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I still don’t think companies serve you ads based on spying through your microphone (simonwillison.net)

submitted 3 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

200 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Not my title! I do think we are being listened to. And location tracked. And it's being passed on to advertisers. Is it apple though? Probably not is my take away from this article, but I don't trust plenty of others, and apple still does

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I used to think the same. I'm all for digital privacy, but listening to a microphone? That's ridiculous, the legal ramifications would be enormous. Plus, encoding and sending all this data? Not practical, and of course, we are fully aware of confirmation bias and selective memory so for sure those personal anecdotes must be coincidences.

Then it happened to me. I use a VPN, all my devices have a billion types of ad blocking, private DNS, JavaScript disabled by default and so on. Then I mention a product next to my girlfriend, a product that only interested me and I had recently discovered, nothing she was ever aware of... and while I was still right next to her, five minutes later, her phone is showing up ads for said product. Her phone, not mine. The product is not Coca-Cola, it's not something that often pops up.

What other explanation could there be? The coincidence of the year? They are listening.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

The speech recognition software used by digital assistants that come with most modern smartphones would make it trivial to process the audio locally and map the output to your ad profile. Much lighter lift than sending audio recordings.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago

And a much smaller footprint. It could even be binary data for tweaking your algorithmic profile, say the name of a branded product or in the case of a product with few options just the type of item. Audio runs in the megabytes per minute, transcripts in the kilobytes, but reducing to a conclusion of interest in a single specific item is really very small, hard to notice tbh.