Talk about a new car near your phone.
Enjoy car ads.
Nope, nothing going on here.
My sister snd I had a conversation in a terrace about flower seeds to gift my mother. Neither has google assitant or any other voice search app acrivated. We both started getting seed ads. Pretty damning
Do you know your sister didn’t search for seeds?
It’s rather Orwellian to me that this kind of logic counts as
justification.semantics of what’s actually happening.
I’ve always stood by the position it’s totally possible to snoop audio and match it to a bloom filter or on device least of keywords for ads. Siri is always on so your mic can be always listening and have no impact on the battery life.
In modern mobile OSs it should be clear that your mic is either on or off (to apps) and we don’t see the mic on all the time as would be needed for this. Maybe there’s a hack, but at the scale and being used for commercial services I think someone would have noticed.
Good breakdown on this in arstechnica:
https://arstechnica.com/?p=1991469
In a statement emailed to Ars Technica, Cox Media Group said that its advertising tools include “third-party vendor products powered by data sets sourced from users by various social media and other applications then packaged and resold to data servicers.” The statement continues:
Advertising data based on voice and other data is collected by these platforms and devices under the terms and conditions provided by those apps and accepted by their users, and can then be sold to third-party companies and converted into anonymized information for advertisers. This anonymized data then is resold by numerous advertising companies.
The company added that it does not “listen to any conversations or have access to anything beyond a third-party aggregated, anonymized and fully encrypted data set that can be used for ad placement” and “regret[s] any confusion.”
That last paragraph. I knew they were lying with that headline.
Always listening is somewhat preferable to ‘Has such an accurate profile on you from the data that is available that these instances happen by pure coincidence’. That’s way scarier and just as intrusive. At least with a listening device you can get rid of it.
Sad thing is, it’s likely both.
