Tested this a while back, had me and my gf talk about kids like where going to have one and all that but never got any baby products before and never typed or asked any electronics about anything related to it.
Within like a few days we started getting ads for babies and expecting parents.
It’s solid proof there always hearing us.
It’s solid proof there always hearing us.
there was actually a study performed a few years ago that didn’t find any evidence for several thousand tested apps to listen on you (some of the scummy ones were caught recording screens, on the other hand). also, the company mentioned in the posted article admits that their claims were exaggerated.
It’s a solid anecdote, for sure.
Absolutely not “proof” though. Unless you made absolutely sure to not accidentally look at a photo on social media of a baby for too long, or scrolled too slowly past a YouTube reel aimed at kids, or listened to a baby shark trap remix on Spotify.
We have LLM models that can give you (mostly) accurate data on how to do a given task based purely on their ability to guess which word comes next from the sources being fed to it, and you don’t think algorithms exist to extrapolate your potential buying habits based on the aforementioned data points?
I’ve gotten very specific targeted ads before that were completely wrong, just because I’d watched like one YouTube video about the hobby or something. It’s really just a prediction algorithm based on the troves of data our use of digital devices gives them.
Or happened to be in the same place as someone who is looking up this type of thing (for example coworkers, or patrons of a park you visit often.)
In reality, the other data that can be gathered is more useful and easier to work with than trying to parse audio and video all the time.
Plus you’d absolutely see that traffic on your network, especially if you lived in an area where you only get like 5Mb/s down.
Uh dude, your girlfriend is pregnant
I have ads blocked on nearly everything, but when I was at a client where they are not blocked, I got an ad for something I was talking about the week before. Don’t remember it, but it happened exactly as you said.
A popular podcast in brazil called Brainstorm9 did the “bowl experiment”, where everyone of the members talked about wanting to buy a bowl but only using their voice, they all started receiving ads for bowls, and I bet you never received a bowl ad since it’s not a thing people often search for online.
I know people say they there are studies, etc, but I agree with you. My husband and I both don’t like Taco Bell. There were zero searches for it, we never talked about it, etc. So we decided to test it. We started saying Taco Bell multiple times in different sentences.
Guess what suggested options popped up when we hit “T” into google or maps? Yup. Taco Bell
Definitely not because most people use Maps for locating a restaurant, which most likely you do as well. Not because taco bell is the most common restaurant that begins with “T.”
Nothing about these comments even hints at establishing the controls necessary to get accurate data on your phone mic spying on you. It’s all anecdotal and based on the knowledge about what information apps are able to scrape, seems like none of you guys really understand what they have access to.
I just press ‘T’ into google maps and Taco Bell is on there. I haven’t been there in years nor can I recall even talking about it in a very long time.
All right, fair. Maybe Taco Bell wasn’t the best test. I’ll keep that in mind for the next time
Or, you know, Taco Bell pays to be promoted.
Fair point
What came up before you test when you typed in T?
It was a year or two ago, I can’t recall. But probably something like Target
Good breakdown on this in arstechnica:
https://arstechnica.com/?p=1991469
In a statement emailed to Ars Technica, Cox Media Group said that its advertising tools include “third-party vendor products powered by data sets sourced from users by various social media and other applications then packaged and resold to data servicers.” The statement continues:
Advertising data based on voice and other data is collected by these platforms and devices under the terms and conditions provided by those apps and accepted by their users, and can then be sold to third-party companies and converted into anonymized information for advertisers. This anonymized data then is resold by numerous advertising companies.
The company added that it does not “listen to any conversations or have access to anything beyond a third-party aggregated, anonymized and fully encrypted data set that can be used for ad placement” and “regret[s] any confusion.”
That last paragraph. I knew they were lying with that headline.
Just like apps aren’t accessing your camera, but Zuckerberg that owns the second biggest ad company in the world, tapes his notebook camera.
He’s arguably a big enough target to actually worry about custom hardware modification attacks.
My sister snd I had a conversation in a terrace about flower seeds to gift my mother. Neither has google assitant or any other voice search app acrivated. We both started getting seed ads. Pretty damning
Do you know your sister didn’t search for seeds?
Right. It only takes one opsec breach.
It’s rather Orwellian to me that this kind of logic counts as justification.
It’s not justification, it’s about understanding the semantics of what’s technically happening.
So many people have trouble telling the difference between “that was fine” and “that’s not what happened”. It’s very disappointing.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
But a marketing company called CMG Local Solutions sparked panic recently by alluding that it has access to people’s private conversations by tapping into data gathered by the microphones on their phones, TVs, and other personal electronics, as first reported by 404 Media on Thursday.
A November 28 blog post described Active Listening technology as using AI to “detect relevant conversations via smartphones, smart TVs, and other devices.”
This is a world where no pre-purchase murmurs go unanalyzed, and the whispers of consumers become a tool for you to target, retarget, and conquer your local market.
The website previously pointed to CMG uploading past client data into its platform to make “buyer personas.”
The archived version of the page discussed an AI-based analysis of the data and generating an “encrypted evergreen audience list” used to re-target ads on various platforms, including streaming TV and audio, display ads, paid social media, YouTube, Google, and Bing Search.
Before Cox Media Group sent its statement, though, CMG’s claims of collecting data on “casual conversations in real-time,” as its blog stated, were questionable.
The original article contains 711 words, the summary contains 179 words. Saved 75%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Always listening is somewhat preferable to ‘Has such an accurate profile on you from the data that is available that these instances happen by pure coincidence’. That’s way scarier and just as intrusive. At least with a listening device you can get rid of it.
Sad thing is, it’s likely both.
I’ve always stood by the position it’s totally possible to snoop audio and match it to a bloom filter or on device least of keywords for ads. Siri is always on so your mic can be always listening and have no impact on the battery life.
In modern mobile OSs it should be clear that your mic is either on or off (to apps) and we don’t see the mic on all the time as would be needed for this. Maybe there’s a hack, but at the scale and being used for commercial services I think someone would have noticed.
That’s probably because you have no technical knowledge of voice recognition whatsoever.
Lots of people of Siri disabled entirely. My household included.
I have often wondered if Siri is actually off when I set it to off. It is not as though I am running ps or top as root to check. A bit of a “trusting trust”.
And you aren’t wrong, from page 2 of the article:
Amazon, for example, has previously confirmed that it uses stuff people say (and do) with Alexa for targeted ads (Amazon has long claimed that it doesn’t sell customer data). But our devices are only expected to gather data on what we say when we ask them to listen to us.
At one point Google had highly specialized hardware that only listened for “ok Google”; that’s why you couldn’t (and AFAICT still can’t) change the wake word.
Things may have changed in the years since I learned that, but I suspect recognizing a bunch of words from an ever-changing list would still need to be done in software and require the phone’s CPU to run.
OTOH, the way Android phones recognize and songs for you is very much like what you described, so maybe there really is hardware already that can recognize a shitload of arbitrary sounds using practically no power.
Talk about a new car near your phone.
Enjoy car ads.
Nope, nothing going on here.
I have a govee backlight for my tv which basically points a webcam into my living room
Let’s start with this. Google Assistant, Siri, Cortina Alexa, etc are always listening.
Your phone can be listening, but at least on Android the microphone permissions are necessary, and unless there are native exploits I’m super unaware of, this happens at the lowest levels.
Keep your phone in your pocket, check the app permissions, learn how to check data leaving your network, and learn to love Big Brother.
Language really muddles things here. What counts as “listening”? In some sense a microphone not connected to anything is always “listening” but we don’t call it that because the electrical impulses it generates don’t go anywhere. Is a phone “listening” if it’s just running that data through a routine that only recognizes a wake word? Does it make sense to use the same word for that as for live streaming data to a server?
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Since when? I disable the camera through software and also use a makeshift lens cap attached to the phone case. Never once came across this. What phone are you using?
- What Phone manufacturer?
- What OS/ Version?
- When is that message displayed? When unlocking or in which app?
- What does the message say exactly?
- What mode of phone unlock is used?
- Got a screenshot of the message? Or even better a photo of the taped camera and phone with the message?
I’m skeptical of this, but I wouldn’t put it past them either.
“guys google assistant isn’t always listening lol it only wakes up on the trigger word. you people know nothing about IT or how good marketers are at guessing” -10,000,000 neckbeards for the last decade, despite everyone’s obvious anecdotal experiences that are just too bullshit to ignore.
Did it really take them admitting it for a publication to talk about it?
Edit: this has angered the neckbeards
Just because you don’t understand statistics and metadata analysis doesn’t make it fake. And of course, since it’s real, you can surely point to all the apps whose network traffic was monitored and all the voice data constantly being transmitted that was captured. Because surely in an era where many people pay for data, it’d be impossible to miss the constant audio stream coming from every one of these devices eating up your bandwidth cap.
But nah, “I feel this is true” is all we need. Even when the person who says it, and said it to advertise their product, admits they lied for sales.
Are they tracking you? You bet. If you think they’re so unsophisticated that they need to literally listen to your every word instead of the millions of other data points you FREELY give away already, you just don’t understand the tech and are fear mongering.
Exactly, their predictive algorithms are entirely too accurate and it’s not just clicking on or searching for products that gives them the information. Even how long it took you to scroll past something is used to analyze potential future behavior and deliver you ads.
You take in so much content everyday that you don’t even realize. They probably saw plenty of them that OP didn’t even realize, I’m sure they gave it away via some other means.
People have tested this before and gotten no additional ads based on their words, it’s all anecdotal.
Of course sometimes the predictive algorithms are wildly and hilariously inaccurate too, as we should expect.
Yeah I’ve gotten weird ads that were specifically targeted but they predicted me incorrectly, of course OP’s confirmation bias is showing here as I’m sure he didn’t notice all of that.
the company itself has admitted that their claims were exaggerated.
At the risk of being called a neckbeard:
Before Cox Media Group sent its statement, though, CMG’s claims of collecting data on “casual conversations in real-time,” as its blog stated, were questionable. CMG never explained how our devices would somehow be able to garner the computing and networking power necessary to record and send every conversation spoken within the device’s range in “real-time,” unbeknownst to the device’s owner. The firm also never explained how it acquired the type of access that requires law enforcement to obtain a warrant. This is despite CMG’s blog claiming that with Active Listening, advertisers would be able to know “the second someone in your area is concerned about mold in their closet,” for example.
In other words, they were hyping up capabilities they don’t have.
Are you familiar with Wireshark and network sniffing? Instead of just wondering, why not look for yourself what these devices are sending out? It’s not hard, and it’s not a secret.
I’m not scared of them, because I know exactly how they work and exactly what’s going across my network at all times.
Are you able to dissect the packet contents tho? I can see the raw hex payloads of any packets on my network but that doesn’t really tell me much about the data actually in them
You can at the very least tell when it is and is not transmitting data when you talk around it. You can set up experiments, like having a casual conversation with and without the “wake word” and compare packets. If it starts spewing data every time you talk, or if it remains mostly idle with just occasional DNS lookups or NTP updates and such, you’ll know.
Is there a way to route traffic from the router to Wireshark? Or would this require a router capable of like OpenWRT?
I have a stupid linksys that has awesome wifi power, but I can’t seem to get custom firmware on it. I might be able to configure it as an access point.
My router is a full on Linux server PC in a rack, so in my case I can just monitor all its interfaces directly on the box. I’ve got an entirely seperate VLAN for my IoT stuff (because a LOT of them are still very unsecure and I’m more scared of my network being compromised that way, by them just getting straight up hacked).
An easy way to do it in your case if you have a gimped ISP-provided router is to find an old hub (not a switch), plug a wireless access point into that, and have the device connect only to that access point. Then plug your laptop or computer into one of the other hub ports and you should be able to listen in on everything being sent across that hub.
More advanced switches might be able to do port-mirroring, which accomplishes the same thing.
Haha I have of those thanks.
You love to see the angry little edit.
“I got one downvote and a few people sharing facts that dispute my comment. It’s a witch-hunt 😠”
mUsT bE tHe nEcKbEaRdS
It was the admission that was the news. People know they are being gaslit so when someone finally admits they are gaslighting you you can and should make them pay. Problem with gaslighting is that you don’t have proof, but you know
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