Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

simonwillison.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 361 posts

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

#281

Post by epolanski »

sixhobbits wrote: post #173
7e wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

How does it work? Bought my gf a Pixel 8a recently.

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

#282

Post by nickburns »

brookst wrote: post #202
Suppafly wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>We know from leaks, reverse-engineering, and personal experience that this spying is going on. No we don't. There isn't any of that. This is flat earthing for technophiles.

Good analogy. Just like anyone with a lick of sense can see the spherical Earth from an airplane, so can anyone see the absence of this network traffic from any network analyzer. It’s not there. It does not exist. And nevermind the conspiratorial thinking required to believe whole teams of engineers are developing and maintaining this capability across several giant companies, but nobody ever puts it on a resume. App…

The traffic would obviously be encrypted. Obviously.

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

#283

Post by dnissley »

darth_avocado wrote: post #261
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 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.

Android shows when an app is using the microphone with a green indicator in the upper right corner -- I'm assuming iOS has something similar. How would apps get around this?

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

#284

Post by giancarlostoro »

alvah wrote: post #29

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…

Had this happen. “Airport tier tar” was the phrase someone said near me. Saw ads on Instagram for such a niche thing the next morning. Not only did I see ads they were insanely local. I have never needed to buy tar.

Then theres the time a friend told me about a very specific brand of Ramen, I opened up Facebook, and there it was, very first ad.

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

#285

Post by [deleted] »

simonw wrote: post #212
fhueller wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Every time I read some technical description about why this isn't happening, the technical description seems convincing. Having knowledge of the technical limitations and challenges myself, I used to be on board for this argument, but now less so. All of the technical arguments against the listening seem to ignore the "Ok, " or "Hello, " initiating phrases for the voluntary surveillance devices people put in their…

> Why is it such a stretch to imagine these devices grab Direct Objects and Subjects and store those singular items for ad keywording? How about because Apple say they don't do that, and can and do get sued if they say things like that which are not true? (Sadly I make basically no money at all from my "breathless proselytizing" of LLMs. I hope to fix that this year, someone should pay me for this stuff! You know I'v…

[deleted]

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

#286

Post by xg15 »

The post's arguments can basically be summed up in three categories:

1) "Doing this wouldn't be technically feasible or would require a technical effort wildly out of proportion"

2) "There are lots of psychological biases that lead people to believe something like this happened even if it didn't actually happen"

3) "Apple is such a nice and honest company, they would never do such a thing..."

As for 1), there is enough technical discussion in this thread to disprove that point. But just as a reminder: Google build an always-on song recognition service into android, free of charge, without any obvious monetization, just because they can. OpenAI released Whisper last year as open source, a highly precise audio transcription model. By now lots of variants for on-device use exist.

All that tech doesn't just exist, it's not even seen as a moat. It's already being commodified.

As for 2), yes of course cognitive biases are always a thing. The problem is that you cannot use them to disprove something. They constitute an absence of evidence, not evidence of absence.

As for 3), yeah no comment here. Except maybe, remember Snowden. "No one would do such a thing" has already been spectacularly wrong in the past.

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

#287

Post by nothercastle »

tracker1 wrote: post #264
snowwrestler wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Couldn’t we test that? If the theory was that buying was a key word we could sniff not activity when that word is said could we not?

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

#288

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#289

Post by addicted »

_boffin_ wrote: post #267
sizzle wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Why would they need to listen continuously?

Most people don’t speak, and aren’t around people talking to them, for more than a few minutes to hours in a day.

You just need to awake every few secs or mins to see if someone is speaking and go back to sleep if they’re not.

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

#290

Post by simonw »

nickburns wrote: post #282
brookst wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good analogy. Just like anyone with a lick of sense can see the spherical Earth from an airplane, so can anyone see the absence of this network traffic from any network analyzer. It’s not there. It does not exist. And nevermind the conspiratorial thinking required to believe whole teams of engineers are developing and maintaining this capability across several giant companies, but nobody ever puts it on a resume. App…

The traffic would obviously be encrypted. Obviously.

So modify the application binary to swap out the certificate in order to spy on the traffic. Difficult, but not impossible.
Post reply on HN