This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
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.
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.
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'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.
It's well possible and previously tv mic had been used as bugging device. The problem is, way too many security researchers look in system level software of iOS and even other components of the device that such practice will be too risky for apple (same applies for mainstream android products). Also processing realtime audio, finding potentially unrealiable topic from it and doing realtime ad is actually too much work as of today's tech (might change sooner than you think though).
What, I think, is more practical is to use the whole query after the wake word to show ad, and potentially use other app tracking data, which is way much reliable than voice for targeting purpose. Voice data is useful for bugging purpose, primarily (ab)used by nation states and LE.
I bet in the medical procedure case mentioned in the blog the user searched/talked about that in other apps and average people aren't good to notice these privacy leaks.
too much work for today's tech
All the assistants listen all the time for their codeword. The new pixel phone show you a list of songs played around them and more. It is already happening all the time in the background.
That's done locally. You can try training wake word models for any open assistant and see how much computing power it needs for even simple phrase.
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?”
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.
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.
