iPhone listening / security

[Serenitespring]

Is it coincidental that after I have been talking to someone that I get advertising about it on my phone? Something weird happened this morning however.

An example of this was recently I was talking about a particular gym and then, having not googled it or looked it up, I got adverts for it on my feed. This has happened with hotels too.

So this morning I was standing next to someone talking professionally about something. After he left I looked on Google maps to see where the closest supermarket was to grab a snack.

On my Google maps came up an address - a residential address.

Showing a home location. The location is exactly where this persons accent is from. Is it possible that my phone has ‘talked’ to his an obtained his home address. I have not been anywhere near this location.

Am slightly freaked out and wondering if my phone is doing this or is this not possible and it’s just a weird coincidence that Google maps brought up a house exactly where his accent is from - we’re rural and very easy to pin down an accent.

Yes & no

Adverts relating to conversations can be entirely coincidental. We notice patterns and ignore the lack of a pattern.
An advert could be entirely random and on occasion could coincide with a conversation or what you’re thinking of
Targeted adversing will still produce randoms based on your general history, but at an increased chance of coincindence as opposed to total randomness

If you use Siri etc then even when it’s not officially listening it’s still listening in case you say ‘Siri’ to activate it
There are many anecdotes that advertising etc seem to be picking these up which may or may not be coincidence

I’m inclined to say that the accent and location are coincidental.
Location services often do go wrong, they pull information from your IP address and can fail by giving your network providers location details. With WiFi and 3g you can get different results from different systems even with the same IP address looked up on different pages

nordvpn.com/what-is-my-ip/
My Virgin WiFi shows the right town
My O2 3g says London

www.iplocation.net
3g says Loughborough
back to WiFi and I’m in Seacroft, but double checking NordVPN still gives the right town for WiFi

NordVPN may have better access to data from Virgin on hub IP ranges, or their systems may supplement other sources for correction

A few years ago I was at the UK round of an international championship in an Essex field, the event provided WiFi and all my photos of it are GeoTagged to Germany

Google maps will try to balance what it can find such as your IP and other geo location data on your phone, and may try to correct from recent movement results, and technology always has mistakes

That’s interesting thank you so much for your considered response.
I’m still not sure what happened and how my colleagues home address transferred onto my Google maps app 🤷‍♀️ weird