Marketing Company Claims That It Actually Is Listening to Your Phone and Smart Speakers to Target Ads - eviltoast
  • Subverb@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    Anecdotally, the odds are near zero that my wife and I can talk once about maybe buying some obscure thing like electric blinds and suddenly targetted ads for them somehow pop up on our devices.

    This happens a lot.

    I think you’re being naive if you believe they don’t locally distill our discussions into key words and phrases and transmit those.

    • jard@sopuli.xyz
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      11 months ago

      As I asked someone else, what is your methodology here? Have you limited all variables that can cause Google to collect this information and lead to confirmation bias? Did your wife search for prices of electric blinds on Google after you both talked about buying them (a very natural and logical next step after discussing the need to purchase them)? A random conversation, or 20 of them, with your wife isn’t exactly a controlled experiment.

      Again, I’ll mention that Mitchollow attempted to conduct a genuine controlled experiment to determine whether Google was listening to him through his microphone. What he failed to realize was that he was livestreaming this experiment to YouTube through Google’s servers, the very conspirators he claimed were listening to him, so he was already voluntarily giving them all of the audio data they would ever want! When this was pointed out to him he retracted his statements, admitting the experiment was intrinsically worthless by design.

      I’m not being naive, I’m skeptical of these claims and challenging the veracity of the anecdotal evidence presented. To blindly accept yet another anecdote that confirms a bias of ours whilst rejecting differing skeptical opinions would be closed-minded.

      • Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        livestreaming this experiment to YouTube

        That in itself is concerning. Everyone is arguing that no company would invest resources to voice to text everything. But Google does it in YouTube.

      • targetx@programming.dev
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        11 months ago

        What a hilarious oversight with that experiment lol! He must have felt stupid when it was pointed out to him.