[xfour]

Can anyone (perhaps a former employee) confirm this behavior. I can’t tell if I’m imaging connections or the words spoken are being ingested by the ad machine.

It seems like a huge overreach to be listening, the microphone privilege I could see being abused for this, but it just seems so wrong.

[unrequited]

Yes, it happens way too often to be a coincidence. I talk about different topics with friends, they end up on my Youtube feed, not sure how. But I use iphone and a mac though.

[halkony]

Google can reasonably infer people that live together based on billing addresses, location, etc. If your roommates pay particular attention to certain media (a video, a song, etc), it's more likely to show up on your recommended media.

In this post, chances are that Google classed each user as being socially close and based its recommendations on that. It's uncanny, but with how much Google data has, eavesdropping is unnecessary for this use case.