Why do you think it's windows10? it might have been vlc as well.

No. You're being paranoid. Alternatively Youtube noticed that you downloaded that podcast somehow because lots of web sites send enough tracking information to Google for them to know that, then went "other people who saw this podcast liked..." or something, or it just happens to be a popular song right now.  The technology for what you're proposing literally doesn't exist, and if it did exist everyone would know because Windows would be uploading huge amounts of data all the time.

While Windows 10 isn't super good with privacy, to think that you found something that the tens of thousands of privacy/security researchers not affiliated with Microsoft haven't noticed is kind of silly, and as someone who should know I can also confirm that your proposal isn't possible anyway for "Ai is super expensive" reasons.

Also Microsoft and Google are competitors and if Microsoft has that data they're not giving it to Google, so even if this were possible and actually happening, Youtube having that data is also not going to happen anyway.

more likely you're not running an ad blocker and downloaded it via a browser, or VLC is sharing data on what you listen to (which I didn't think they do, but eh).  but my money is on popular song and coincidence with someone who is seemingly ready to jump at conspiracy theory type ideas ready to make something more of it.

reason number 451321 people should be using Brave. Cross-tracking disabled. Mozilla-approved. Chromium-based, so it's just as accesible as Chrome.
https://brave.com/jac065

Hi.

I tried Brave today and am just used to Firefox.

Braves site says it's faster but I don't notice it so am sticking with Firefox.

@9
You should learn about how probability works, and confirmation bias, and things like that.  If I want to find a coincidence that's as bad as this one, I could manage to do so at least once a week, possibly as much as once a day.

It is literally impossible for Microsoft to run speech recognition on your machine without people knowing because this eats a large amount of CPU resources.  It is literally impossible for Microsoft to ship the audio somewhere else and do it themselves without using large amounts of network bandwidth.  When I say literally impossible I mean not allowed by the laws of physics themselves impossible.

Microsoft can use CPU resources without you knowing if and only if they have secret partnerships with enough chip providers that when a security researcher plays around with Windows they'll reliably happen to be on a motherboard Microsoft has secret control of, and even then you could still just measure the heat or power consumption and know something odd is going on that way, which means that Microsoft would also have to have a secret relationship with god or something so they could get exceptions to the laws of thermodynamics to stop everyone from noticing that hey, that's funny, Windows is using resources that it doesn't report and this hardware won't report it to us either.

Microsoft can only ship data off device without someone knowing if they have hardware-level agreements with just as many routers, except again you can just measure the radiation from the wi-fi card directly or literally solder measurement devices directly into the ethernet cable, so again Microsoft also needs a relationship with physics god to get an exception to needing to use electrons to send information.

And hey, even if Microsoft somehow has god-level access to the universe itself, that still doesn't explain how Google got the data.  Google is a direct competitor in the browser market, the laptop market, and the cloud computing market.  They've also been a direct competitor in the phone market, at least until Microsoft stopped caraing about Windows Phone, and are still a direct competitor in the VR market as well.  Also let's not forget being direct competitors in the search engine market, somewhat competitors in the ad market,

So if Microsoft is doing what you have decided Microsoft is doing they are a magical company that can change the laws of physics themselves who is also interested in handing data over to competitors.  Both are silly, but frankly, if I was a magical company that could change the laws of physics themselves I doubt I'd care about such petty things as money, I'd probably just go "okay now the world is an amazing place to live, everlasting happiness forever" or something.

Point being develop some critical thinking skills and stop freaking out because Youtube worked out that you're the kind of person who would be adjacent to those songs in their machine learning clustering algorithm, probably off something simple like your Google search history or something like that, and be aware that if you continue this many of us are probably going to laugh you out of the room because while Windows 10 isn't great at privacy, it's not violate-the-laws-of-physics bad at privacy either.

Definitely not gonna just chalk this up to coincidence here, that's definitely weird. This doesn't happen to me too often but sometimes it does and it weirds me out for a few seconds. I could be talking to someone about something and get a youtube video relating to it. This actually happened a lot more on my macbook than it has on either my desktop or new laptop, since Apple wants to act like they're for privacy but castrated ad blockers in Safari a year and some change ago.. But I use LTSC on all my windows machines. Google is your friend.

Well now!  This is a refreshing thread?  Let's see here...
My microwave quit working at 10 minutes though I set it for 15; do you think Hamilton Beach secretly knew I'd get angry if it did?  I mean, I've cooked stuff for 15 minutes before... Surely it has a mic in it, somewhere... Where would you go to hide a mic on such a bulky device?
Also, there's this shrub that feels like it smacks me almost every single time I walk toward the mailbox, but doesn't smack me on the way back... I wonder what it's real agenda is?  Is it greeting me, then discovering I won't greet it in return?  Could it be that thing has a proximity sensor and isn't really a shrub?  Possibly it's smacking me because I get too close to the sensor on the way to the mailbox but not on the way back?
I've also noticed there's a neighbor who decides for whatever odd reason that whenever I'm going to take out a sizable bag of trash to the dumpsters, will park near them, practically blocking my way to it.  Do you think they've managed to somehow weasel their way into my audio interface and just walk out there before I happen to get to the dumpster?
I have a cat that always starts needing at my leg, just as I'm getting ready to type a post like this one or do anything else that I find interesting.  Is it possible she's somehow accessed Microsoft's Godbase or whatever weapon they're wielding to use to her advantage?  She seriously messes things up just as they're getting good... I'm sure my kids are in on this one too, now I think of it!  Particularly the youngest one!  She's only now getting ready to turn a year old, but I kid you not she gets up hear and trys to take my keyboard away from me!  FORCEFULLY!  What on earth are we feeding our children?  What kind of products are MS, google and Apple secretly cooking up in their labs and how many of them are being secretly injected into our world's fastfood chains!

@14 Dude, stop.

I hate chrome. Firstly it's owned by Google and Google collects all kinds of data. Yeah I get that's ironic I say that because I use windows 10, however I use LTSC and strip the hell out of it. Secondly it loves to smother your RAM. I know there are several people in less than fortunate circumstances who can personally attest to this. Meanwhile I'm sitting here typing this on a laptop with 32 gb of RAM, more than my custom built desktop has. Firefox is just better anyways. I still have Chrome for some random apps that require it but that's about it. And ever since I was able to start paying for a malwarebytes subscription, I never had problems with malware fucking up my windows installation again. Only things I had to deal with were false positives. Now if I could just find an accessible backup solution that worked as good and seemlessly as Mac's Time machine did...

am I the only one who accepts that google knows everything about me? I mean, that's the price I pay for convenience I guess...

Youtube does go through your browsing history, as does any other site nowadays so it could have seen the site you visited to download the podcast. Many podcasts do have summary information included so if they wrote about these songs in their show notes, Youtube could have just scraped it.

As for things popping up that you happened to talk about, the same thing has happened to me and it's one reason I got rid of Facebook so long ago. Everything, including Windows 10, has the ability to listen to your mics and stuff like that so I'm hesitant to say that this is coincidental. And they don't even need to send too much data to make this happen.

Now, whether Windows 10 is actually responsible here, there's no real way to tell. My first thought would be that Youtube itself gathered that information based on the podcast site you visited and all that.

Also, I also disabled Cortana in group policy editor, but notice that the process is still running.

Okay, look, guys.  It costs a ridiculous amount of money to do speech recognition at scale reliably, and even when they do it can't reliably detect what you're saying when you speak clearly in a quiet room to your Google Home or whatever.  And we can barely build a reliable barcode scanner app that doesn't need to be lined up perfectly, and barcodes are *explicitly* designed to be scanned.

Yes Facebook, Apple, etc. share data with other parties to some extent.  Yes Google pays people to be the default search engine. But scraping your camera and microphone all the time to go get fed to some magic AI overlord, that's silly.  And you couldn't keep it secret either, since if you could do it you'd need to basically double Google's computing power, which means someone having as many datacenters as Google and no one knows what they're for, and you just can't hide a bunch of gigantic mysterious buildings that eat power and network bandwidth like candy to secretly run the AI mastermind overlord data consume-o-matic 10000.

Plus if we had that tech we'd put it in the Google Home or something and sell it to you for a low monthly fee of $4.99 and make more money than scraping your data for ads anyway since honestly how many of us wouldn't pay for something that could just always understand us no matter what, including the context of what we're doing, and be able to answer our questions perfectly or something?  Come on.  It's ridiculously paranoid to decide that this tech exists while somehow being secret and also we only use it for ads and Youtube recommendations without telling you, especially when they can do the same thing by just looking at your search history.

Even if it only sends a little bit of data, people can both see and intercept it, and we'd know, unless you also want to propose that it has some sort of magic 100% effective "I have detected the person holding this device is a security researcher" tech?  perhaps by doing facial recognition against a database of known security researchers?  Or maybe it uses the wi-fi card to detect your brain waves to tell if you're thinking about security, perhaps?  O I know, it can use the accelerometer to tell that you're nervous and the embedded black hole in every iPhone to edit the past to remove any data it might have sent an hour ago from your network logs!  Yay!

But seriously, if things were as bad as this there is literally nothing you can do ever, not even uninstalling apps, not even getting rid of your phone and all your electronics because your neighbor has some, and don't forget about the weather satellites...it's ridiculous to think this.  They share browser history, and app history sometimes, and sometimes your apps will share some data, but it's not just listening and watching what you do and somehow detecting things from that, because seriously that doesn't exist right now and probably won't for another 5 years, and when it does exist they're not able to do it in secret without editing the laws of physics to do it, so come on people.  Critical. Thinking. Skills.  And I think some of you are even programmers as well, which is extra disappointing, especially you Munawar, given that you've been programming for a long time and should understand the absurdity.

Even Chinese surveillance isn't secret, in the sense that everyone knows what exactly they do to phones and you can find documentation of it if you look around, and the reason they get away with it is they flat out let citizens know they do it and pass laws that makes it illegal to circumvent.  So: even a giant government with a vested interest in having this tech and not telling anyone doesn't have this tech.  And when they do have this tech (which everyone knows about) it likes to just have all sorts of false positives and ban things and stuff because doing this reliably can't be done, sorry, it just can't.

And a VPN doesn't protect you either, which if you did your homework on how the tracking that exists actually works, you'd know. It's actually done off cookies and things in the browser, not your IP address, and all a VPN does is puts one more party in the mix, except this time you explicitly gave them permission to analyze all your network traffic if they want and installed their spyware on your machine to send them a 100% accurate copy.  IP addresses haven't been a reliable way to track users in years.

Yes, you're tracked, but none of it is secret and what is being proposed on this thread is well outside the realm of current technology, and since it is literally impossible to make any of this secret and keep it that way for any real length of time, you'd know about it almost immediately if it started happening anyway. So it is ridiculous, and if you stopped to analyze your thinking rather than let paranoia run away with you, you could go become educated as to why or even reason it out yourself without having to learn anything.  The only remotely complicated part to understand is how SSL protects you from letting the ISP see your traffic, but even that's not that hard since anyone who has even vaguely heard the word cryptography can understand what it's for and even a little bit of how it works in 20 minutes.