Google (or any other company) have also never promoted such an ability to advertisers. If it would be a very closely guarded secret you would think that high budget advertisers would be the likeliest to have access to such targeting. However in "tests", like the 'dog toys' video that mikejb mentions and many more, the advertisers are usually no-name companies with cheap products. Most of these proclaimed tests also seem to be YouTube videos trying to get revenue from views. Furthermore, if devices would be looking for trigger words (like mentioned in the first paragraph), it would be even more likely that you would only see this happening for high volume/big budget advertisers.
Disclaimer: Today, I work for Google, but nowhere near ads. And I wouldn't share internals anyway.
No matter how disturbing they would be to the broader public?
Maybe there are some things that may be unethical without being disturbing, I'm not sure the opposite is true; if the majority thinks it's disturbing then it's most likely unethical.
So you can advertise Bingo Card Creator to teachers. Or swimming suits to lifeguards.
A few dozen people put gross things like "jew hater" as their job titles. So, if you trawled hard, you could target these "jew haters" on Facebook.
Some blogger screenshotted this and it became a national uproar about the evil Facebook profiting from hatred. None of the popular articles pointed out the nuance. And in response, FB nerfed the job title feature to hell, which means its harder to actually put relevant ads in front of people.
So that's an example of something that disturbed the public but was completely misunderstood.
I'd say the main problem is this. Nobody has ever asked for ads to begin with.
The unethical part is not better ad targeting, it's simply the fact that advertising exists and is depriving the world of millions of man-hours that could be put to better use.
You can find it in Account > Personal info & privacy > Ad Settings. You can also turn off ad personalization.
And yet, YouTube's recommendations were combination of obscure items of interest only to me that it had been recommending on the other computer. It was telling me to log in but already knew who I was.
Presumably it matched my IP address, but if I had used it for a while from a different IP address, it would have been able to match my usage and identified me that way. And if not that, one of my many Google-employee neighbors mentioned that they record your typing rhythms when they can, and those rhythms eventually uniquely identify you.
So when Google's "here's all we know about you" purports to reveal all, it shows you what they think of you rather than what they actually know about you.
Look at amiunique.org or panopticlick.eff.org for more details.
A fair number of people are claiming they've been targeted with ads seemingly based on information that could only have been obtained through audio recording. But so far no one technically sophisticated has, and so these claims never seem to involve narrowing it down to a specific device, or checking the devices for malware or suspicious apps.
There's of course always a chance that I've done something that—unbeknownst to me—has led Google to believe I was interested in cricket, but I definitely didn't google "cricket", watch videos about it, mentioned it in emails or some such.
But then I wonder why the 3rd guy in the car didn't get any similar suggestions.
Sure, including ones I've never discussed; simple (not even requiring ML) statistical prediction of likely interest based on interests of people with similarities in search history or other things that Google overtly has in its tracking of profiles could well explain that; with ML applied well, that gets even better.
Covertly recording conversations for ads seems to be an unnecessary assumption to explain any effect I've seen or heard decribed, so while it's not impossible, I don't see any reason besides paranoia to believe it is true.
I've only seen one attempt (shown in a video online, the topic was 'dog toys'), where recorded conversations were claimed to influence ads. Lots of people indicated foul play in the video, so I didn't book it in my "that's happening"-bucket.
I've only tried to reproduce it once, half-hearted, and failed.
If coincidences are just coincidences then why do they feel so contrived?
How many things have you casually mentioned and not seen an ad for? Maybe the Swiffer ad stood out to you because you had just talked about it? Maybe the reason you were thinking of buying one is because you saw an ad for it previously?
In first video, a guy talks about dog toys and then he'll see ads related to what he talked about.
Worth noting, he doesn't have dogs or searched about it. The ads are even specific to the toy colors he talked about.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_d-ON4ktkc
Do you think they made all of those on the first try?
Does the Facebook app, if granted permission to access photos, upload thumbnails or metadata generated on-device that's descriptive-enough to characterize photos located on devices even if they're not chosen by the user to be uploaded to their service.
Does Facebook and/or Google send your current clipboard contents to their server? Google Maps seems to do-so since it has the address pre-filled when you launch the app if you've copied it from elsewhere.
Anybody able to officially answer or speculate on either of these? I've always resorted to assuming they do because they can.
2.Once a work colleague said me "Hey, listen my phone (nexus 5x)". From conversational speaker we heard as other people said! nexus 5x was on standby state! According to the conversation, I think that people did not talk on the phone, but offline.
sorry for my english ).
Even when searching for specific items “tacos” the ad will be stupid. I can’t recall the last time I used a Google ad productively.