[parksy]

Telemetry is the catch-all phrase used to describe data captured about a device. Telemetry servers combine this information to build profiles on users. Network models of relationships between devices and user behaviours are used in recommendation engines including autocomplete results.

If you are in the same room as a cohort of people, if one or more people had been searching or messaging the X & Y Smiths, then by geolocation since you all attend the same church, you're associated as potentially interested, especially considering you already had their details saved.

There are also fuzzy logic factors, like maybe those three letters weren't in their name but were in their phone number (each number corresponds to several alphabet characters), or might have been in a message you've long since deleted but is still in your autocomplete index which combined with the geolocation weighting could have caused it to pop up as an option.

In these instances it might appear your phone is listening, but you were in the same room as some people who were probably also interested in that family, had their data in your history, and being a new connection could have boosted its relevance too. (I just saw someone else also answered that you probably only noticed this event because of the conversation, or the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon, which is also plausible)

Not saying definitively that your phone was not covertly listening but our devices are capturing and correlating a massive amount of dimensions related to our behaviours at all times, so it's not beyond reason that enough of these factors lined up to cause the autocomplete engine to suggest it as a reasonable option.

[MobileVet]

I could definitely believe it was deep telemetry as the intended message recipient did have proximity to the unexpected 'match' earlier in the day. I am 99% sure they hadn't swapped contacts though, so it wouldn't be as easy as a matched contact connection.

Interesting idea about the mapping of numbers to letters, oh how I miss 800-call-sal advertisements.

[parksy]

I was reaching on the mapping of numbers to letters to be honest. If I were designing a system to track and corelate everything I'd take it into account since it's still in use, but yeah that was a definite stretch in this case.

But I am pretty sure this was just a proximity match. When you're dealing with the quantity of telemetry the big players deal with, you're talking billions of people in real-time all day long, then how do you figure out what's relevant and what isn't?

Physical proximity is important. You don't have to swap contacts with someone for your telemetry to connect you with them. I mean you were right next to someone who was right next to them, out of billions of people you're relevant, so no one needs to share contact details. The manufacturer of the phone knows your geolocation. Your telecom company knows your geolocation. If you have bluetooth or wifi switched on and you're already fingerprinted, then every chain store knows your geolocation. If you use a credit card or eftpos card anywhere, the products you purchase are combined into your profile, etc etc.

That and you already had them in your contact list (even though you were surprised they were, you're not saying they weren't, I have people in my contact list from 15 years ago I only spoke with one time...), they already know that you've bumped into this contact before in the past, and boost the recommendation because you shared the contact and the geospatial relevance in a short period of time.

Like I'm pretty cynical and suspicious at the best of times, but once I started to realise the above, all my "oh shit they're listening" moments kind of dissolved because I could trace all of them back to being in the same room as someone who had met a person, or had been actively searching a related topic in the past few days.

Yeah it's still spooky, it's the reason I run a pi-hole, and got myself off most social media.

Also I noticed this thread got flagged. Not sure exactly why but I think it's because this same subject has come up a few times. I do think people need to better understand how network analysis can reveal spooky shit about our behaviours, like our devices don't need to be literally listening to our words in order for corporations and governments to know exactly who we are or what we're about. There's tons of different signals we all send out each day that fingerprint exactly who we are, who we're related to, and what we care about, they don't need realtime voice processing.

[MobileVet]

Yea, I understood the number mapping was a stretch... just a fun memory.

Thanks for laying out a very plausible case for how this match could occur without actually listening to the ambient conversation.

I also run a pi-hole at home and almost never visit social media. Frankly I am surprised it took this long for people to understand how giving up their privacy had a cost, I was hoping the backlash against Facebook et al was going to start a decade ago.