(I know many of you already know it but this incident I experienced made me so paranoid about using smartphones)

To start off, I’m not that deep into privacy rabbit hole but I do as much I can possibly to be private on my phone. But for the rest of phones in my family, I generally don’t care because they are not tech savvy and pushing them towards privacy would make their lives hard.

So, the other day I pirated a movie for my family and since it was on Netflix, it was a direct rip with full HD. I was explaining to my family how this looks so good as this is an direct rip off from the Netflix platform, and not a recording of a screening in a cinema hall(camrip). It was a small 2min discussion in my native language with only English words used are record, piracy and Netflix.

Later I walk off and open YouTube, and I see a 2 recommendations pop-up on my homepage, “How to record Netflix shows” & “Why can’t you screen record Netflix”. THE WHAT NOW. I felt insanely insecure as I was sure never in my life I looked this shit up and it was purely based on those words I just spoke 5min back.

I am pretty secure on my device afaik and pretty sure all the listening happened on other devices in my family. Later that day, I went and saw which all apps had microphone access, moved most of them to Ask everytime and disabled Google app which literally has all the permissions enabled.

Overall a scary and saddening experience as this might be happening to almost everyone and made me feel it the journey I took to privacy-focused, all worth it.

  • Matt
    42·
    2 months ago

    Root your phone and degoogle it if it doesn’t have LineageOS image. If it does have LineageOS image, then flash it. Oh, and don’t use Google and YouTube. Use Brave/Vivaldi for web search and Tubular for YouTube.

    • foremanguy
      3·
      2 months ago

      I’ve seen a lot of people using Vivaldi as “private” browser. What is the point here?

      • Matt
        1·
        2 months ago

        Because it’s one of the few browsers on Android that allow you to put your address bar down

          • Matt
            1·
            2 months ago

            Firefox is okay but most websites break on it.

              • Matt
                2·
                2 months ago

                I had uBO and Dark Reader installed.

                • QuazarOmega@lemy.lol
                  2·
                  2 months ago

                  Those 2 might very well cause issues sometimes, you should try and fiddle around with their settings on the websites that complain, or outright whitelist them if nothing works and you want to use them, other times it really is the browser or even more often an artificial check of the user agent string (dick move on the dev’s side), so if you spoof a Chromium browser it’ll start working right away

              • Matt
                1·
                1 month ago

                I meant on mobile. It’s the reason why I use Vivaldi on Android.

                • QuazarOmega@lemy.lol
                  1·
                  1 month ago

                  Still personally I’ve had very very few ones breaking, but I guess it depends on our browsing habits what we use the most. A report broken site function exists on desktop, but I think it’s still missing from mobile

            • foremanguy
              2·
              2 months ago

              I don’t see any main website being broken due to firefox