This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
The comments here show the real problem, adverts dont have to say why they've been selected.
All online ads should have to say which filters they matched to advertise to you. The advertising in most cases now is centralised into Google or Facebook, this is absolutely technically possible.
All online ads should have to say which filters they matched to advertise to you.
According to the Signal foundation, the reverse is true. They claim they got banned for revealing that info.
https://signal.org/blog/the-instagram-ads-you-will-never-see/
Wow.
This gives me that gut uneasy feeling. Those grabs are hyper specific examples.
I talk to my father on the phone.
We finish.
I receive ads for a very specific thing that we talked about that I’ve never ever looked up.
Same thing with my therapist.
We talk. I receive highly specific ads.
It can always be explained by something else. Recency bias being a big one. It’s very possible you saw an ad yesterday as well, but didn’t notice you saw it because you haven’t talked about that item. Talk about it today, see the same ad, and now you think you’re being listened to.
It’s very possible your father googled something after hanging up the phone. There are endless ways they can connect you to knowing your father.
It’s possible someone on the same wifi network as you or your father overheard the conversation and looked it up.
All of these are far more likely than everything you say and do being recorded without anyone ever finding any definitive proof.
There have been ad agencies who have claimed to be able to do this, so they would if they could. https://www.404media.co/heres-the-pitch-deck-for-active-listening-ad-targeting/
Perhaps they track who you talk to and show you ads that are relevant to those people, or their best guess based on two profiles.
I don't think there's a data center out there with a live audio stream of literally billions of always-on devices 24/7/365.
Perhaps there's some local processing first, but devices have permissions for apps, and lights that indicate the mic/camera is in use.
I figure someone would have figured it out by now (reverse engineering, decompiling code), or someone from Google/Apple/Samsung would have leaked it if it were true. Think of the number of people required to keep this secret.
And yet my android phone is able to detect what song is playing 24x7 without being a noticeable drain on the battery or using extra data. Doesn't seem far fetched to be able to do keyword spotting under the same constraints.
Here's one example of a company getting caught: https://m.economictimes.com/news/international/us/next-time-you-talk-on-your-phone-be-careful-facebook-and-google-are-listening-to-your-conversations/articleshow/113071827.cms
The worse part is, they don’t really need to bug your mic to figure out what you are talking about to target ads to you. The best sales leads are the family and friends of your existing customers. So say you talk to you coworker about how they switched to this new diaper rash cream for their baby. You might not have a baby but you talked about it and somehow you got ads for diaper rash cream. What really happened though is that your coworker bought their cream on Amazon and that brand purchased target ads for everyone whose location data was nearby them. Or they bought it for everyone whose phone was connected to the same IP address. We have so much data tracked about us that they can guess what we are talking about without actually having to tap our phone lines
I'll tell you my story, believe it or not.
I had a Samsung phone. got sick and tired of getting not just targeted advertising about shit I had spoken about, buy also targeted emails as well. really freaky shit.
I switched phones. got a fairphone with e/os.
it's been about 2 years now. my old Samsung is a phone I use strictly for work. it only exists inside my office and is never taken outside of the room.
ALL my ads and emails are about work related topics now.
I could talk about stuffing cheetos up my rectum outside my office and never see an ad for chester cheetah. as soon as I say anything about it in the office, boom!
Sure, Google, or Amazon, or Facebook may not be listening to you...but that doesn't mean ~~Samsung~~ someone isn't listening and selling them that information.
Literally the news story that this author cites as motivation for writing this article in the preamble to the article.
Forgive me if this is here already but this is how your post showed to me.
Instagram showed me an ad for a medical condition I only discussed out loud, in person, in my doctors office.
Instagram was immediately uninstalled that day.
Other methods of data collection can be scarily effective. Stores have identified people were pregnant before they knew.
Very likely they identified you as someone that could have that condition, and you noticing the ads after talking to your doctor is a form of recency bias.
You can collect almost all the same data from traditional surveillance methods. Collecting and processing mocrophone data just isn't effective enough to make up for the massively increased costs from processing it.
As much as I logically know this to be the case, especially now that Android and iOS indicate when things like the mic are active... My brain still wants to reject it because it is just too coincidental.
I do not trust mic switches however, unless someone can provide proof that it physically disconnects the circuit to that microphone, it can be bypassed somewhere and there's no reason to trust the manufacturer.
I hate to add to the conspiracy, but I know my eye doctor uses a 3rd party which has sections of their hipaa privacy acceptance which allows them to use your info to sell you ads if you don’t decline. Phreesia, is the 3rd party company. Now add the other apps that track your location… time spent there…
and I know my grocery store does the same when you use the discounts. and worse, they have facial recognition so I can’t even opt out (kroger).
Your issue was likely a combo of that.
Your age group, sex, location, profession/industry, income estimation - you can assume they have this data.
That + a few data points that could be tracked by apps or websites:
Cross some of that, personal info, and ads of treatments for conditions of X.
They don't need to listen to your mic.
That said, if it's a fairly common condition, it might be the case you were presented the ad before and never noticed it.
I think we will need a few more lawsuits such as Apple has agreed to pay $95 million to settle a lawsuit alleging that its virtual assistant, Siri, recorded users' conversations without their consent before this is no longer treated as confirmation bias or people been paranoid.
My wife used to tell me that her adds would change after discussing something and at first I did not believe her, but it just kept happening again, and again. It reached the point that we would put our phones away, discuss something and there is no change in ads about the topic. If we had our phones near adds would change.This would happen on things that we would not see adds for normally. For example we would discuss a trip to a place we have never been and she would start seeing adds about the destination after that.
I'm not saying it's completely 100% not possible and has never happened in the history of human technology, but the situation is not as ubiquitous as most people seem to think it is.
Don't get me wrong, collecting and inferring personal information is happening on an epic and ubiquitous scale these days, but for the most part, it's not the microphones on your devices that are doing the data collection.
Pretty much all my older relatives are completely convinced their phones are listening to their day to day conversations and serving up ads based on those conversations. One of them came to visit me for a week over the summer. One night we had been talking about having asparagus for dinner, and as evidence that their phone was listening to us, the next day they showed me that their news feed was filled with asparagus recipes. Another night, we were talking about one of their medical conditions and the drugs they were taking, and the next day they showed me that they got notifications about a prescription drug for that condition. On another day, we had been talking about a specific actor's filmography and all their movies that we liked, the next day their streaming video app was suggesting a bunch of content from that actor.
I can understand why this seemed pretty convincing that our phones were listening to us, but consider the simpler explanation.
I live in a rural area where there's not good cellular reception, so for the most part, our phones are connected via wifi to the same internet connection. Essentially, every device on the property has the same external IP address. So, when I looked up asparagus recipes on my laptop later that night because I wanted to surprise my relative with that specific dish, and when I Googled the prescription medication the relative was taking to see what the side effects where, and when I looked up that actor on IMBD to see what all movies they'd been in, that pretty much gave all the advertisers all the information they needed to start targeting ads and recommendations to folks sharing the same IP address.
Occam's Razor being what it is, I assume that's how things went down versus all our conversations being constantly recorded and uploaded to the net to be interpreted and used for the purposes of serving ads.
One of my weirder hobbies is trying to convince people that the idea that companies are listening to you through your phone’s microphone and serving you targeted ads is a conspiracy theory that isn’t true.
ARS said, that reuters said, that users said.
Someone needs a new hobby. "Proof" from 3 layers of journalists interpreting a case that they themself said never went to court. Trying to use evidence of absence as proof will never win any hearts in a debate.
I didn't seriously believe it happened either for quite some time because confirmation bias is a bitch. But I've seen it happen a few times where it would have to be a seriously unlikely coincidence.
If it was searched for in Google, Facebook, apple, or whatever sure
If it was correlated with locality and time, sure.
You can infer a lot from a few searches but there are times where nothing was searched for and a novel concept came out of conversation and book there's ads and search completion for it.
Maybe, just maybe, someone settling a lawsuit without being found guilty, doesn't ACTUALLY mean they're innocent.
ITT:
People saying “They already use every other bit of data they can access, why do you naive optimists think they wouldn’t use the most obvious one?”
vs.
People saying “They already use every other bit of data they can access, why do you naive optimists think they would need to use the most expensive one?”
Believe it, don't believe it, some people believe the earth is flat, and 5G gives you cancer
We live in an age where the voice can be processed locally on the phone (we’ve had on-device speech-to-text since the late 90s…), and it’s already listening for a wake word, meaning mic is always hot. It doesn’t need to be streamed and use bandwidth; it can fire off 4K of JSON every few hours and relay more than enough information.
Just program whole dictionary of key phrases and scan the wake word buffer like you are already doing. Easy, stealthy, encrypted. Every voice assistant from a major tech company could (and likely IS) doing this.
This also provides ample opportunity for domestic (or even foreign!) spying my state actors, too.
I don't think that most of the big tech companies are listening to your microphone (I'm not ruling it out entirely, and I'm certainly there are some smaller sketchier companies that are doing it)
But I think most of the time most of the time they don't need to
They know what ads you've seen on your phone/computer, what you've been googling, the websites you've visited, where you've used your credit card, what shows and movies you watch, and where you've been (from gps locations, or from what wifi networks and Bluetooth devices you've been near or connected to) and what ads, playlists, stores, products, etc. you were exposed to while you were there, and of course who you talk to and all of that same information about those people.
That's all going to influence the things you think and talk about, they probably have a pretty good idea what kind of conversations you're going to have well before you do.
And don't get me wrong, that's creepy as fuck.
I think most of it comes down to people not even realizing how much data about ourselves we put out there and all of the ways it can be collected and used to build a profile about you.
And honestly I think they can probably get better data from that most of the time than from trying to filter out background noise and make sense of what you're talking about through your microphone.
Why wouldn't you think this? There is no system in place for monitoring those companies, nor is there any type of punishment for if they were to be proven to be doing so. While on the other hand, there are piles of money to be made from advertisers for allowing exactly that to happen.
I've personally had things come up as being advertised to me after being NEAR people talking about those items, and I have seen several videos where people show this effect in action.
Frequency illusion is real, but is not reliable enough to repeat over and over, back to back, unlike the advertising.
When, ever, have the capitalist companies prioritized morality over money? Never.
People always talk about getting served ads after they talk about something. I think it's the other way around. The ads put the thought into your brain and then you start talking about it and notice after you've already been thinking about it for a while.
