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I still don't think companies serve you ads based on your microphone

simonwillison.net

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Re: I still don't think companies serve you ads based on your microphone

#261

Post by darth_avocado »

simonw wrote: post #255
marcusverus wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) App stores the trailing two minutes of speech in memory. 2) If the app detects a consumption-related trigger word, the related conversation is flagged for transmission to the server. 3) Flagged audio block is converted to text. Consumption related verbs ("buy", "purchase", etc) are identified. The syntax of the sentence clearly indicates which noun is the target of a given consumption-related verb ("new car", "poo…

Where's the proof that this is happening? Lots of people run network traffic sniffers to see what apps are doing. Lots of people decompile apps. Lots of people at companies leak details of bad things they are doing. Why has nobody been able to demonstrate this beyond anecdotes about talking about swimming pools and then getting adverts for swimming pool stuff?

I have a suspicion it’s not Facebook or Google listening in, but rather other third party apps. In fact it’s not even the third party apps but the libraries/frameworks they use to show ads.

Re: I still don't think companies serve you ads based on your microphone

#262

Post by ComplexSystems »

simonw wrote: post #255
marcusverus wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) App stores the trailing two minutes of speech in memory. 2) If the app detects a consumption-related trigger word, the related conversation is flagged for transmission to the server. 3) Flagged audio block is converted to text. Consumption related verbs ("buy", "purchase", etc) are identified. The syntax of the sentence clearly indicates which noun is the target of a given consumption-related verb ("new car", "poo…

Where's the proof that this is happening? Lots of people run network traffic sniffers to see what apps are doing. Lots of people decompile apps. Lots of people at companies leak details of bad things they are doing. Why has nobody been able to demonstrate this beyond anecdotes about talking about swimming pools and then getting adverts for swimming pool stuff?

I can't even begin to tell you how many times I've been randomly having a conversation with someone, only to be alerted to the sound of the Google Assistant suddenly responding to what we're saying. Something we said was interpreted as a wake word, and then from that point on, every single thing we said was transcribed via STT, sent to Google's servers, various Google search queries were run, etc, and then the assistant responded - because it thought it was responding to a valid query and had no way of knowing otherwise. This has gotten worse with Gemini but has in no way been limited to that.

In this situation, I was alerted to this because the assistant started responding. However, I've also been in situations where I tried deliberately to talk to the assistant and it failed silently. In those situations, the UI spawns the Assistant interaction dialog, listens to what I say and then just silently closes. Sometimes this happens if there's too much background noise, for instance, and it then just re-evaluates that it wasn't a valid query at all and exits. Sometimes some background process may be frozen. Who knows if this happens before or after sending the data to the server. Sometimes the dialog lingers, waiting for the next input, and sometimes it just shuts off, leaving me (annoyingly) to have to reopen the dialog.

Putting that together, I have no idea how many times the Google Assistant has activated in my pocket, gone live, recorded stuff, sent it to Google's servers, realized it wasn't a valid query, and shut off without alerting me. I've certainly seen the Assistant dialog randomly open when looking at my phone plenty of times, which is usually a good indicator that such a thing has happened. If it silently fails in such a way that the UI doesn't respawn, then I would have no idea at all.

The net effect is that Google gets a random sample from billions of random conversations from millions of people every time this thing unintentionally goes off. They have a clear explanation as to why they got it and why ads are being served in response afterward. They can even make the case that the system is functioning as intended - after all, it'd be unreasonable to expect no false positives, or program bugs, or whatever, right? They can even say it's the user's fault and that they need to tune the voice model better.

Regardless, none of this changes the net result, which is they get a random sample of your conversation from time to time and are allowed to do whatever with it that they would have done if you sent it on purpose.

Re: I still don't think companies serve you ads based on your microphone

#263

Post by simonw »

ComplexSystems wrote: post #260
simonw wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The story here is about Apple paying a settlement because Siri was sending audio snippets surrounding invalid wake word activations back to their servers without users realizing it. In the story, there was an implication that these audio snippets had been used for targeted ads. This is very clearly not true. A separate issue is whether Apple take audio from opt-in full hey Siri sessions and sell that advertisers for…

None of this is in the realm of "conspiracy theory." We aren't talking about the Earth being flat. Your phone is very clearly listening at all times, and sometimes activates and sends that data to servers. Given that, we can debate all day about what happens with that data - hopefully it's being treated properly - but the point is that it isn't clear, there isn't enough transparency, and there are occasionally scanda…

The reason the "phones are listening to you and targeting ads based on what you say" thing is a classic conspiracy theory is that it would take a genuine secret conspiracy to pull it off.

Think about how many people would need to be in in the secret and actively lying about it: employees of phone hardware companies, and ad tech engineers, and execs at these companies, and their legal teams, and every contractor they used to help build this secret system.

All of whom passionately deny that this is happening.

If that's not a conspiracy I don't know what is.

Just because something is labeled a conspiracy theory doesn't mean it's not true (this one isn't true though). You're welcome to continue believing in it, but saying "it's not a conspiracy theory" doesn't work for me.

Re: I still don't think companies serve you ads based on your microphone

#264

Post by tracker1 »

snowwrestler wrote: post #200
ahofmann wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Add at least two zeros to your number. Pixel phones can detect the top 11k songs while being offline (it used to be more). The fingerprint database for this is around 500 MB in size. 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.

For argument’s sake, let’s be generous and stipulate your phone is listening for 11k keywords to serve you ads. Why would “pool fencing” take up one of those valuable keyword slots on everyone’s phone? And you’re going to see way less than 11k ads per day. Why would the ad server prioritize serving an ad for pool fencing (a phrase said once) over all the far more common topics a person talks about in a typical day, l…

"look into" is a much more likely trigger, then send the 30 seconds before and after to a server for more analysis. "buying" could be another. It's not like it would be that hard. Especially with some of the pretty good vocal compression for audio. It would be a small blip on a modern connection, even wireless.

I'm not saying it is or isn't happening but it wouldn't be hard.

Re: I still don't think companies serve you ads based on your microphone

#265

Post by simonw »

ComplexSystems wrote: post #260
simonw wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The story here is about Apple paying a settlement because Siri was sending audio snippets surrounding invalid wake word activations back to their servers without users realizing it. In the story, there was an implication that these audio snippets had been used for targeted ads. This is very clearly not true. A separate issue is whether Apple take audio from opt-in full hey Siri sessions and sell that advertisers for…

None of this is in the realm of "conspiracy theory." We aren't talking about the Earth being flat. Your phone is very clearly listening at all times, and sometimes activates and sends that data to servers. Given that, we can debate all day about what happens with that data - hopefully it's being treated properly - but the point is that it isn't clear, there isn't enough transparency, and there are occasionally scanda…

"Your phone is very clearly recording at all times"

It very clearly isn't!

Unless you mean "listening for hey Siri wake words", in which case yeah, it's doing that, but that's not the same thing as "recording".

Re: I still don't think companies serve you ads based on your microphone

#266

Post by simonw »

ComplexSystems wrote: post #262
simonw wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where's the proof that this is happening? Lots of people run network traffic sniffers to see what apps are doing. Lots of people decompile apps. Lots of people at companies leak details of bad things they are doing. Why has nobody been able to demonstrate this beyond anecdotes about talking about swimming pools and then getting adverts for swimming pool stuff?

I can't even begin to tell you how many times I've been randomly having a conversation with someone, only to be alerted to the sound of the Google Assistant suddenly responding to what we're saying. Something we said was interpreted as a wake word, and then from that point on, every single thing we said was transcribed via STT, sent to Google's servers, various Google search queries were run, etc, and then the assist…

"Putting that together, I have no idea how many times the Google Assistant has activated in my pocket, gone live, recorded stuff, sent it to Google's servers, realized it wasn't a valid query, and shut off without alerting me."

Have you tried resisting an export from Google Takeout to see if there are answers in that data?

Re: I still don't think companies serve you ads based on your microphone

#267

Post by _boffin_ »

sizzle wrote: post #248
snowwrestler wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think about what this implies. If your phone is listening, it’s listening all the time, right? So like 12-18 hours of continuous audio every day. That’s a lot of ad triggers. Way too many to actually be served with ads during your browsing time, which is a strict subset of your total audible proximity to your phone (plus ad inventory is a strict subset of what you view on your phone). So how does the phone + ad netwo…

Your voice is unique and can be fingerprinted to ID you (see Alexa devices). Add in things like positive sentiment analysis, changes in vocal inflection/intonation and context surrounding spoken products like purchase inference/intent and you can probably triangulate a threshold for showing products with high likelihood of purchasing intent. Really smart people have been working on these things at Google for decades…

I guess my question to this is, what are the estimates on energy required to do this on a continuous timeframe?

Re: I still don't think companies serve you ads based on your microphone

#268

Post by o999 »

> 404 Media previously reported Cox Media Group (CMG) was advertising a service that claimed to target ads based on what potential customers said near device microphones. Now, here is the pitch deck CMG sent to prospective companies. Google has kicked CMG off its Partner Program in response.

https://www.404media.co/heres-the-pitch-deck-for-active-list...

Re: I still don't think companies serve you ads based on your microphone

#269

Post by ComplexSystems »

simonw wrote: post #263
ComplexSystems wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of this is in the realm of "conspiracy theory." We aren't talking about the Earth being flat. Your phone is very clearly listening at all times, and sometimes activates and sends that data to servers. Given that, we can debate all day about what happens with that data - hopefully it's being treated properly - but the point is that it isn't clear, there isn't enough transparency, and there are occasionally scanda…

The reason the "phones are listening to you and targeting ads based on what you say" thing is a classic conspiracy theory is that it would take a genuine secret conspiracy to pull it off. Think about how many people would need to be in in the secret and actively lying about it: employees of phone hardware companies, and ad tech engineers, and execs at these companies, and their legal teams, and every contractor they…

I don't think any such conspiracy or secret-keeping is required; one need not attribute any of this to malice which can be attributed to incompetence. There already exists a system, on everyone's phones, which is listening to audio at all times, occasionally activates in response to a wake word and runs search queries and such from it. The point of this system, when used properly, is intended to take a recording of your voice, transcribe it into text, send it into a search engine, associate the query with your account and search history and use it to influence ad preferences in response to future queries. The functioning of this system involves sending data through an opaque and complex chain of custody, sometimes involving third parties, which - even if intended to comply with privacy and security protocols - could easily be mishandled either maliciously or accidentally, as happens in software development all the time. This includes but is not limited to:

1. The occasional false positive response to a wake word that wasn't really a wake word, causing search queries to be run that you didn't intend.

2. This data being accidentally mishandled behind the scenes in Apple's servers in some way, such as developer error leading to the data accidentally landing in the wrong folder, being labeled with an incorrect flag in some database somewhere, or otherwise being given the wrong level of sensitivity.

3. This data being deliberately "correctly-handled" behind the scenes in Apple's servers in some way that users wouldn't like, but technically agreed to when they first used the phone.

4. This data being used for valid "QA" purposes that, for all intents and purposes, include situations that user would probably not be comfortable with, but also technically agreed to.

5. An unforeseen security vulnerability affecting any part of this process.

6. Malware on the phone interfering with any of the above.

7. Not-quite-malware that you agreed to install, doing things you're not quite happy with but technically agreed to, which is somehow in the loop of any part of this process.

Again, we can debate all day which of these are true - hopefully none of them are true. But we're talking about software development here, where these sorts of things happen on a daily basis. None of this is "they faked the moon landing" kind of stuff, and all lead to the same result from the standpoint of user experience.

Re: I still don't think companies serve you ads based on your microphone

#270

Post by ComplexSystems »

simonw wrote: post #265
ComplexSystems wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of this is in the realm of "conspiracy theory." We aren't talking about the Earth being flat. Your phone is very clearly listening at all times, and sometimes activates and sends that data to servers. Given that, we can debate all day about what happens with that data - hopefully it's being treated properly - but the point is that it isn't clear, there isn't enough transparency, and there are occasionally scanda…

"Your phone is very clearly recording at all times" It very clearly isn't! Unless you mean "listening for hey Siri wake words", in which case yeah, it's doing that, but that's not the same thing as "recording".

Yes, I probably should have said "listening." I edited.
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