181–190 of 361 posts
My wife has a very new ( I sh_t you not. She was a bit gobsmacked. I was neither surprised nor disturbed. That's real anecdata, my friends. It could have been coincidence, and while we have nothing to hide, it's not an optimal situation, whatever the cause. Besides, we ain't buying no Gucci slippers, no way, no how.
What social media apps does she have installed? Just curious
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Why did they pick a swimming pool? Did they see people in their area installing pools? I think that's often people's best guess, is that the "random" thing people use to test this actually isn't random and subconsciously they already had this topic seeded to them.
Something similar -- while on a family visit at my parents' house, my brother was talking about his upcoming Hawaii trip, Specifically he was going over a snorkeling adventure he signed up for. For the next week or so, I got many ads on my phone about underwater packages for Hawaii, along with ads for various snorkeling and swimming gear. Now I had never researched any of that on my phone, however obviously my brothe…
It was impressively creepy and a good way of surprising her with something she hadn't said anything about but was considering buying.
We search for everything we talk about these days…our location services are always on. The times I’ve noticed this I can usually trace it back to a friend had been searching for something and then we (our phones) were in the same place. Even the guy from the lawsuit with the doctor… his phone knows he was at that doctor and that doctor offers that procedure. Seems possible without listening.
This is gaslighting. Even if it’s a coincidence, people have numerous examples of situations where they or anyone with them did not search for a thing. I’m not saying the only possible explanation is that the phone is spying on you - but I’m saying, don’t gaslight people and say “you probably searched about it and forgot”.
Every time I read some technical description about why this isn't happening, the technical description seems convincing. However... A friend tested the theory a few years ago. He doesn't own a swimming pool, doesn't want to, and has never expressed any desire to. He put his and his wife's phone on the table and said to the wife (loudly), "Why don't we look into pool fencing?". She agreed with him. Shortly after, on b…
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But if you're listening for 64, or even 1024 wake words, you won't get to the level of granularity people are claiming to observe, like in the other comment here where they tested "pool fencing". If you were putting together a list of 64 words, would you really include "pool fencing"?
Its an extreme low side estimate. And the chance that Pool OR Fencing is one is pretty high.
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Your phone can listen for “hey Google” because it’s only one phrase and the model can run at very low power on specialized hardware. If you want to add 1000 keywords the battery drain would be intense.
Pixel phones run song identification constantly now. They have a local database of the top 1000 (?) most popular songs. It has negligible impact on battery life. Not saying I agree that 'phones are listening to show us ads', but technically we have the capability for that to happen (sampling audio every X intervals and matching against a local database of keywords)
I think it is very easy to sneak a few (thousand) extra fingerprints in this database and do all kinds of tracking with it. All while the green microphone icon is disabled.
> ...they would need to be feeding those snippets in almost real time into a system which forwards them onto advertising partners who then feed that information into targeting networks... I think this is totally mistaken. An ad seller which also wants to respect privacy keeps this data in-house and does the ad targeting themselves. The advertiser never needs to see personal information for this kind of market to give…
We're specifically talking about Apple here, based on Siri wake words. Do you think Apple are running this kind ad of targeting?
And as we know from the lawsuit, it seems that there's been a lot of data gathered accidentally too.
They don't need to: they can read your mind. My proof? Yesterday I was driving home and I saw an old Toyota Previa minivan and thought to myself "Oh, a Previa, you don't see those very often these days." When I got home, I started scrolling through my Google News and it showed me an advert for the new Previa. I agree with Simon: you basically aren't going to convince someone that their phone doesn't listen to you and…
I think people are prone to believing that their phone is listening to them out of an instinct to believe they are a lot more unique than they actually are. A clash between western individualism and hyper-efficient consumerism. That's not me taking a stance on whether it's true, though. There would be a lot of fame in it for a whistleblower, but on the other hand if Google or Meta figured out a way to do it with a lo…