Ask HN: How can this happen without the phone covertly listening?
Telemetry is the catch-all phrase used to describe data captured about a device. 
 Telemetry servers combine this information to build profiles on users. Network models of relationships between devices and user behaviours are used in recommendation engines including autocomplete results.<p>If you are in the same room as a cohort of people, if one or more people had been searching or messaging the X &amp; Y Smiths, then by geolocation since you all attend the same church, you&#x27;re associated as potentially interested, especially considering you already had their details saved.<p>There are also fuzzy logic factors, like maybe those three letters weren&#x27;t in their name but were in their phone number (each number corresponds to several alphabet characters), or might have been in a message you&#x27;ve long since deleted but is still in your autocomplete index which combined with the geolocation weighting could have caused it to pop up as an option.<p>In these instances it might appear your phone is listening, but you were in the same room as some people who were probably also interested in that family, had their data in your history, and being a new connection could have boosted its relevance too. (I just saw someone else also answered that you probably only noticed this event because of the conversation, or the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon, which is also plausible)<p>Not saying definitively that your phone was not covertly listening but our devices are capturing and correlating a massive amount of dimensions related to our behaviours at all times, so it&#x27;s not beyond reason that enough of these factors lined up to cause the autocomplete engine to suggest it as a reasonable option.