Comment on Researching alcohol interventions for a friend. I’ve seen more ads for alcohol than ever in my life
captainlezbian@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Yeah I learned stuff was spying on my voice because I was talking to my wife about how I need to take a break from drinking for a bit to recalibrate my habits and then for several days literally nothing but alcohol ads. No searches were made.
If they can’t resist doing this then maybe they shouldn’t be allowed to advertise alcohol.
Jamie@jamie.moe 10 months ago
It’s possible that she looked up information about cutting down on drinking, and because you’re connected in the ad network system, you also got ads from it. They like to learn who is connected to who and target ads that way. Facebook is, as you might predict, one of the most notorious.
Captainvaqina@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
Na, it’s parsed from conversations. I don’t know why everyone always tries to explain the connection when it’s quite obvious your phone is designed to use your spoken words for ads.
Coniferous@thegarden.land 10 months ago
It’s not. On the one hand is however many people saying “it’s obvious!” and on the other hand is no evidence of network traffic transmitting audio data. Why spend all the power to transmit audio, autotranscribe, and parse for specific keywords when they already track your browsing habits and those of your housemates?
Captainvaqina@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
It’s decoded on the device with the dedicated audio processor built into every smartphone since about 2010.
Jamie@jamie.moe 10 months ago
I disagree. Consider the average internet user and how much they willingly give up about themselves online. Most of them use social media and have everyone they’ve ever met added on it, they post directly about what they’re doing and often who they’re doing it with, and they lend their engagement at things they like. They use Google for a search engine and don’t block ads.
So really, for the probably 80-90%+ of the population that captures, the massive surveillance network in place just at that level is perfectly sufficient to gleam anything they might want to know. Even if someone does protect their privacy, people they’re connected with still influence their profile through their lack of concern for privacy.
So really, with all that in place, what’s the incentive to have a top secret voice surveillance system built on top of all that? It would destroy the market for any phone doing it if it was ever proven. Why take that risk when you can get everything you want from all those other sources instead?
roboticide@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Also, his purchases of alcohol may have made it to an advertiser. He may simply not have noticed he was getting ads until his wife talked to him about drinking too much.
The whole “phones are listening all the time” thing could be true, and wouldn’t surprise me, but to my knowledge no hacker or privacy monitor has ever found evidence that they do. Always just seemed more likely to me that people just expose information without realizing these systems are much more ubiquitous and complex than just microphones illegally listening.
captainlezbian@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Yeah if I didn’t trust her to tell me specifically if she’d done it I’d’ve thought that. But she’s been there in the past herself and was less concerned than I was. Also she’d’ve definitely told me when I complained about the ads
chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 months ago
There could also be cues from the rest of your observable behavior even if it wasn’t explicitly searched for. They have a lot of data to work with and your circumstances probably aren’t unique, maybe there are signs they are aware of that you wouldn’t be.
Twelve20two@slrpnk.net 10 months ago
Bless you for using two different double contractions
captainlezbian@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I’dn’t’ve even noticed if you’d’nt mentioned it lol