Not my title! I do think we are being listened to. And location tracked. And it’s being passed on to advertisers. Is it apple though? Probably not is my take away from this article, but I don’t trust plenty of others, and apple still does
One of my weirder hobbies is trying to convince people that the idea that companies are listening to you through your phone’s microphone and serving you targeted ads is a conspiracy theory that isn’t true.
ARS said, that reuters said, that users said.
Someone needs a new hobby. “Proof” from 3 layers of journalists interpreting a case that they themself said never went to court. Trying to use evidence of absence as proof will never win any hearts in a debate.
I didn’t seriously believe it happened either for quite some time because confirmation bias is a bitch. But I’ve seen it happen a few times where it would have to be a seriously unlikely coincidence.
If it was searched for in Google, Facebook, apple, or whatever sure
If it was correlated with locality and time, sure.
You can infer a lot from a few searches but there are times where nothing was searched for and a novel concept came out of conversation and book there’s ads and search completion for it.
Maybe, just maybe, someone settling a lawsuit without being found guilty, doesn’t ACTUALLY mean they’re innocent.
Quick experiment. If you don’t own a dog or a cat, talk about buying dog or cat food a couple times today.
about buying dog or cat food a couple times today.
I have both, also, if it’s real, you’d have to match up with an advertiser that really wants your profile.
I search for crap all the time but don’t get ads most of the time, then one time, I look up this one kaz air filter and get nothing but ads for it for a week. hundreds of home depot ads.
I love how having both a dog and a cat is somehow dismissive
My big problem isn’t with the concept I could talk about buying parrot food.
But there has to be a vendor out there that says hey whoever I’m buying this data from, I need to put an ad in front of parrot owners.
These are going to be very high cost ads, so whatever products they’re going to sell you probably have a respectable profit margin or respectable expected lifetime value.
Trying to trigger it on purpose, without any idea of who’s advertising or for what is somewhat of a fool’s errand.
How many dog and cat owners are out there anyway? Dozens perhaps.
I talk to my father on the phone.
We finish.
I receive ads for a very specific thing that we talked about that I’ve never ever looked up.
Same thing with my therapist.
We talk. I receive highly specific ads.
Perhaps they track who you talk to and show you ads that are relevant to those people, or their best guess based on two profiles.
I don’t think there’s a data center out there with a live audio stream of literally billions of always-on devices 24/7/365.
Perhaps there’s some local processing first, but devices have permissions for apps, and lights that indicate the mic/camera is in use.
I figure someone would have figured it out by now (reverse engineering, decompiling code), or someone from Google/Apple/Samsung would have leaked it if it were true. Think of the number of people required to keep this secret.
And yet my android phone is able to detect what song is playing 24x7 without being a noticeable drain on the battery or using extra data. Doesn’t seem far fetched to be able to do keyword spotting under the same constraints.
Here’s one example of a company getting caught: https://m.economictimes.com/news/international/us/next-time-you-talk-on-your-phone-be-careful-facebook-and-google-are-listening-to-your-conversations/articleshow/113071827.cms
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