scarily... They don't need to to be this creepy, but even I'm a tad baffled by this.
Yesterday me and a few friends were at a pub quiz, of course no phones allowed, so none were used.
It came down to a tie break question of my team and another. "What is the run time of the Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the ring" according to IMDb.
We answered and went about our day. Today my friend from my team messaged me - top post on his "today feed" is an article published 23 hours ago.....
Forgive the pointless red circle.... I didnt take the screenshot.
My friend isn't a privacy conscience person by any means, but he didnt open IMDb or google anything to do with the franchise and hasn't for many months prior. I'm aware its most likely an incredible coincidence, but when stuff like this happens I can easily understand why many people are convinced everyone's doom brick is listening to them....
The person asking the trivia question needed to know the answer, so they could determine who was correct.
Phones, as I understand them, average about 30 pings per second. That's 30 times per second the phone is checking for signal strength with the nearest tower, among other data.
They also work with any device that has wifi or bluetooth to help with location triangulation. So anyone at trivia that had their phone on them and powered, had their position noted as well as their proximity to others. If the location has smart TV's on the walls, those were picking up the pings as well. If they have internet available to customers, there's another point picking up the info.
It's already been shown that a few companies have listened to microphones. The data being extrapolated is so large, listening to the microphone would be counterproductive and redundant. There are devices everywhere, security cameras, billboards, inside each row of shelves at your grocery store, in every car that has a computer, lights at intersections, smart watches and other IOT devices, even appliances these days have wifi and bluetooth like refridgerators, coffee pots, robot vacuums, treadmills, i could go on.
It's scary that some company might be listening to your through your phones microphone but the real scary thing is that they don't need to. They knew people at that trivia game would be searching for that answer before the question was even asked, without needing to listen in.