I'm nowhere near California, but when I type "Paso" on Google, I also get Paso Robles as the first option. Unless...Google knew I was reading this thread and knew I would try looking it up.
they do if you use a gmail/google account for those devices. i was surprised to see my youtube history from my pc, even though i don't have a youtube account, appear on my phone. need to set the privacy settings in gmail/google account to not track your cookies or something like that.
Your devices always with you? They see and hear everything with those mics and camera. They know you better than anyone could. They are there to serve you.
Google allegedly does not store search history based on IP (if you're not logged in). This is a very broad statement. There are many different ways you could be targeted: Someone else is logged into google and associates your device to the IP, thus pushing AD content Google stores IP metadata for ad's and marketing spyware I wouldn't put it past developers, but they could use your mic to collect keywords for ad purposes.
I was eating pita chips the other day and never said to anyone what I was eating and honestly could not have told you the brand if anyone asked. Then I logged into facebook right after and there was an ad for the exact same brand of pita chips. I recognized the bag. My thoughts for that was that Kroger sells the shopping data from your rewards account. Otherwise, my phone was watching me and I would rather not think that.
All of the major search engines have the capacity to use artificial intelligence (I use the term broadly, for those who are more technical, Recurrent/Convolutional Neural Networks) to process audio at production scale (i.e to listen in to spoken commands in millions of instances, even in circumstances with muddied audio). I'm more familiar with Baidu's work: http://usa.baidu.com/deep-speech-lessons-from-deep-learning/ but from an end user perspective you can see the results through dictation to Siri, or Google Search through microphone. Their inability to listen in on conversations would be a legal and infrastructure matter, not strictly per say a technical one. I highly doubt they'd have the scale of computing resources to dedicate those resources to every user, but I would say that assuming away legal and computing resources, everything is there for the search engines to listen in on your conversations. However, most of the "tracking" described here can be ascribed to more conventional technologies. Don't know if that makes it less creepy. Off the top of my head: A lot of data holders sell their data to third-party data brokers. While your "personally identifiable information" is stripped away, it is in theory entirely possible to target a group of people who have bought a certain brand of clothing or food. Websites will use tracking cookies to do what is called "retargeting" people who have visited their website. While there's an expiry for how long the cookie itself lasts (I believe there are very specific privacy laws governing this), previous audiences could be saved, in theory, for years and could be targeted at any time. Your location metadata is the easiest to obtain. Every time you make a GET or POST HTTP request (basically any time you access the Internet), your IP address, and the city/country of that IP address are logged. If anybody wanted to get even more granular and find your exact location within a city, well, if your account were linked to a particular cellular device, you could be pinged through the cellular tower you're relaying communications to, GPS (if you have it turned on), or nearby Wi-Fi networks. Here's an explanation of how Google Maps could map you inside using Wifi. http://newaer.com/indoor-mapping-via-wifi-from-google-maps/ Hopefully, I made this even creepier.
Knowing Google, they will soon use this to track even your most minute intentions. <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/0QNiZfSsPc0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> (cool tech nevertheless)
