Can my sonos speaker hear me??

[Anonymous]

We have sonos speakers in our house. We have purposefully avoided voice activated devices to date, but we really needed a soundbar for our tv - and since we already had sonos in the house, AND I preferred the newest sonos soundbar features (only soundbar that has hdmi aux, so works with your regular remote) so we got the newest soundbar. Which happens to have alexa on it.

When we set it up, we skipped the step to set up an alexa account.

We hang out in front of that tv a lot, with our home laptops and other devices.

Twice in the last week, weird coincidences have happened. For instance, a couple nights ago I was watching the pbs business news on the tv and there was a 2 minute story about Proctor & Gamble announcing very good financial results. They mentioned "P&G" a ton of times. Later that evening, I was surfing on my mac laptop, and I get a sidebar cookie ad for P&G (I think it had a big P&G logo and three household products, including Tide).

I spend a ton of time surfing the web, and regularly get cookie ads for stuff I recently looked at - jcrew ads, amazon ads, etc. So i'm used to very targeted ads. But the P&G ad seemed to be not based on a web search, but on audio that played in the room. Our mac devices are logged into sonos. Is it possible my sonos speaker (or some other device - iPhone? ipad?) picked up this audio and somehow connected to my mac? Or is this just a total coincidence? What the heck???

[Anonymous]

The answer is yes. Ask your Sonos and see what happens next.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:We have sonos speakers in our house. We have purposefully avoided voice activated devices to date, but we really needed a soundbar for our tv - and since we already had sonos in the house, AND I preferred the newest sonos soundbar features (only soundbar that has hdmi aux, so works with your regular remote) so we got the newest soundbar. Which happens to have alexa on it.

When we set it up, we skipped the step to set up an alexa account.

We hang out in front of that tv a lot, with our home laptops and other devices.

Twice in the last week, weird coincidences have happened. For instance, a couple nights ago I was watching the pbs business news on the tv and there was a 2 minute story about Proctor & Gamble announcing very good financial results. They mentioned "P&G" a ton of times. Later that evening, I was surfing on my mac laptop, and I get a sidebar cookie ad for P&G (I think it had a big P&G logo and three household products, including Tide).

I spend a ton of time surfing the web, and regularly get cookie ads for stuff I recently looked at - jcrew ads, amazon ads, etc. So i'm used to very targeted ads. But the P&G ad seemed to be not based on a web search, but on audio that played in the room. Our mac devices are logged into sonos. Is it possible my sonos speaker (or some other device - iPhone? ipad?) picked up this audio and somehow connected to my mac? Or is this just a total coincidence? What the heck???

If you don’t have Alexa enabled, the Sonos is a passive system that doesn’t listen.

[Anonymous]

I wondered the same of the phone but didn't consider the sonos. We discussed starting to look for appliances and before visiting sites or even googling any terms I had tons of appliance ads on the web and instagram.

[Anonymous]

Security dots and turn mic off when browsing. I do this in addition to clearing history and cache (more than I should have to). I'm a Blackberry Key 2 user. And all I can say after having BB operating system forever...f**k you Google/Chrome.