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

[SnowHill9902]

We watched an episode and now clips are showing as recommended on YouTube. How does it work?

(Edit 16:48Z) More info: - using iPhone - YouTube on Safari, no app - got connected to her wifi

[tgsovlerkhgsel]

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]

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...)

[seba_dos1]

> I kinda doubt the last two though. That would provide very little benefit and be a huge privacy risk.

To the contrary, I highly doubt that they don't use it, privacy risks be damned. Using that data is their primary business model after all.

[pieresqi]

I have found out that google uses atleast 1 of the last 2 "doubt" ones. My sister was watching my little pony on her laptop without being logged in and her reccomendations would "leak" into my reccomendations on different computer with logged in account. It was very annoying and even flagging the videos as "not interested" or "don't show" wouldn't help much. I think I "fixed" it by disabling yt history or something. I am not sure. This was 2...3 years ago

[burntoutfire]

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.

[the_only_law]

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.

[kyriakos]

He used iPhone

[bbor]

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

[quasimodem]

>they don’t use the mic as many suspect

I know they claim they don't, but do you have reliable information that confirms this? Like experience on an internal team at Google/Apple?

[weberer]

>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.

[miki123211]

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]

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.

[latency-guy]

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

[libertine]

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)

[ocharles]

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?

[notimetorelax]

Story time: I have disabled all types of tracking in Twitter, same for Amazon. Now, I bought a few e-books for my wife. Those are very girly books that definitely don’t fit my profile.

Twitter is now showing me kindle ads for those books.

Twitter has a menu offering to explain why I see it. The explanation says: Amazon wanted to advertise this to people in your region.

I say they lie… We need Blackbox monitoring against those behaviors with some legal teeth.

[FredPret]

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.

[thegeomaster]

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.

[loa_in_]

In systems complicated enough there could be no clear answer

[jimsmart]

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)

[somehnacct3757]

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.

[batirch]

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.

[filoleg]

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.

[Supermancho]

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.

[3dprintscanner]

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.

[wallmountedtv]

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

[krackpot]

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.

[mmiyer]

More likely it is the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon [1]

1.https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion

[netsharc]

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.

[tveita]

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-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/

> 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

[euos]

Location. Bike store paid for ads in the city (or county)

[zacherates]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion

[quanto]

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).

[Jabbles]

Sounds like certain videos about historical trivia start trending and your colleague watches them before you do.

[t_mann]

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.

[fwip]

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.

[gandalfian]

Hypothetically there is a common root source further back from your friend. IE a new book/documentary has people talking and the general buzz triggered both your friend to comment and Google independent of each other.

[briga]

Have you used his Chromecast or connected to his wifi? I’ve noticed lots of misdirected targeted ads after doing this

[treeman79]

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.

[FlacoJones]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion

[entropicgravity]

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.

[GenerocUsername]

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

[happy-go-lucky]

They must have signed in to YouTube with their Google Account and you may be one of their Contacts. Just a wild guess.