241–250 of 336 posts
This partly explains why the recommendations I receive don't feel like mine. Multiple times, it's been obvious that the suggestions were pulled from other profiles and I could even tell whose. My hypothesis * The algorithms have linked my account to some others. * They then serve me the embeddings extracted from those profiles. The near-real-time nature of this has crossed my mind more than once. It's really unsettli…
At one of my previous companies we made a moderately popular mobile app SDK that app developers would embed in their apps. We were approached by a company that claimed they had a MIT developed (or was it Bell Labs?) audio recognition technology similar to Shazam, but orders of magnitude more efficient, that would be used to recognize audio from ads and record when a user was exposed to a TV or radio ad for tracking p…
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There is so much time spent “debunking” audio recordings being shared with various entities it makes me more suspicious. Just like Facebook’s “we never sell your data (we just stalk you and sell ads using your data)”. I’m sure there’s a similar weasel excuse… “we never listen to your audio (but we do analyze it to improve quality assurance)”
There is a small list of reasons why it needs to be "debunked:" 1. Your phone is gathering data that you don't realize that it gathers. One of the biggest examples of this is real-time location data that is brokered by cellular carriers and sold as aggregated marketing data. You don't have to give your apps permission to do anything like that because your cellular carrier can get that data regardless of your phone's…
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> There is so much time spent “debunking” audio recordings being shared Not really. 99% of the time it's someone claiming that it happens. And it's always an anecdote, never clear proof that it happened. Let alone that it happened because of the audio and not web activity. And that the conversation was actually the cause for the ad and not the other way around. Is it technically possible? Sure. But if so many people…
Here is an example that just happened today. I talked to my partner about me going to a city directly (via one state) or indirectly (via another state). All I said was "so you want me to go directly to X". Boom, Illinois tourism ad shows up the next time I hit the internet. Scary thing is I didn't even say the state name, just the destination, and SOMETHING calculated that Illinois is in the middle. This stuff has no…
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Same with drivers licenses and passports having a photo requirement too
>drivers licenses and passports having a photo requirement too You're free to take the bus, or hire a chauffeur. A private pilots license doesn't have any pictures either.
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> There is so much time spent “debunking” audio recordings being shared Not really. 99% of the time it's someone claiming that it happens. And it's always an anecdote, never clear proof that it happened. Let alone that it happened because of the audio and not web activity. And that the conversation was actually the cause for the ad and not the other way around. Is it technically possible? Sure. But if so many people…
Here is an example that just happened today. I talked to my partner about me going to a city directly (via one state) or indirectly (via another state). All I said was "so you want me to go directly to X". Boom, Illinois tourism ad shows up the next time I hit the internet. Scary thing is I didn't even say the state name, just the destination, and SOMETHING calculated that Illinois is in the middle. This stuff has no…
This would simply eat the battery immediately, it's simply not feasible and given all the other, cheap tracking it wouldn't even be beneficial.
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There is so much time spent “debunking” audio recordings being shared with various entities it makes me more suspicious. Just like Facebook’s “we never sell your data (we just stalk you and sell ads using your data)”. I’m sure there’s a similar weasel excuse… “we never listen to your audio (but we do analyze it to improve quality assurance)”
I can just say that I knew an entrepreneur in early post Y2K who developed apps to track music played in clubs in SF for folks like ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC. They gave out "free" phones (these were the small expensive candybars and nice flip/slideups) to the influencers of the day. They compressed the audio for orthogonality, and had a huge number of hashes to match. If they got more than a few consecutive matching hash…
Also, "Siri" and the like ends up waking the main processor, which is definitely easy to prove/disprove. Just talk to your phone continuously for a long time and see if it wakes.
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I can just say that I knew an entrepreneur in early post Y2K who developed apps to track music played in clubs in SF for folks like ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC. They gave out "free" phones (these were the small expensive candybars and nice flip/slideups) to the influencers of the day. They compressed the audio for orthogonality, and had a huge number of hashes to match. If they got more than a few consecutive matching hash…
What kind of keywords would you imagine provide an actual, profitable advantage to an ad company? I can't imagine "computer 2", "fridge 3", "egg 4" being all that valuable compared to.. literally my whole browser history and my reaction to other ads/videos (I looked at that short for 10s vs immediately skipping builds a very nice profile). And now add i18n in the picture - even the main AI assistant products suck in…
Another thing to consider is that we should never fall into the trap of thinking we are immune from influence from advertisers. Firstly, it's basically what advertiser want; it allows more actions like this, more of our data to be sold and secondly because it's easier to influence someone if they think of a decision as their own choice, than if they think they were manipulated into it. We do not remember the ads we see but we can remember that we are all susceptible to influence.
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> The phone is listening. Services like Shazam and Alphonso are constantly fingerprinting audio from the mics and sending these fingerprints up for "matching". Could you please provide a source for this? Just on the outset this sounds pretty wild if true. In the settings I do not see any permissions associated with Shazam, and only when I open it do I see the usual microphone indicator light up. I will say though, it…
Pixel phones have a built in background audio fingerprinting service called "Now Playing" which can operate constantly. Shazam has an "auto shazam" feature you can enable for constant background listening, since 2016 at least! But look into Alphonso. That's like Shazam but explicitly for covert "content recognition" listening in microphone enabled apps. And it's old. People who say it's too expensive or impractical t…
That's interesting. Although can and does are very different things - appears to be a feature you turn on yourself. Upon a surface level research, I also found it to rely on an offline music fingerprint database, suggesting it doesn't retain and send off the audio it records, or metadata it extracted from them.
> Shazam has an "auto shazam" feature you can enable for constant background listening, since 2016 at least!
This is again a can vs. does difference.