtube recommends gameplay videos of f2p gacha-shit, which I utterly despise but know that person has an interest in. And they probably get videos about submarines and airplanes in their feed, because that's the sort of thing I often watch.
  • filoleg 4y ago
    Pretty much this. The least obvious at the time, but looks extremely obvious in retrospective. You and your friend are tightly linked on the social graph. Your friend starts watching a new show and keeps googling and watching stuff about it and talking about it with other people online. While the system won't recommend to you every single thing your friend watches and likes, it knows that for some of those the likelihood of your tastes matching is high. E.g., you might not like horror movies unlike your friend, so the algo wont be recommending them to you, despite your friend watching those. But the algo knows you both like crime dramas, so as soon as your close-social-link-connection-friend starts watching and googling and talking about Breaking Bad, the algo thinks you might like it too, so you start getting suggestions for it. It is kind of silly, but it is indeed scarily way more accurate/effective to predict recommendations that way, as opposed to doing very invasive stuff like actually trying to listen to mic or correlate locations or whatever else (not even mentioning that on modern phone OSs it is somewhere between very difficult and pretty much impossible to do in a legitimate way). Tldr: if you have close social connections whose certain media tastes match yours in some specific niches, don't be surprised that when one of those social links starts watching and enjoying something in those specific niches (and googling about it and talking about it to others online and etc.), you might get recs for that type of content too.
• Markoff 4y ago
  Location sharing, wifi/Bluetooth scanning and then easy to pair accounts signed in to devices appearing at same location, being in each others contacts helps as well.
• miki123211 4y ago
  I was recently talking to my family about a pretty obscure topic. The topic appeared on our family TV in less than 15 minutes. The plot twist in this story is that the TV was tuned to a very popular, national TV channel, and that's where the topic was mentioned. If those coincidences happen on the radio or on TV, we laugh, shrug them off and go on with our day. If they happen on the internet, though, a lot of us immediately turn to conspiracy theories. The big-media narrative on tech really isn't doing us any good.
  • moritzwarhier 4y ago
    Honestly, this reply is well-written but detached from reality. Google uses your IP, fingerprinting, geolocation and more for personalization, at least if you're not logged in. Anything else would be a huge surprise given Google's business model. There also seems to be correlation to previously used accounts if you mainly use YouTube without logging in, but use a Google account on the same device. I experience this myself and, despite always leaning towards psychological explanations in such cases, calling this a "conspiracy theory" seems very off. I mainly use YouTube in incognito and rarely log in, but I heavily use my Google account, dating back to 2006 or so. My YouTube suggestions when not logged in are "personalized", although I use YouTube almost exclusively in incognito mode. They are not personalized as aggresively as when I am logged in — since I mainly use YouTube in incognito, my suggestions when logged in tend to be very repetitious and boring. But there is definitely some personalization going on based on IP, geolocation and browser fingerprinting. > The big-media narrative on tech really isn't doing us any good. HN narratives tend to be similarly distorted, see any thread on environmental change, dependence on fossil fuels or advertising exponential economic growth based on burning fossil fuels and trashing other natural resources.
    • eurasiantiger 4y ago
      Search YouTube in incognito mode for anything random and not connected to you. Keep scrolling. Observe how here and there are results unrelated to your search terms, but clearly aimed at you. They are discovering the user’s identity through UI events, such as scrolling and momentarily pausing to look at a video the user recognises. The identifier videos are sparse enough, and only one of them is on screen at a time, so the mechanism must get rather good resolution this way.
• giords 4y ago
  Did your phone connected to his wifi? If so, that's very likely the reason for this.
• jimsmart 4y ago
  That's nothing...! My friend's smart-TV asked if I wanted to login on the Youtube app, presenting me with my username, after I'd spent an evening or two showing my new friend a bunch of YT vids on it (music/bands and more). My phone and tablet were indeed on the same wifi, but they're not Android. And neither are my friend's devices. Except for the TV perhaps, IDK what the OS is there, it's not Apple for sure. But I did pull up a heck of a lot of my favourite videos, for many hours. And previously the Youtube app on the smart-TV was mostly un-used. I guess it thought I might be the owner / primary user of the smart-TV. I thought it spooky. (I'm a software engineer by trade, I kinda totally understood how it might be done — but I'm also quite a privacy advocate, hence: spooky)
• FlacoJones 4y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion
• midislack 4y ago
  Your GovCorp TrackerPod's relaying your interests to the cloud. Enjoy!