The reason I think this isn't happening (other than they have told us it's not happening and technically seems very difficult to do this long without researchers/people figuring it out), is that in my life I've spent millions and millions of dollars on ad budget, we spent so much with twitter they made us custom hoodie, nobody tried to sell this function to me, it's not an enterprise level option, I've seen those, and it's not a button in the ad platform, so how is the key word getting into an ad network getting attributed to my ad profile and my ad served? There is a lot of rich ad enhancement you can buy at the enterprise level, but I've never seen anything like that mentioned even remotely. There are A LOT of ways I can target you, some of them pretty creepy, but using convo snippets from the phone? I can't even think how that would work.
I still don't think companies serve you ads based on your microphone
301–310 of 361 posts
Re: I still don't think companies serve you ads based on your microphone
#302I had this happen to me recently. I was speaking to a friend about a subject that suddenly started to appear in ads after I hung up. It was spooky. But I think it has more to do with the activities related to the people we know. I'm sure because of Android, Gmail and search they have a good understanding of our general association group. I bet my friend did a search on what we were talking about and Google was able t…
What you described is basically how it works. You all get finger printed on the same network, finger printed on google searches, finger printed at the routers, and then associated. 6 guys get together for beer and someone brings up wood chips, 1 guy later googles BBQs, you're all getting BBQ ads for the next week and a half, the 5 other guys think the phone is listening to them because they don't know one of the guys actually googled or triggered something related to BBQs. I once knew my roommate was pregnant before anyone else because I got a bunch of ads for baby shit all of a sudden.
Re: I still don't think companies serve you ads based on your microphone
#303Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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.
Once you change it to listening, your whole point doesn't make any sense anymore?
Re: I still don't think companies serve you ads based on your microphone
#304One thing that is rarely discussed in relation to this urban myth is that it is widely believe and yet it doesn't actually effect the behavior of most believers. That is one of the major reasons why most companies and many governments don't care about privacy, the public doesn't really care about it either. People will of course choose privacy over no privacy with all else being equal, but privacy is the first thing…
That's the main reason I care about this so much. If people really do believe that their phones are spying on them all the time to show them ads that means that people are basically surrendering to an imagined surveillance state. They shut up and accept it, because they'd rather keep Facebook/Instagram installed than fight back. I find that really depressing. I want people to have more agency than that. We need peopl…
That's a very good reason to talk about this.
I do think that this is a very "lightly held" belief. It's something people kind-of believe, they'll tell this to each other, but it doesn't affect any behavior - not because it's not important IMO, but because people mostly don't really, deep down, believe it.
And I do wonder if convincing people this isn't happening will have the opposite effect than we intend. Instead of being more aware of what actual privacy violations are, it'll just make people write off the whole idea of companies invading their privacy. Idk.
Re: I still don't think companies serve you ads based on your microphone
#305Earlier quoted context omitted.
The only way to test this would be to have your anecdote together with the complete marketing profiles of your friend and his wife. If such a profile could even be compiled in principle, from it we would be able to tell whether your friend or his wife had generated any non-audio pool-related signals, or whether they had seen other pool-related ads recently. Also, it'd be nice to know how often people in their marketi…
It’s definitely a difficult one to test in a scientific way. But they 100% had no interest in pool fencing, living long-term in a rental townhouse. They chose the phrase specifically to be something they had no interest or search history in.
> They chose the phrase specifically to be something they had no interest or search history in.
If you feel like repeating this experiment, try generating the phrase randomly rather than choosing one, to eliminate unconscious bias.
Re: I still don't think companies serve you ads based on your microphone
#306The argument I use to convince people is to ask them how long your battery lasts when you’re running any apps, I’ll then ask how long do you think your battery would last if the apps were listening all day long. I can’t tell if my friends are convinced or if they’re too polite (or disinterested) to argue.
How would you tell the difference if the apps are listening all the time without you knowing it?
Re: I still don't think companies serve you ads based on your microphone
#307Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Easy: That indicator is not always on when the mic is.
Unless we're talking about an electret capsule with a physical LED wired into the supplying power rail that is switched off when the mic is not in use, you have to trust software.
And good luck with that after the patriot act. I am not implying the NSA has a microphone backdoor, but if they had and someone abused it, how would you know about it?
Listening in for keywords and only send text/audio when keywords are spoken isn't only good for ads, that would be dream of any intelligence agency. And since Snowden have been a few years.
Re: I still don't think companies serve you ads based on your microphone
#308Earlier 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…
"How would it do that? " AI. That is entire premise of 'Nexis' from Yuval Harari. Individualized bot driven surveillance . https://www.theregister.com/2024/09/16/oracle_ai_mass_survei... ""Ellison declares Oracle all-in on AI mass surveillance, says it'll keep everyone in line Cops to citizens will be 'on their best behavior because we're constantly recording and reporting'""
Harari is a shill.
Re: I still don't think companies serve you ads based on your microphone
#309They 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…
Had something similar happen to me. I wanted a mid sized ladder. Didn't search for it or even tell anyone that I was looking for a ladder but suddenly started getting a bunch of ads for ladders. Eventually I figured out that when I went hiking a few days earlier, I forgot to turn off my Fitbit after I got done. On the way home, I stopped at Walmart and looked at the ladders they had. I could see on my Fitbit account…
> suddenly started getting a bunch of ads for ladders
The trouble is, what does "suddenly" and "a bunch of" mean? This doesn't sound very specific, let alone scientifically rigorous. How many ladder ads were you getting previously, and how would you know? Exactly when did the rate of such ads increase? Unless you have these details, it's highly possible you're estimating them inaccurately.
Re: I still don't think companies serve you ads based on your microphone
#310It's because the big companies have the simulation's/global consciousness' hacked endpoints as uplinks into their infrastructure. lol