HACKER Q&A
📣 thisismyfakeacc

Does Chrome Listen to the Videos?


Today I was watching the Lex Friedman podcast on Youtube with Hikaru Nakamura who mentions that hey plays Geometry Dash. A few seconds after, I paused the video and opened a new Chrome tab and typed "geo". Search suggestion in the address bar was Geometry dash.

Same thing when I was watching some tv show on CraveTV where they character said that an assailant used "wifi circuit breakers". Auto complete/suggestion for "wifi" in my address bar was "wifi circuit breakers"

I know search suggestions are enhanced by recency of something you were browsing but not entirely sure how this is possible based on contents of a video that is being played.

Now, I don't think Chrome can actually listen to audio, process it in real time and all that, but in both cases Youtube and CraveTV had/has subtitles in the video player which are just text files.

This comes off a bit tin foil hatty so I made a different account but not really sure how the auto complete for "wifi" and "geo" could literally be what I was looking for which is rare (at least in the case of wifi circuit breakers..)


  👤 version_five Accepted Answer ✓
Could there be some metadata that it's using?

Otoh, I know there was come controversy because Samsung was taking screenshots from people's TVs and using them to target advertising, so it's not unprecedented