The conspiracy that never dies. I think it's so sticky because people feel very uncomfortable when they realize how much Google knows about you without having to listen.

It is not conspiracy. There is literally an option on your Google account to stop using mic for collecting data. On older accounts, it is enabled by default.

Are you referring to the voice assistant telemetry? That's not passively recorded according to Google, but if you have evidence to the contrary I can think of a number of news outlets (and prosecutors in 2 party consent states) that would love to have it.

The option was there before voice assistant existed in 2013 or something. That is when I figured it out myself. I don't know how the description of that is changed during the years.

At work you have the same IP. Your coworker may have googled what he was taking about. This is a much easier explaination than a constant mic monitoring for arbitrary phrases

Don’t people have data caps where they’d notice if a ridiculous amount of audio was sent to a server?

If you did all of the analysis on device, even quite cheaply, you could just transcribe key words and phrases into a text file and upload that. That would only be a few kilobytes of data tops per day of unique words and phrases, I should think. And if you've ever tried to monitor data usage on an Android phone, you'll know that the monolith of Google Play Services phones home all the time with all kinds of pings and datapoints, so it wouldn't be hard at all to upload that data.

and you'd have no battery inside an hour.

watch words are simple to listen for, generalised transcription is far harder.

Doesn't your phone stay on charge sometimes?

There are a lot of people at this company, and my news feed doesn't diverge enough to account for all of their varied google searches.

No, but it would be easy to tell that you associate with your co-worked by correlating Bluetooth beacons, which many apps do for exactly this purpose.

More realistically, your co-worker googled it on their phone. They also email/chat/sms/call you once in a while, so they know you're connected.

Now, it's only logical that you may share certain interests, so why not show ads for things they bought/googled for to their contacts?

Yeah I can't decide on this one. Part of me thinks this can't be happening, and that someone would have realised. But there's been a couple of occasions that go beyond the "creepy coincidence" ads to something that I was speaking with my wife about that day and neither of us had put into the internet, suddenly we get ads for it.

People really aren’t capable of conceptualizing how intimate normal data collection and analytics are capable of being. You think your phone is listening because you assume that’s the only way the ads can know so much, and ironically the truth is far more invasive.

I doubt they are listening - What is more likely is Google can use your lat/lng and knows that you and your co-worker work near each other, etc and is making recommendations based of proximity.

It's plausible, but I still don't buy it because I don't see divergent things when I, say, sit next to a complete stranger in the break room cafeteria.

Have you considered an even scarier alternative: that Google simply has such an enormous amount of data about yourself and the people around you that they can make incredibly accurate predictions like this?

What do you say about the people who have tested this and found nothing?

There's a good chance I'm wrong, but it certainly seems like that's what's going on. I haven't seen anyone's testing of this, but it is also possible their methodology is flawed.

AB testing?

Maybe Google heard them say that they were going to test!

you don't need to listen at every conversation. Your friend was tagged with those topics, and there is a connection to you. It's simple enough to "copy" those topics over to you, cause you're maybe also intrested. :)