They only listen to what is said after you call their name. Right.
Yes, and so is Amazon. I have six Echo devices in my house. I've taken to muting all the mic's on them when I don't want to listen to music.
Contemplating getting rid of all of them, the problem for me is they've become so useful. My favorite task is to go through my kitchen cabinets and create my grocery list using a skill I wrote. I have it connected to my daily calendar so I know where I need to be ahead of time, I can make calls with it (including yelling "Alexa, call 9-11" and then tell it to open the garage door in case I fall so emergency personnel can get in my house.)
That is the problem with technology like this though, isn't it? It's so easy to weave into our daily lives and increase convenience that we become spied upon and listened to.
I've had a similar experience as you where ads pop-up in my browser that are related to discussions I've had in my home and that's why I mute the mic's now.
There is an article on the interwebs about how to delete all the files that Amazon and Google have from listening to you if you care to find it, and one about how to disable that feature on Alexa. I'd post it, I'm on my way out the door to work ...
haven’t heard a mountain lion, but have heard bobcat- very eerie sounding- and them ost eerie sounding animals I’ve heard are racoons- no lie, they make like 5 0r 6 sounds that sound like pigs, monkeys, lion, bear, even a weird sound that can onmly be described as the ‘big foot’ soudns they do when tryign to call in the myth- it’s really freaky when they get fighting- I’d hate to be lost at night i nwoods and hear that
Seems like a stretch for Google to listen to talk and to update their search suggestions based on it. More than likely other people have searched for the same thing.
If someone is paranoid about the danmed thing “listening” then he should rip it out and throw it away!
Perhaps your wife had searched the term in response to hearing it?
I do not have Alexa, Google Nonsense, Siri, or any of the other listening devices. My home is as bug free as I can make it.
My daughter in law had it even worse. She was talking to a friend in her house about something. She had never searched the item or anything. And all of a sudden, ads started showing up when she accessed the internet for the very item. I can’t remember what it was, but it caught her attention because it was something very odd, that nobody normally discusses.
Her take: “I talked about it with the phone in the room, and now people on the internet are trying to sell it to me.”
Some paranoid people have this idea that Google has employees spending day and night with headphones on listening to every household conversation with these Alexa devices and transcribing them for posterity. Then these employees go out for beers after work and laugh among themselves about the "private" conversations they overheard.
Which is ludicrous. Not even the federal government has anywhere close to the number of employees that could listen in on even a tiny percentage of households.
Besides, generally speaking, Google employees couldn't care less about the conversations we have at home. I know we like to flatter ourselves sometimes that we are somehow important but most of our lives are excruciatingly boring to outsiders (who themselves live excruciatingly boring lives for the most part).
Now if you mean "listening" in terms of the Google devices capturing conversations so that Google bots can parse metadata for the targeting of advertising, then you would be correct. To test my theory, go ahead and have conversations about instant hot water heaters. Shortly, you may start getting ads for Rinnai, Rheem and Bosch instant hot water heaters (among others).
Now some might find that creepy but that's how Google gets most of their revenue and that is also why most of Google's basic services (i.e. search engine; Gmail; browser, etc.) are FREE to the consumer.
In other words, if we all insisted on total privacy and no targeted advertising, then we need to be prepared to pony up some monthly payments for all these services we currently take for granted as being "free".
Actually nothing is truly free as I just pointed out.
Outside the range of your listening devices, have you can your wife agree upon a topic you don't generally discuss. For example, retiring and moving to Canada, renting a billboard to sell your house, buying a kayak, or any other odd but plausible topic.
Each day you agree on a topic and bring it up throughout the day near the listening device.
Each day, discuss a different topic.
Do that for a week, every day, and see what your results are.
Report back to us.
I am CERTAIN our phones are listening to us. One night before going to bed my wife discussed on the phone a piece of practice management software with a colleague. The VERY NEXT morning a representative of the company that makes the software called my wife on her cell phone. The software is made by a very small, hardly known entity. My brother and I were once discussing a very particular LED bulb meant to replace metal halide bulbs in bay lighting. The very next day Facebook had ads featuring, yep you guessed it, the very bulbs we were discussing. This has happened on other occasions too where the ads the following day were too specific to be merely coincidental. However, knowing they are listening can be used to your advantage.