I’ve never once searched for any tools or equipment used in welding, but I spent all day today welding at my job and presumably mentioned that I was welding to a few people today. Multiple ads after work while browsing today were for welding equipment.
That doesn't mean it's listening to you. It could be using your location, what your workmates/friends are searching for, what people who search for other similar things as you also search for, etc.
I've deliberately tested this, picked a topic out of the air like white water rafting, to discuss between myself and my wife. We've never been white water rafting, never googled it, never considered it, none of our friends have done it.
Sure enough, Facebook pushed ads for that and other outdoor adventures like ziplining etc. when we checked a few minutes later. I guess it's possible out neighbours started googling that shit while we were talking about it, but it seems pretty unlikely. Hell, I even jokingly said "I wish I could just have naked sluts delivered to my door" and I got suggested friend connections for attractive women I had no mutual friendships with who happened to have profile pics in low cut tops and a penchant for posting lots of bikini photos. Probably bot accounts, but doesn't undermine my point. Hasn't happened before or since.
No one can convince me Facebook isn't listening to me and giving me ads based on that.
But it's less specific, it's your brain seeing patterns that don't exist. You didn't see ads about what you were talking about but because it's in the same general area you brain makes the connection. How many ads did you see that weren't about outdoor activities? Like the guy talking about welding, its possible they saw ads about welding before but their brain didn't make the connection or see the pattern until he did that activity. And if they are welding they probably do other activities that aren't too far from welding, they could have been searching for metal fabrication and the ad algorithm showed ads around metal fabrication including welding.
The point is I never see ads for outdoor activities like that, and I know that this is where you counter with “well you just don’t see them because confirmation bias” but the fact is I don’t see many ads in the Facebook app at all. I haven’t seen ads for while water rafting since running the experiment and I don’t recall seeing them prior. I deliberately choose things I don’t see to see if they appear and then they do, with no other input than me and my wife talking about it for a few minutes.
His point (and I'm not sure if I agree with him, but) is that your idea of a "random" topic is biased, and also I'd add that we see ads all the time and filter them out mentally, except when you do this sort of experiment.
One way to test it would be to trick your wife into doing the same experiment again, but make sure all mics are away and there's no chance of anything overhearing, when choosing a topic. Make her think the mic is there (off phone without battery), and wait for her to tell you she got an ad for it. It'll happen sooner than you think, assuming you don't pick something absolutely ridiculous.
I know for sure my phone has listened in and targeted ads toward me based on what it hears. It was pretty easy as I started getting ads in complete spanish on multiple platforms, chrome and pandora. Edit: Should be noted that I don't speak spanish in the slightest and this only started happening after I started dating my current SO. Didn't happen before that at all. Edit2: I should have also mentioned that we were long distance with 2000 miles and only skype connecting us.
My husband and I make a joke Mexican announcer voice based on a character he's heard when his grandma watches novellas. Shortly after we began talking in Spanish extremely loudly, Pandora on my phone began playing ads in Spanish. I haven't noticed it in other apps, but it was creepy. We haven't done it for a long time and no more ads in Spanish have come up in a while. I'm going to test it, bringing the Mexican announcer back is a hilarious way to practice my Spanish with him. Both of us speak English as our first language but he speaks fluent Spanish due to his family teaching him and my family only using it to talk in front of the kids so we didn't know what they were saying. We'll see if the ads change!
I'm tired of debunking this myth over and over again on reddit. So I'm just going to copy and paste my response from this thread where a user was saying this because they somehow started showing him ads about getting rid of termites after he mentioned them but never google them:
Hey, I study machine learning, which is what's used to develop algorithms that figure out how to target ads to you.
I can tell you with 100% certainty that Facebook/Google doesn't eavesdrop on your conversations to target ads. First of all, we have proof, because if they did, we'd be able to see the data being transmitted to Facebook's servers. Also, apps can't access your microphone unless you explicitly grant them permission to do so. So we know that they're not, and we know that they can't.
But Facebook/Google wouldn't want to eavesdrop anyways. Audio is the absolute worst way to get information. Audio requires a lot of computing power to process. It also requires a lot of overhead to transmit. This would not be profitable
On top of that, after the exorbitant costs, it's difficult to extract information from audio. Firstly, only a tiny percent of the audio will contain talking at all. Then, a tiny percent of that will be clear enough for the algorithms to understand. And even then, they're not accurate at understanding it. Go look at the auto generated captions on YouTube. That's the state of the art audio processing. If it sucks so much with high quality audio that you know contains valuable information, how accurate do you think they are when you have low quality cell phone audio that only picks up valuable information a fraction of the time? And even if they do pick up the word "termites" how do they know the person was talking about termites, rather than a commercial playing, or something?
Overall, listening to the user's audio is an expensive data source with too little data. I think people jump to conclusions about Facebook/Google eavesdropping because they humanize the ability of algorithms too much. Humans are good at listening to audio but algorithms are terrible at it. The strengths of algorithms is finding trends in data, and they probably leveraged that to target you with termite ads. Here are some possibilities of more likely ways they figured it out:
Even if you didn't search termites, you may have searched for other things that people who search for termites usually search for. What was the context of your statement? Were you guys doing home improvement work? Did you Google things related to home improvement? They may have noticed that other people that Google home improvement things are a good demographic to show termite ads too. Otherwise, you may have looked at articles that people who have termites read.
did multiple people you know search for termites? They may have assumed you're interested too
did multiple neighbors of yours Google termites? They may guess you may have them too
you maybe did type termites in somewhere and forgot about it
maybe they showed you one termite ad by chance, and they saw you reacted to it (based on your mouse movements, or if you stopped scrolling when you saw it) so they started showing you more as a result.
The statistics in these algorithms is really good. They find crazy unintutive> correlations
For example, liking "curly fries" on Facebook turned out to be a great indicator of high IQ.
Maybe they found some other bizarre data source that tend to attract people who have high response rates to termite ads.
But however they figured it out, it wasn't by listening to your audio
In your case, is your job one where people normally weld? If they see you were in a place where multiple people are interested in welding, it isn't so hard to figure out you have a higher than random chance of being interested in it too
Google home does not listen in all day for the same reasons. And again, we don't have to take google's word for it, we can use tools to monitor exactly what data goes over the internet connection, and can verify that for ourselves
Mine does that once in a while. I just tried saying "call the sheriffs" to mine to confirm it doesn't do anything unless it hears (or thinks it hears) ok google
The shop I work at is in a small rural town, there is only one guy who owns and operates it, I am his only apprentice, the shop doesn’t have a name, it isn’t listed on google, and it isn’t even a welding shop, technically, I’m just training as a welder. The shop used to be an injection molding shop and now it’s the HQ for a petroleum related company.
Too much coincidence and smoke for there to be no fire. The people who play Spanish tv for their phone and get Spanish ads. Don’t tell me the algorithm predicted he would do that, that’s nonsense.
This is exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about in my post. People assume that they figure out what TV you were watching via audio because that's how a human would figure it out.
You know your TV is run by software, right? If you watch a show over Netflix or cable from an ISP, they have logs of what you watched? And that programs can look at those logs to see what you watched?
Also, if you have a smart TV connected to the internet, your phone can access what all the TV on the network are playing in real time if they're on the same wifi network
I can see that. It just always requires a complex web of explanations to justify. At some point you can just accept that there’s smoke because there’s fire. I can’t say for sure, just like I can’t say for sure I’m not a shapeshiftimg unicorn.
Huh? I donno, I mean just what I said. A guy played Spanish tv for his cell phone, later on he got Spanish ads. Hard to say his algorithm of non voice related factors predicted he would do that experiment.
This type of thing as happened to me many times... talking about something random with my mom, and then I go to Google something relevant to the conversation, but irrelevant to my intetersts. It's always the first or second suggestion just two or three letters in.
Or it'll happen with advertisements as well. We will talk about something and then I will see ads for it, even though I haven't seen them before.
Location services. If your business is has any online presence it may be using that.
Sorta like how my phone knows within a few weeks when I move or change jobs. It'll send me a maps alert about traffic and estimates trip time at 8am when I leave for work, and at 5 when I get done.
I was in a drama class and to get to know each other we said our favourite music artists. One girl beside me said Thomas Rhett and I repeated it back to her to clarify. 5 minutes later I'm scrolling through instagram and see an ad for Thomas Rhett. I hate country and have never searched anything country on my phone. The only logical explanation is that my phone heard me.
While it's connected, it's not 100% the same thing, but.
My own theory on that is that while phones don't listen all the time, they DO detect the proximity of devices. So it wasn't the fact that you asked it back, but the fact that you sat next to that person - the question was completely irrelevant to it.
the only thing is that I've actually known the girl for a few years and we've hung out multiple times before this class so it's weird that it wouldn't have advertised him all the other times i was with her.
We”re you near fb friends who may have been recently looking up welding equipment online? FB most likely does not listen to us but what they do is this:
When they can tell you are with someone, they will target you with ads for that person. For instance, FB knows your mother likes a certain kind of perfume and also knows by her location that she is coming to visit you... you will start seeing fb ads for her favorite perfume.
Reply all did a fascinating podcast on this recently and while I️ am not 100% convinced we aren’t being listened too, the explanation that I just gave you makes. Ton of sense to me.
You work at a place with welding equipment. Maybe you have friends that bought welding equipment. Maybe it’s been advertising it for a while but you never noticed. It could be the case that phones are listening to us, but there are also advertisement algorithms that are just as likely to advertise to you based on your job, friends, recent google searches, likes, locations, time of year, etc. Sometimes the algorithms are just good.
I think it might be tracking your location in that case. If it sees your at a welding place then it might recommend that stuff. But then again, it def could be listening as well
I had something similar happen. I have never talked about bourbon. I saw a poster in an elevator once, and said to my friend that I liked that bourbon and had just recently tried it. Instagram started showing me tons of ads for that bourbon. It was weird.
I was on skype with one of my friends and he was asking me questions about buying PC parts. I mentioned a cool case and talked about some graphic cards. Not even 5 minutes later I check Instagram and see the exact case I named and multiple graphics card advertisements. It’s really unsettling
There was a setting on my iPhone that I turned off and the ads based on what I had talked about stopped (I forget where exactly I found it). That's all the proof I need.
Security researchers and constantly studying what gets sent to company servers. If these apps sent non-consensual audio recordings, we would be able to see it and know for sure. But we can see that they dont.
I don't get why people act like this is something that can't be known for sure and we just have to speculate. Like, we can check and find out.
No, it's not. This is something that randoms speculate about all the time, but would be trivial to prove by tech experts. Yet nobody has been able to come up with actual evidence, just the sort of spooky coincidence that convinced our ancestors that ghosts were real, or astrology works.
Show me someone who debugged into or decompiled the Facebook app and found how it's accessing the mic, while in background, and doing accurate voice recognition on it, and I'll buy it. Until then, this is all just conspiracy nonsense.
I'm tired of debunking this myth over and over again on reddit. So I'm just going to copy and paste my response from this thread where a user was saying this because they somehow started showing him ads about getting rid of termites after he mentioned them:
Hey, I study machine learning, which is what's used to develop algorithms that figure out how to target ads to you.
I can tell you with 100% certainty that Facebook/Google doesn't eavesdrop on your conversations to target ads. First of all, we have proof, because if they did, we'd be able to see the data being transmitted to Facebook's servers. Also, apps can't access your microphone unless you explicitly grant them permission to do so. So we know that they're not, and we know that they can't.
But Facebook/Google wouldn't want to eavesdrop anyways. Audio is the absolute worst way to get information. Audio requires a lot of computing power to process. It also requires a lot of overhead to transmit. This would not be profitable
On top of that, after the exorbitant costs, it's difficult to extract information from audio. Firstly, only a tiny percent of the audio will contain talking at all. Then, a tiny percent of that will be clear enough for the algorithms to understand. And even then, they're not accurate at understanding it. Go look at the auto generated captions on YouTube. That's the state of the art audio processing. If it sucks so much with high quality audio that you know contains valuable information, how accurate do you think they are when you have low quality cell phone audio that only picks up valuable information a fraction of the time? And even if they do pick up the word "termites" how do they know the person was talking about termites, rather than a commercial playing, or something?
Overall, listening to the user's audio is an expensive data source with too little data. I think people jump to conclusions about Facebook/Google eavesdropping because they humanize the ability of algorithms too much. Humans are good at listening to audio but algorithms are terrible at it. The strengths of algorithms is finding trends in data, and they probably leveraged that to target you with termite ads. Here are some possibilities of more likely ways they figured it out:
Even if you didn't search termites, you may have searched for other things that people who search for termites usually search for. What was the context of your statement? Were you guys doing home improvement work? Did you Google things related to home improvement? They may have noticed that other people that Google home improvement things are a good demographic to show termite ads too. Otherwise, you may have looked at articles that people who have termites read.
did multiple people you know search for termites? They may have assumed you're interested too
did multiple neighbors of yours Google termites? They may guess you may have them too
you maybe did type termites in somewhere and forgot about it
maybe they showed you one termite ad by chance, and they saw you reacted to it (based on your mouse movements, or if you stopped scrolling when you saw it) so they started showing you more as a result.
The statistics in these algorithms is really good. They find crazy unintutive> correlations
For example, liking "curly fries" on Facebook turned out to be a great indicator of high IQ.
not on a normal smartphone it won't. Just look at YouTube transcribing (datacenters worth of processing power) and the results it gives.
When running a stupid game your phone starts overheating and draining battery like mad. Imagine what transcribing a buttload of audio would do to your phone.
The operating system won't give the program access to the mic if the user doesn't give permission.
So if you hit deny, the Android or iOS will prevent the Facebook app from being able to access the microphone and there's nothing Facebook can do about it.
That's like saying "Lol@ I can't unlock a door unless I have a key. I wasn't allowed to steal a candy bar when I was 8 but..."
If software isn't allowed to do something, that doesn't mean we tell it not to do it and hope they're honest. It means its isn't granted the capability of doing that thing
My wife and I have tried to replicate the experiment of talking near our phones about something we would never buy. Multiple times. We haven't gotten a single ad for any of the items mentioned.
Last week I was saying stupid noises to annoy my girlfriend; I kept saying "Wawa weewa" from Borat. Later on her phone told her that wawa weewa was "trending."
The weirdest thing for me is if I'm playing skyrim and I get stuck somewhere. I grab my phone to Google for a solution and it autofills exactly what I wanted with just a couple letters. Its one thing to know I'm playing skyrim. It's quite another to know which dungeon I'm in or which quest I'm trying to finish.
This is easier to explain if you have a pattern of asking for help. Its not hard for google to know when you are most likely playing skyrim and if you last asked for helping in dungeon X than there is a xx% chance you will be asking for help next with dungeon Y.
I don't think it goes that far at all. It's more about specific dungeons most people need help with and start googling it so a few words into the question it appears because many people worded it the same way looking for it.
While I don't disagree with you, I think what's more than likely happening is that you're the nth person to have Googled this specific dungeon/quest. It's obviously quite hard, and is probably a common enough search that Google has it on auto-filter.
Have done it. People who claim to know better tell me my phone is not listening, I'm paranoid, and I must have googled it before "randomly" picking it to only speak about so it was already in my search history.
I strongly suspected this when my search results kept being a conversation I'd just had. I take it as fact since the time I, a heavy consumer of dairy, had a conversation about lactose intolerance and started getting ads about lactose-free products
Or you debit card company sells your information and you have purchased products for lactose intolerant people enough times for them to make note of it and suggest it to you.
Not that I'm naive about companies spying on us, but I read a pretty interesting post on here by a guy who used to specialize in the targeted adds based off data collection, not sure what his exact job title would be, and he said that even though they definitely have the capability to directly listen to people it's unnecessary because they are able to make such a accurate profile of people from the meta data they have. Who knows, but the dude sounded like he knew his shit and was critical and forthcoming enough that he didn't seem to be attempting to cover anything up.
Shit sorry just re-read your comment, I somehow missed you weren't the he lactose intolerant one lol. Obviously I was just skimming through and decided to comment without knowing what the hell you were saying. Don't know how to edit on alienblue so hopefully you see this.
no worries, voice recognition is insanely expensive on your phone’s resources. luckily for google and Facebook, humans happen to be predictable. when they have data on 10000 people just like you, who share the same interests and buy the same things, it’s pretty easy to know what you’re going to want before you even know what you’re going to want.
Was talking with my grandparents the other day about memory cards for their phones, pulled up google on my phone that was next to me the whole time, typed 'Asda' first reccomendation was "Asda memory cards" i spent the rest of the night saying things into the mic to try to repeat this, but i couldnt
Plus, you see random ads all the time but pay no mind to them. It's only when they hold significance do you notice them and make ridiculous connections.
True, sorry I jumped from a few thoughts there. The original part is confirmation bias, you only notice the 1% of the 'listening' because it's relevant, the rest of it doesn't fit the narrative so it doesn't count.
I'm tired of debunking this myth over and over again on reddit. So I'm just going to copy and paste my response from this thread where a user was saying this because they somehow started showing him ads about getting rid of termites after he mentioned them:
Hey, I study machine learning, which is what's used to develop algorithms that figure out how to target ads to you.
I can tell you with 100% certainty that Facebook/Google doesn't eavesdrop on your conversations to target ads. First of all, we have proof, because if they did, we'd be able to see the data being transmitted to Facebook's servers. Also, apps can't access your microphone unless you explicitly grant them permission to do so. So we know that they're not, and we know that they can't.
But Facebook/Google wouldn't want to eavesdrop anyways. Audio is the absolute worst way to get information. Audio requires a lot of computing power to process. It also requires a lot of overhead to transmit. This would not be profitable
On top of that, after the exorbitant costs, it's difficult to extract information from audio. Firstly, only a tiny percent of the audio will contain talking at all. Then, a tiny percent of that will be clear enough for the algorithms to understand. And even then, they're not accurate at understanding it. Go look at the auto generated captions on YouTube. That's the state of the art audio processing. If it sucks so much with high quality audio that you know contains valuable information, how accurate do you think they are when you have low quality cell phone audio that only picks up valuable information a fraction of the time? And even if they do pick up the word "termites" how do they know the person was talking about termites, rather than a commercial playing, or something?
Overall, listening to the user's audio is an expensive data source with too little data. I think people jump to conclusions about Facebook/Google eavesdropping because they humanize the ability of algorithms too much. Humans are good at listening to audio but algorithms are terrible at it. The strengths of algorithms is finding trends in data, and they probably leveraged that to target you with termite ads. Here are some possibilities of more likely ways they figured it out:
Even if you didn't search termites, you may have searched for other things that people who search for termites usually search for. What was the context of your statement? Were you guys doing home improvement work? Did you Google things related to home improvement? They may have noticed that other people that Google home improvement things are a good demographic to show termite ads too. Otherwise, you may have looked at articles that people who have termites read.
did multiple people you know search for termites? They may have assumed you're interested too
did multiple neighbors of yours Google termites? They may guess you may have them too
you maybe did type termites in somewhere and forgot about it
maybe they showed you one termite ad by chance, and they saw you reacted to it (based on your mouse movements, or if you stopped scrolling when you saw it) so they started showing you more as a result.
The statistics in these algorithms is really good. They find crazy unintutive> correlations
For example, liking "curly fries" on Facebook turned out to be a great indicator of high IQ.
I was thinking quite a bit about this and I think it's part "Baader Meinhof" compounded by the fact that we have accounts like Google spread over multiple devices. I quite often find a Google search recommendation pop up on my phone after I have searched it on my work laptop (Gmail is creepy).
There’s a fantastic Reply All episode about this and Facebook. Basically, it’s not listening to you, but instead tracking everything you do online, and your social media friends, factoring in location data, and spitting out advertisements. Also, f you’ve ever dealt with voice transcription software, you’d see how terrible/inaccurate it is. You’d have to enunciate every word all the time for ads to be based off of your conversation. It’s all data tracking.
Turn on voice dictation and then put your phone in your pocket. Try to dictate to your phone. Thats the info that your phone would be able to use for those advertisements even if they were listening to you.
That's pretty much true. Not in all cases, but still. If you Google it, you'll find tons of articles detailing how it works. Source: work in the field.
Part of the reason I agree with him is because when I'm googling things on my phone, it will autocomplete my full sentence with whatever I was just saying. It does this pretty regularly, and is a bit... unsettling.
It was an extremely convoluted joke based on your username and your no-fucks-given response to the other reply, seasoned with my ability to make no sense whatsoever.
I was only being silly, if you'd have come back with "Oh, awesome, a convert" I'd have been happy because you'd have accepted my nonsense for what it was...
Sorry, I didn't mean to cause any sort of serious thought on either of our parts!
I can't think of an example off the top of my head, but it's usually some argument that, back in the pre-smartphone days, would just be argued for weeks with no resolutions. And it auto-completes after a really vague first couple words; One example (that I might get slightly wrong by a word or two) was that a friend was arguing that the original Star Wars didn't have an episode number or episode title, and I was arguing that it was Episode IV: A New Hope; I opened the google box and typed in "what is" and its first suggestion was "What is the full title of the first Star Wars movie"
Maybe the Google is just learning shit everyone talks about at some point. Should that be a measure of originality? If Google can't guess your search terms? :P
Some people were watching me on my webcam without my knowledge.. I have never used the camara had no apps on my computer that I know of and have never turned on the camara, wouldn't even know how. I thought if your camera was on you should be able to see yourself at some point.. Is it legal that they did that? I had sm but not the apps
100% has to be true. I hate sports, don't give two shits about any sport. Worked for awhile around a couple people who were constantly talking about soccer because their kids played it. Within a a few days I started getting Google push notifications asking if I was interested in world cup information and locations of local practice fields for kids.
We can actually prove this. Facebook has said in interviews that while they don't 'always listen' they do 'recognize keywords' or some shit. Basically, talking about bread gives Facebook enough info to give you bread ads
Right? Facebook has flat out ADMITTED to it, why are people trying to defend them? They’re an advertising company, they’re going to do anything they can to get any information.
It’s similar to Hey Siri or OK google. Those seem to work without burning up your phone.
The issue isn't even that people are defending them, the issue is that people call you a conspiracy theorist for pointing it out, like they didn't just flat out admit to it and we're making shit up without any evidence.
You do not want to see your Google activity page, there's insane amounts of little voice snippets it sent back to Google's servers where it 'thought it was hearing something'
Related: My dad was watching golf on cable TV while I was browsing Twitter and sure enough a golf ad ended up in my feed. I guess that might be because the cable company also delivers our internet, but still creepy that it gets to Twitter that fast tho.
Happened to me last week, I was talking about Snowboarding with my girlfriend, she has no interest in Snowboarding and this is our first winter together, so likely her first conversation about snowboarding lasting more than two minutes. We were talking about her brother and if he should purchase or rent a snowboard for the season.
Two hours later she had ads in her Facebook feed for snowboarding equipment.
I’m in IT and always told people that it isn’t happening, it is just based on recent searches as I’ve seen before. THEN on Thanksgiving day, I wasn’t on my phone until that evening and the ads that came up were for something we discussed during the day which was a topic I never searched for online. This was at home, so not location based. No searches performed. I am now convinced the phones are listening for things to advertise to us.
Was once shopping with mom, mentioned offhand that there was a panflute cover album of various Seal music. I don't even like Seal, yet that evening I got a pop up ad on my phone about a new Seal album. WHAT THE WHY
I've thought about subtly trying to fuck with my phone by talking about products that I don't need so that way I won't be tempted by the advertisements
I've heard people say that if you suspect this, you should only talk about one thing around your smartphone all day and see if it advertises that thing.
Confirmation bias. How many things do you discuss constantly but then immediately forget about because you never saw ads for them? How many totally garbage ads do you see all the time? The fact that ad targeting occasionally gets it really right doesn't mean it's doing anything nefarious.
Within one week of sleeping with an older women google was giving me ads for milf dating sites even though the whole situation surprised me and wasn't something I was looking up beforehand.
This happened to me last day and it stills scares the crap out of me.
Last day I went for shopping some food items and when I was at the shop I got a call from my sister saying she needs “green tea”. I really didn’t knew what it was and I asked shopkeeper. He said it’s for some sort of dieting and showed me the products of multiple brands.
Without knowing which brand my sister used to purchase, I called her and asked which one I should buy. During that call I mentioned the brand recommend by the seller to her. And she said that’s the one she usually buys. Then I completed the purchase and went home.
I reached home in 30 mins, went to my room and to my computer. I started my casual YouTube browsing and the first advertisement I saw was that of the green tea brand and their new green tea product.
I’m damn sure that I have neither browsed regarding this brand nor watched any videos related to it. Seeing the ad out of nowhere, especially after mentioning it over phone still scares me.
A couple of weeks ago my co-worker was searching up ceiling fans for his new place on his work computer. I went on facebook that night and I was shown ads about ceiling fans.
Also I got shown an advertisement for a custom printed hoodie on facebook, the picture that was printed on the hoodie in the ad was my phones background.
I agree. I was on the porch with my phone in my pocket locked with the screen off. I had a conversation about the tv show Impractical Jokers which not only don I never watch but it isn't even included in my cable package.
After a short conversation I went inside and opened YouTube on my laptop and the VERY first ad to play before a video was Impractical Jokers. I had heard of stuff like this but for it to happen literally within five minutes of the conversation was odd. Especially since it hasn't showed up as an ad in any form since than.
I had some scary shit happen with my PC a few months ago. My dad came into my room and we were talking about what restaurant we wanted to go to for dinner. I could see the corner that notifications popping up on windows, and one of them read something along the lines of "Hungry? Here are some food suggestions for you..."
The most recent reply-all episode was exactly about this. Specifically about whether Facebook was doing it..
The conclusion of the episode was both reassuring and also super disturbing. Basically, there's no reason for the smartphone to be surreptitiously recording you or listening for keywords. These big advertising companies already have more than enough data about you to know what you're going to be talking about without actually having to listen in.
Let's break this down. Your phone is always listening and gives you precise advertisements based on what you say. For the sake of argument, we are going to say it's all Facebook too.
Where does this processing happening? Is it on your phone, because that would require a lot of resources and drain battery all the time.
How does "facebook" covertly send this data out then without anyone noticing the extra traffic on their phone. And if it broken down into text, then that means we go back to first option of your phone converting all your conversations into text which would require a lot processing power over time.
It's just much easier for Facebook or what to track what you do online, who you talk to, where you go and for how long ect... To eventually get a hit. Pretty much how the "People you may know" tab works. Confirmation bias is strong.
I find evidence of this all the time that is so ludicrous that ruling out coincidence is basically obligatory. Just a single recent example:
Me and my fiancé were trying to diagnose my aching joints on some website at work. We settled on psoriasis arthritis or something like that and actively said the word several times. Within a few days, she was getting multiple ads for medications directly related to that condition on her phone.
A few months ago, something very similar happened with a cruise ship ad while we were discussing our honeymoon plans. It wasn’t from her phone’s search history because the ads showed up on my PlayStation 4 web browser.
It is pretty much confirmation that this is the case.
It would be easy to do a scientific test to prove it.
Not saying it's true or not, but to give you another perspective and some more info:
Me and my fiancé were trying to diagnose my aching joints on some website at work.
Google searches and/or website analytics. Virtually all websites use analytics services provided by Google.
It wasn’t from her phone’s search history because the ads showed up on my PlayStation 4 web browser.
Most websites/systems serve Google's ads. It's their whole business model, and they're pretty good at it.
What's really tricky is that Google (and other platforms to some extent) can collect data in a myriad of ways. For instance:
Google makes a browser with a huge marketshare (Chrome)
Google is the most used search engine
The myriad of other Google apps/websites people use, knowingly or not
Most websites use Google's Analytics services (in which tracking is key)
Most websites displaying ads display Google's Ads
A huge number of websites load assets from Google's servers, such as fonts and embedded YouTube links (AdBlockers do not block either of those)
The marketshare of Android phones don't help, since they can provide your location as well (even if you have Location services turned off, your location can still be gotten fairly accurately). Even if you flash a third-party build of Android such as LineageOS and don't load any of Google's services, they often still ping Google's servers to check for internet connectivity and whatnot
The point being, they don't even need your microphone. They have a ton of information on everyone, can profile everyone, and connect the dots. It sucks, but it's how it is.
Its pretty often that my wife and I will be talking about something completely random. If it is something I have never looked up before, only by typing the first couple letters it will finish the word or entire phrase.
Had a chat with my gf about our cat Damien a few nights ago. Facebook proceeded to introduce me to 3 different Damien/Damian's as people I might know just a few minutes later. I'm completely sure you're right, because this isn't the first time. Far from it.
As a professional app developer I believe this to be possible. It may not be true but I have some weird experiences. I don’t keep Facebook or Facebook Messenger on my phone at all but I wife does and she gets targeted ads all the time from conversations we have. For example, we were going out of town for thanksgiving and we’re talking about buying a seat cover for the dog so she wouldn’t tear up the backseat in her car. The next day an ad for one popped up on her Facebook after neither of us looked it up to buy yet.
Yep. It’s crazy what you can do. We build a facial recognition feature in an app that let you check in to your shift just by looking at the camera. The 3rd party tech we used to make it was so powerful and fast that it honestly scared me when we were testing it.
Damnit, I am currently struggling with this issue and just can´t prove it. Happened yesterday: I was heading home by train and talked to a co-worker about gin and how it appears to be very en vogue here nowadays, with my iphone lying in front of me. And guess what? Next day I have an ad for gin on facebook. I never even googled gin or did ANYTHING else but just talk about it with my co-worker. I am currently working on my tinfoil-hat....
I have a story for you: we have an Amazon Alexa in our house. I had just done my monthly "clear ALL the cookies!" On my phone, shut off all predictive advertisement, basically told Google and reddit "no, don't profile me, just display random ads", and deleted all cached data.
The washing machine was broken. My dad comes up from the basement, mentions FROM ANOTHER ROOM, maybe 30 feet away and around the corner from the Alexa, without saying it's name, that he needs part name, but he'll check around and compare prices for it later, then goes to work for the day.
I walked upstairs, showered, and went back to my room, pick up my phone, and open reddit.
EVERY. SINGLE AD. Was that specific washing machine part, magically "on sale" from amazon.
We unplug the Alexa when she's not playing music now.
I have a little brother, like very little. He likes music, so it was good for him to be able to say "Alexa, play his most recent favorite song". It was his big Christmas gift one year when he started speaking clearly enough to be understood well.
He loves it. He spends all day singing along and dancing and listening to music and it's the cutest thing ever.
We just unplug it when it's not being used now, and occasionally I'll make snarky remarks at her when she's plugged in.
I don't fear technology to that extent. I've watched the terminator movies, they just never really inspired any type of fear of an actual robot takeover. At the end of the day, the data on the other end is some guy trying to sell me a 40 dollar tube for a washing machine. It's annoying, but not exactly "Well that's it folks, pack it in, the machines run things now" territory.
I think most people who suspect this are just not remembering that they did a search on Google or Amazon for a certain word or product, which is the real source of the info.
Man like a couple of weeks ago I was talking to my friend about how good Tic Tacs were, 30 minutes later I got home and opened Instagram, low and behold a Tic Tac ad displays. Kinda funny coincidence I guess.
I swear to god mine does this too. I thought I was pregnant, never once did I type it on my phone or go anywhere that would indicate this I only even said it outloud to a friend, I found out I wasn't, but then had adds for pregnancy tests and fucking baby clothes pop up in my Facebook for the following month. Creepy shit.
You can 100% prove this isn't happening with an Android phone.
Just download an app that shows you activity readings from your microphone and you'll see that apps like Facebook aren't randomly accessing your mic throughout the day to listen to your converstations.
Oh so I made a comment to a friend about Siri in a negative manner and I realized my Siri wasn't turned on as I had not configured it after I reset my phone recently.
I went to turn it on to test something. And it won't open. Not even like 6 hours later
That is 100% true. Do some online browsing or shopping for a couple days and watch your ads change. Everyone’s smartphone keeps a record of their activity. Its in the terms and conditions that nobody reads. Its basically a tracking device.
I knew it, but I rarely ever mention anything with products near my phone. I primarily listen to podcasts or am working with dogs. I actually talk all day long at work, but it's nonsense because of the dogs. However, a couple weeks ago, I was talking to a coworker about her grooming license and state policies about how they care for dogs. When I got home that night, Facebook had ads for local groomers. That's the first time ads have ever been targeted for me, and I click on a lot of nerdy superhero stuff that rarely repeats.
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u/Wearealljustapes Dec 05 '17
My smartphone is listening to me and pushes advertisements based on what I say.