Is Google Listening In?

Big Brother is real.

There have been criminal cases where Alexa transmissions
were used to convict people for committing various crimes.

Here is one:
https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/1...r-privacy-data

And Google is known for tracking people's whereabouts by
using data from their cellphones, monitoring gmails, and
other methods.

They track things you wrote in your gmails, your searches,
other data that they collect such as your purchases, and
they use that information to spam you with ads.

I searched for a Chevy Tahoe once, and then I kept seeing
ads for that all over the place online.

I clear my cookie folder every once in awhile to eliminate
those annoyances.

Most of their tactics are done as an aggregate, they don't
really care about you as an individual.

And then there is Echelon.

Don't people ever ask themselves how corporations offering "free" services make their money?

If you use GMail and Chrome, Google likely knows more about you than do your spouse, family and dog.

Judging from posts on this forum - people not only do NOT ask how a business makes money offering 'free' services'....some marketers get angry at the idea that 'someone' would 'make money' by trying to sell them a tool or a service.

Often the same people who complain that someone wants payment for using an app or software - those who want EVERY THING for free - don't seem to realize their own objective is to sell something to make money. THEY don't intend to work for free. IMO those who don't figure out the 'pay to play' or the 'buy to sell' should probably get a job in the offline world.

In this era of data collection - naive to think your information is 'safe' online or that your 'privacy' is being protected by anyone other than yourself.

It has been 15 years now, since I was a pregnant teen girl. And guess what? Those old email addy's still get ads as if I were a young mother.

For me, the wisdom of an old Navy curmudgeon who said in 1969 the moon landing was a distraction for replacing our service numbers with social security numbers, so THEY could track us. Ol Charlie Green uttered about red herrings.

I feel sorry for the youngins, the "Santa" seeing you when your sleeping, knowing when you're awake, is for sure, making a list and selling it thrice (X1000).

I did a recent search for lingerie, and now I seem less offended by the ads following me around. OH, look, there's Victoria's Secret at Facebook, who knew?

GordonJ

I've never liked Gulag products for this very reason. When you close your G account they're on you right away asking you to register a new one. Back door surveillance is real.

The Google search engine, the most used, has lots of affiliate ad's when you are searching for a specific product as well as more general ones. Like Amazon results for example. But, in this case the guy did not search online, just vocalized on his active mike. I find that disturbing.

You Tubes war on Ad blocking is backfiring on them. That is threatening to cut you off watching a video if you do not turn it off. What's happening is, with it's publicity, it has woken up people to invest in ad blockers more, where as before, people were perfectly happy to suffer a few ad interruptions in their video watching.

A tip for you, I will not be renewing my Ad Blocking software after a year. That is because I switched to the Brave browser. I realized recently that Brave does not have the Ad blocking software installed on it. It blocks nearly all ad's and in particular, You Tube ad's, natively. It's worth downloading and using just for that alone. I'm not even getting the warnings from YT either. On it's home page, it even tells you how much time you saved from pages loading and having to sit through intrusive ad's on You Tube and similar sites. (collective time saved)