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.
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.
ZodiacSF1969@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
Is there any proof of this?
Listening to, and understanding, everything said within range of the phone should use noticeable processing power.
ToyDork@lemmy.zip 10 months ago
If that’s the case, I’m glad I keep my goddamn smartphone’s permissions locked as tight as I can. I’m so pissed off that Samsung decided to lock down their phones’ bootloaders that I bought a 512GB Google Pixel Pro and installed Graphine OS.
I will never use will be my last smartphone unless Fairphone starts doing business in Canada; I’d buy from a UK reseller but if I’m going to buy a phone I want to have access to the official warranty, which was not offered by the reseller I found, and repairable by even the best right-to-repair standards still means nothing if the local repair shops tell me they can’t order in Fairphone parts.
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?