this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2023
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Privacy
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The point of OK Google is to start listening for commands, so it needs to be really good and accurate. Whereas, the point of fluffy blanket is to show you an ad for fluffy blankets, so it can be poorly trained and wildly inaccurate. It wouldn’t take that much money to train a model to listen for some ad keywords and be just accurate enough to get a return on investment.
(I’m not saying they are monitoring you, just that it would probably be a lot less expensive than you think.)
I think what the person is saying is that if you aren’t listening for keywords to fire up your smart speaker, but are more instead just ‘bugging’ a home, you don’t need much in the way of hardware in the consumers home.
Assuming you aren’t consuming massive amounts of data to transmit the audio and making a fuss on someone’s home network, this can be done relatively unnoticed, or the traffic can be hidden with other traffic. A sketchy device maker (or, more likely, an app developer) can bug someone’s home or device with sketchy EULA’s and murky device permissions. Then they send the audio to their own servers where they process it, extract keywords, and sell the metadata for ad targeting.
Advertising companies already misrepresent the efficacy of the ads, while marketers have fully drank the kool-aid - leading to advertisers actually scamming marketers. (There was actually a better article on this, but I couldn’t find it.) I’m not sure accuracy of the speech interpretation would matter to them.
I would not be surprised to learn that advertisers are doing legally questionable things to sell misrepresented advertising services. … but I also wouldn’t be surprised to learn that an advertising company is misrepresenting their capabilities to commit a little (more) light fraud against marketers.
sigh yay capitalism. We’re all fucked.
I was about to write this but you took the words right out of my mouth, so I will just write "this ^"