After a week at my mom’s house I'm getting ads for her toothpaste brand
twitter.com
twitter.com
They know who are you sleeping with, or if you aren't sleeping with anyone. They know your age and all the insecurities you have about your body, not to mention your health problems and every embarrassing fact about you. They know where you've been, where you're planning on going, and your political preferences. They know if you've donated to political parties, attended political rallies, if you voted, where, and when. And they know all your friends.
And we just let them do this. As tech people, we built this. And all the along the way we told ourselves it was fine, because it was very lucrative for the entire ad tech/fintech/startup ecosystem, and us personally.
And by “we” I hope you mean consumers as much as the people who built this. Some may say this is a systemic problem and I don’t necessarily disagree with that but I think that narrative obscures the fact that the average person literally does not care. Maybe privacy-conscious tech nerds on the internet care but normal people really do not care at all because if they did they would not consent to it when purchasing an iPhone or Android. The public is well-aware of the lack of privacy of these devices yet their behavior does not change.
If you are a tech person who cares about your privacy then buy a Linux phone. Apple and google and government are not going to change this when there is no significant public will to change this.
These platforms literally do everything possible to obscure what you are actually agreeing to. Google, for instance, has lawyers sign off on privacy design docs that set the verbiage on dialogs that users agree to. The lawyers are there to make sure it is as vague and as broad possible while being up to a hair's breadth of what is legally defensible.
Consumers are deliberately kept in the dark. One might say they are naive and trusting. But most would absolutely disapprove if they sat at the "God console" and saw other people's lives the way the vast towers of computing power and machine learning can. It's like a wireframe view of an ant farm, but with people.
Sure maybe they would disapprove but they would probably still use their phones even after being horrified by the god console. The fact is that the average person is already aware their phone is spying on them without being told by the manufacturer yet they still use their phones. On a visceral level, the benefit of their phone far outweighs abstract privacy concerns.
For example, a troubling amount of people were seriously paranoid about 5G somehow causing them harm. What percentage of that group do you think will continue to use their 5G phone? I would guess upward of 80%
I know. But people still smoke even after seeing pictures of cancer-ridden lungs. We're all little crack addicts.
Great point all around. Similar to the smoking problem, I think if we want behavior around privacy to change it will require large amounts of funding and public campaigns. I think it’s unlikely there will be a grassroots effort.
True. Most have been fed the "if you have nothing to hide..." bullshit for too long, so they now think only criminals must have something to hide, which is nonsense, and paves the way to potentially horrific development if taken to the letter.
I've spent hours wordsmithing some text in a dialog that explains exactly what the problem is to people, then watched people blow through the dialog and get angry when they couldn't figure out what's wrong.
I think it's important to understand what you're agreeing to in simple, plain terms that aren't a mile long. But the legal system is so tortured with tort cases that you can't have a simple agreement like that and be protected from lawsuits where people are just trying to make a buck off you.
I think a lot of people care _but have no choice in the matter._
We created an economic system that is at times both parasitic and/or symbiotic in nature. We enjoy the free, we enjoy the bargain bin prices of Amazon shopping, we enjoy being nurtured by marketing moguls who will tell us what will Solve All Our Problems.
Ad blocker (uBlock Origin) in the browser.
No social media apps on the phone. No other "free" apps on the phone. Location services always disabled unless I'm actively using Maps navigation. Bluetooth always disabled.
I pay for YouTube Premium to not see ads. If there is another app that I find useful, I pay for it to not see ads.
Same with the phone, one shouldn’t pay for a phone in cash (or payment plan) and continue to pay indefinitely with personal data. It could be worked out contractually that way a person knows what they are buying at time of purchase.
If they have a data set from a hundred other people whose behavior you can't control, using android phones in a default configuration, in a residential /24 DHCP IP block belonging to some last-mile ISP, where those people do turn on location and GPS services, and you regularly show up with traffic from the same block, you're being correlated with your neighbours.
Additionally lots of other people with fully-default android or ios location/advertising permissions are using other social media apps from the same netblocks that your traffic regularly appears from in a predictable daily wake/sleep pattern (facebook, instagram, twitter, reddit, tiktok, etc).
Anyway, I follow similar practices (and actively monitor my privacy settings), and it's fine for the most part. The ads I get make zero sense.
Companies on our side of the ocean also seem to thread more carefully, based on stories I read.
Like a lot of people, I stop reading at the first insult, because I know everything after that will be worthless.
But it might be better to use those in browsers with ad-blocking, though honestly I'm not sure
There's an built-in conflict of interest with mobile platforms, both Google and Apple, who both run advertising networks that are incentivized to collect data on you to improve targeting, whether you look at ads or not.
(It is helpful that Apple's core business is not advertising, though I still don't trust them.)
I don't think we do enjoy that, at least not once we're experienced enough to understand that it's all lies designed to sell us stuff rather than actually help at all.
The public promise was always it's free because we show you ads. The general public equates that with having to view a billboard on the highway. The fact that persistent surveillance is used to serve ads now is never called out or publicized by these companies for a reason. They know that most people would think that is creepy and that they are going to far.
The reasoning that we give the users a free app therefore we can do everything in our power to surveil and exploit the information of those users for money is bs. I can't think of a single person who has no conflicts of interest that would say otherwise. There is also so much hand wavy stuff thrown around with this argument like "but we're making the world a better place, so the means justify the ends". I haven't worked at any of the large social media or similar companies but I still feel guilty like I have blood on my hands because of those that feign altruism while being bloodthirsty capitalists in this industry. I am definitely a capitalist but some actions just aren't moral and I don't think we should ignore the reality of those actions.
Is there already an underground market for person-to-person sale of information about individuals for relationship-tailoring purposes, or could there be soon? And would those become commonplace or even socially accepted if so?
Those are the kinds of question I have about the territory we're getting into, and I wonder what the implications would be for society.
I get that for some people advertisers seem omniscient but man do they miss the mark with me. Getting Trump ads (I may as well carry a bash the fash bat) and advertisements for services that I am completely against. It’s like, “how fucking dumb is the algorithm? Do they really think I want to work in an Amazon warehouse when I make $400K/yr??”
The only time I had a relevant ad was retargetting (which is also hit or miss since you might have made your purchase).
The only people who know how to use it efficiently are the police when they want to arrest people who organize or participate in demonstrations.
You're almost right.
The data they collect wasn't ever intended to be used for advertising purposes. They do it because they seek to pivot from adtech to the much, much more lucrative and entrenched govtech in the future.
One use and price point doesn't necessarily preclude the other but discriminatory pricing is easy to arbitrage in the information market, so in practice it makes sense to ditch the low value applications in order to fully extract revenue from the high value applications.
I wish bad ad targeting meant that this wasn't happening, but wishful thinking doesn't make it so :/
I guess my point is - why spend any money on me with these specific ads? They're not going to have any positive outcome. How many leftists get shown a Trump ad and are like, "Hell yeah I'm gonna donate/vote for Trump!" - it can't be any amount that makes it worth it...
It’s ironic. When I was 18 and I heard about people doing HFT I thought it was unethical, siphoning money from Joe Shmoe to evil rich people. The older I get, the more I realize Facebook and Google are the truly evil choice — it’s the people in HFT that can have a clear conscience.
I've heard some crazy shit about how much money comes from adtech to fund blackhat data brokers. Adtech buys hacked databases on underground markets, but more than that they fund supply chain attacks to get highly intrusive adware into popular apps. They frequently buy up applications that have a wide install base on phones and browser extensions, and then on the next update, request maximum privileges and use it to loot as much as they can from user systems.
It's a symbiotic relationship. Shady ad networks are often used by criminals for narrowly targeted attacks (advertise this crafted phishing site to women aged 25-35 in the greater Dallas Fort Worth area who are recently married). Those criminals use that access to obtain more private data which they sell to adtech companies. It's a pretty gross business.
In other news, HFT isn't bad because it's HFT, it's bad because order matching services have a bunch of shady, undocumented order types that are designed to allow HFT firms to specifically extract winnings from retail investors. They are absolutely economic parasites, and no one has any incentive to stop them.
https://www.amazon.com/Flash-Boys-Wall-Street-Revolt/dp/0393...
https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Pools-Machine-Traders-Rigging/dp...
Ehn, most of those order types are to try to beat other HFTs. When talking about order types, it's HFT vs HFT.
Most interesting statement I have seen on this is
"Surveillance Camera Man": https://youtu.be/mP5ZVPwP7bg
Nobody gets upset with the 24x7 web browsing, video gait tracking, street video and audio recording, face-rec, FBI planes recording 24x7 for post analysis of possible crimes, etc...etc...As long as they do not see it. Put "just another camera" a few meters and suddenly everybody is a ranging lunatic.
PS: Before you are going to criticize the ethics of the "human experiment" above....With comments mentioning privacy, consent an all that. Please make sure you do not work for one of the Silicon Valley companies enabling this and much worst :-)
To me, the stupidest simplest solution is probably the most likely - some naive marketing analyst probably just grouped all traffic coming from the same IP address into the same bucket and blasted ads to them based on recent Amazon purchases at the same IP address.
They’re just scarily good at predicting what you are going to do. They’re not listening in. It’s far scarier/more insidious than that.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_Surveillance_Capita...
They did a compare for one dealer: out of 150 people that got pushed ads for the dealership 12 ended up buying cars there afterwards - on a higher $ purchase that’s pretty significant conversion.
I agree with this as well. I've been living back at my parents house for a bit while I'm between properties, and I definitely see ads for stuff targeted at my parents. Sometimes I worry there might be a privacy breach there, e.g. my Dad has been suffering from a condition recently and I've seen ads for coping with it come up on my computer, most likely based on his google searches or whatever.
While not strictly accurate, it's easiest to think about it as a simple machine learning system. The system can't be interrogated, so you don't really know what correlations are being made.
The actual way it works is in layers. There's a human layer, using logic to create segments or other targeting methods. There's the ad network's automated optimisation options. FB really took this to the next level. There's retargeting. Bidding, and the economics of advertising plays a big role in giving the system intelligence. 3rd party ad management software.
Each piece/layer typically ads additional data to the set. The human/advertiser generally does this this by uploading or tagging their own customers. FB, for example, will allow you to create a "similar" list, where it finds user similar to those you designate. Similarity is somewhat ambiguous. FB/Adwords is where the heavy lifting happens, most commonly via bid optimisation.
The only intention is "goals per $." Price, and volume. As I said, the sausage factor is complex and no one sees the whole thing. In practical terms, a massive NN optimizing for sales/signups/etc itself is a decent analogy... and increasingly not an analogy.
Edit: commercial to carrier, thanks justusthane
Do you have numbers on how many consumers in say NA, various European countries etc are behind CGNs? I would guess most are used by mobile carriers (but I have no data) and I would gather that this particular technology is not going to be used to try and associate random mobile users anyway. It's more about who likely lives in the same household.
Googles interest in ipv6 isn’t entirely altruistic after all…
Have you logged into a service or websites on multiple devices before? Then you voluntarily gave them enough data to link it.
Many ISPs used to insert “client id” and other uniquely identifying information while NATting/proxying. Luckily, they can’t do that for https - but I wouldn’t put it beyond them to sell a back channel “connection xyz is unique user abc” service.
However, with the move to IPv6 , at least in my area, NAT is gone and static assignment is in. You just need to know the isp’s prefix length, and you get a unique identifier.
List generation is dumber, and feels more hand coded. Basic demographics, facebook/instagram interests.
Here's a 2015 Kaggle competition that they hosted, which provides sample data that they use in modeling, https://www.kaggle.com/c/icdm-2015-drawbridge-cross-device-c...
And here's a technical writeup of one of the well-performing solutions from that competition, https://arxiv.org/pdf/1510.01175.pdf
I’m guessing the present wasn’t a PiHole or VPN?
Your credit card company will still sell you out - but that does take a little more time, and will only include one item (rather than your entire browsing history) - meatspace cash is likely to help with that, but that’s much less of a problem in your context, I think.
I notice that over the course of the last year either some really sophisticated newer algos are being put to use, or the collaboration and sharing of information between ad networks has been streamlined or increased in some manner because I'm being served ads that are creepily relevant. But in any case, the clues and data you leave behind, they're aplenty and quite suspect to being compromised and pounced on by ad networks. I think at this point if you wanna play tango, don't only just play defense (ad block), go on the offense as well and use adnauseam to pollute the profiles they've built of you.
I want to articulate as well the annoyance I feel when being served targeted ads: an ad, if it's related to my interests, even tangentially, it does grab me, and no doubt it probably compels me to make some decision one way or the other. Particularly, what gets me, I believe, is both the mental overload of being served ads of "relevant" things which will attract my attention too much and clutter my mind and distract me, and the sheer arrogance of pushing things it believes are relevant to my interests.
Well. I would postulate, that targeting iphone users would be numero uno priority at any self-respecting adtech company, since its a strong signal that marketing does in fact appeal to you more strongly and you likely have a lot of "spare change"...
I also run my iOS devices over Wireguard when out and about to my home network which runs a pihole DNS server. Works surprisingly well and also catches ads in apps that way.
Sometimes it’s « annoying » because I click on links from articles and emails and they are blocked so I can choose to give up or disable NextDNS for this time but it’s my choice to be tracked
(They don’t stop YouTube from showing ads)
It’s unusual for sites to conspire directly and share data about IP (but that may change)
> We also use Cardholder Information for marketing purposes and to conduct research and analysis. We may provide certain Cardholder Information to companies, including our affiliated companies that perform business operations or services, including marketing services, on our behalf. We may provide certain Cardholder Information to others outside of American Express as permitted by law, such as to government entities or other third parties in response to subpoenas. We may develop marketing programs and send you offer for products and services. We do not share customer addresses with other companies for them to market their own products and services.
https://assets.ctfassets.net/2x5vcnvffh4i/7it0e2T8WQ8fl4DmkL...
Another comment mentions privacy.com as a solution. I've actually thought of creating a little terminal program to leverage it because it's a neat product and super cool they're maintaining a well-defined API for it.
All this ultimately bums me out though. Jumping through so many hoops to avoid this intrusive (and increasingly default) behavior can't be good for mental health. Plus where do you draw the line? When it's so widespread and largely unaccountable while everyone is saying it's up to the individual to avoid it, it really starts to feel rather quixotic trying to take measures to protect yourself.
I’m not trying to show off my European high horse, it’s not like we don’t have our own problems.
That's true – nothing stops Google from knowing what you were looking for – but if your girlfriend was seeing ads, she wasn't using uBlock: because it blocks all first-party ads, too.
I think a much bigger problem here is that almost nobody uses Firefox for Mobile. Also, uBlock doesn't block ads across native apps (for instance, YouTube).
The solution is to use something like NextDNS as your DNS provider at OS or router level. At least on Android 9+ and most latest Linux distributions (via systemd-resolved) no additional software is required for it to work.
uBlock can be used to block both, "Sponsored" products, and Amazon's recommendations. But it won't help when using Amazon's native apps – which many people probably do.
You either have to use a VPN to hide your IP address (Mullvad seems to be trusted even by Mozilla), or at least switch to your mobile 4G/5G connection when doing anything more privacy sensitive.
I agree that ublock, VPN, browser compartmentalization, etc are all really good practices. But they don't stop a first party from sharing everything they know about you, or embedding content derived from third-party brokers
The initial example you gave was almost certainly informed by your browsing behaviour, because that's when those product recommendations started.
I agree, that it has become impossible to completely avoid being tracked, but there are many tools that can significantly reduce the data leakage.
In case of credit cards, that's what virtual disposable debit cards, such as from Privacy.com, are for. I personally never use my physical credit card for online purchases.
So even with this simplest of use-cases: GPS says I live in Flemish part, never search in French, etc. Still they sometimes show me French ads, which is a total waste of course.
So I don't believe the tech is so crazy advanced already.
For example, any good Facebook marketer probably uses "lookalike audiences". You upload some existing customers and then tell Facebook to show ads to people who are "like" your customers. Facebook then used whatever data it has to find similar users (demographic, interest, geographic, behavior etc).
In fact, lookalikes can be so good that any good marketer also knows to _exclude_ existing customers from the lookalike audience (unless you're actually retargeting your existing customers).
Yes, the dirty secret of basically all discussions about tracking on the internet is that IP+User-Agent is a pretty good baseline that is commonly used.
For about a week now, about 80% of the YouTube videos I've watched on my Android TV has been tampon ads, body hair removal machines (legs, not beard) and similar. My SO never uses this device nor the account.
I've disabled personalized ads, so YouTube tells me it's showing me these ads mainly due to time of day and the type of video I'm watching...
I can't be certain, but I'm pretty confident the number of tampon users watching videos about repairing parts for earth movers at 2am is rather low compared to those not using tampons...
So while others may have cracked the code, YouTube certainly has not.
Today I made an insta post about sand that resembled dunes at the beach, mentioning a camel in the description. Less than 5 minutes later I saw the camel logo at the beach bathroom, on someone's discarded cigarettes.
Here it's obvious that there is no connection. But if I had instead randomly seen a camel cigarette ad online at that point in time, I might have seriously wondered if it's because I mentioned it in the post.
My partners birthday was coming up and I thought she might like a weighted blanket as a gift.
Within 10 mins of doing some light searching for prices and local outlets on my office computer, she came into my office smiling asking if I was planning on buying her one for her birthday.
She had suddenly seen multiple ads for weighted blankets appear on Facebook.
This was the most obvious example, but there have been many others were one of us researching something through our home internet connection will affect the advertising the other person sees.
I now have to be more careful in how I do my gift searching. Personally, I'm not really seeing this type of targeted advertising as a net positive.
No. That is, there's Baader-Meinhof effects, misattribution and other things going on at the surface level... but the actual reality is much worse.
Ad tech is the entirety of FB & Alphabet. Ad tech is their business and as an industry it rivals energy, shipping... everything but defense. It is the tech industries' biggest achievement, and the most economically significant "big data" and machine learning sector. Don't underestimate it.
Tracking and snooping are the single most important element in ad tech. Views & user volume is secondary.
Moved into a new place, in Poland. Bought a new smart TV, it was a Samsung (kaput after 2 years). Me and my wife decided to have an impromptu singing session just bellowing out 'Hotel, Hotel, Hotel, Hotel, Hotel, Hotel' in a Pitbull (Cuban rapper) style whilst looking for holidays to book.
Within the next 5 minutes, Trivago was on the TV. Now bear in mind I have literally never seen Trivago being advertising on the TV and all of a sudden their catchphrase at the end of the ad got me 'Hotel, Trivago'.
Safe to say me and wife had a few minutes of WTF just staring at the screen then each other. That's when I truly became convinced that everything is listening. Could have been a coincidence though but it was an almighty coincidence to say the least.
To be honest, the ads on TV are basically on repeat so this is why it stood out so much, the fact that I can practically give you the schedule of ads that I am about to be shown during a break which does not include Trivago is what gets me.
Well, I assume you weren't looking through an offline printed holiday guide of some sort :-)
Cookies, IP addresses
Also, maybe not in this case but more generally, GPS
My interest is in the manipulation taking place on all the people who do click on ads, and the likely negative affect on society.
Obviously, enough people click on ads to make it worthwhile for the advertisers. And this is despite all the people who think ads don’t work on them.
I was referring to the ads described in OP’s article- ones that show up around “real” content.
Of those ads, I’ve clicked none.
Thing is, your brain does all the processing: it reads the label, it detects the colors and brands, it associates it with previous experiences and reinforces all these connections. Then, at the last moment it decides not to engage the neocortex, so you’re not consciously aware of it.
I'm sure I've also read somewhere that those most affected by ads are those who believe they are not affected by them.
Seriously, go visit Stackoverflow Jobs. Start scrolling. It takes me so much conscious effort to read those listings with the yellow background. I'm specifically trying to read every listing and I keep missing them. They just look like rubbish ads, so my brain has been trained to ignore them.
It's the same experience with custom adverts on eBay or real estate websites. Any non-standard listing, I keep missing and have to scroll back through several times to "find" them.
Last time was probably when I went to cinema, which is well over a year ago.
This was debunked.
There is, however, something sort of in the same ballpark that has been reproduced and does show that your brain does have an astounding capacity to at least partially remember images seen only briefly.
Take a large collection of images of a variety of ordinary things. Pictures of things like a bunch of bananas, a dog catching a Frisbee, a cat sunning itself near a window, kids waiting for a school bus, a cat pouncing on a mouse, someone eating a banana, yadda yadda.
Divide the collection randomly into two equal sets, A and B.
Show test subjects the images from set A serially, letting them see each image for a hundred milliseconds or two, with occasionally rest breaks if the image set is large (I believe this has been with image sets up to 10K in the total collection, so it can take quite a while to go through set A).
If you then tested people on how well they could recall these images, they would suck at it. Ask them to describe all the dog images they saw, for instance, and they will only recall a small fraction of them.
Where it gets interesting is if instead the test you do is at a later time you randomly pair up each image from set A with an image from set B, and serially show the subjects these pairs in random order and with the random left/right placement, and ask the subjects to identify which of the two images is one they have seen before.
People get it right some astoundingly high percentage of the time, like 90% after several days. They might not really "remember" most of the A set in the sense that they can purposefully recall them, but apparently we do automatically and effortlessly store something that is good enough to let us tell which of two images is the one we've seen before.
I wonder if this effect would apply with ads? You see a banner ad in passing for brand X molten boron, not paying attention to it. This doesn't make you subconsciously want to go buy the product--that was the old debunked subliminal advertising theory.
But later, you actually need some molten boron and so head out to the store. They have brands X and Y. I wonder if because of the banner ad you saw a few days ago, you'd recognize brand X as one you have seen before and be more likely to choose it over brand Y.
The title really says it all: subjects shown up to 10,000 pictures (once, for a five seconds apiece) remembered a substantial fraction of them two days later. This is somewhat specific to images (and even moreso for “vivid” ones); people did worse with dictionary words.
However, one important detail is that subjects were told to pay careful attention to the stimuli; they were repeatedly reminded that a memory test was coming up.
PDF: https://www.sas.upenn.edu/psych/rust-lab/publications/standi... Journal Page: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1464074730840034...
It wasn't until some time later when I saw my next Liberty Mutual ad that I realized that they had never even crossed my mind during this whole process. Ha! I still chuckle. Now I am even more conscious to avoid things that I see a ton of ads for. I hate ads!
The very next day I open Youtube and one of the suggested videos is an explanation of the Chad and Romanian flags. I had not searched for anything relevant, and upon asking the children and wife (only people present) if they had mentioned the conversation to anybody or looked for something online, they say that they hadn't. And I believe them, I'm always presenting to them small bits of information about the world even though I know that 99% of it gets forgotten immediately.
That was a few months ago.
Lately I have been unable to fall asleep. I refuse to use the phone or any electronic devices after 12 (and wear Gunnars after the sun goes down) but in any case I lie in bed sometimes until the sun rises. I mentioned this to one of my kids (5 years old) a few days ago, I don't know whose phones were where. But the very next day I get an advertisement for "Medicines for those sleepless nights". Now maybe, just maybe, one of the older children or the wife used a phone late at night that specific night. But it seems far too far fetched to imagine that this happened exactly the day after I mentioned that I sometimes don't sleep.
I am 100% convinced that our phones are listening for keywords and assigning us to categories based on that.
I'm unconvinced. If this is happening to everyone, surely it's possible to conduct a randomized controlled trial? Despite that, we only have years of anecdotes but zero such trials. Moreover, this directly goes against the security models of both android and ios, which both require microphone permissions for apps to listen in on stuff. ios goes one step further and puts a recording indicator when the microphone is in use, so it's hard to imagine how these apps are are even listening in the first place.
Her phone is a Samsung A50 probably Android 10 or 11.
> we only have years of anecdotes but zero such trials.
There's some quip about lack of evidence not equating evidence of lacking. But more importantly: at some point the quantity of individual anecdotes, along with the technical ability and interest of the parties involved, become data in and of itself.
It's not, but the burden of proof is still there. It's up to the claimant to prove that some activity exists, not for it to be assumed to be true and for others to prove it's false.
>But more importantly: at some point the quantity of individual anecdotes, along with the technical ability and interest of the parties involved, become data in and of itself.
Ever heard of the saying "the plural of anecdote is not data"? I think this applies here. Specifically, I think this sort of phenomena is highly susceptible to publication bias/p-hacking. ie. you only remember/hear about all the instances that confirms this theory, but not all the instances where nothing happened. With billions of facebook/google users worldwide, and dozens of possible "topics" being generated per day, I'd expect millions of anecdotes to surface just by random luck alone.
Finally, if we're going by "a lot of anecdotes is proof in and of itself", what does this say about other paranormal phenomena? eg. ghosts or bigfoot? Those have a lot of anecdotes as well.
> It's not, but the burden of proof is still there. It's up
> to the claimant to prove that some activity exists, not for
> it to be assumed to be true and for others to prove it's false.
Isn't that the difference between gravity and "facebook is surreptitiously listening to our conversations", that the former has loads of high quality evidence backing it up and can be trivially demonstrated and the latter doesn't? If someone claimed there was an invisible force that we don't know about, but you can't demonstrate it and the only evidence we have of it is various anecdotes, I'd be skeptical as well.
>Leaking a single keyword per day or per week would greatly enhance such systems' capabilities yet remain very very difficult to detect. Perhaps 52 new keywords per year is enough for them.
I suspect you're getting some of the threads mixed up. Other commenters have mentioned about this sort of activity being detectable via network monitoring, but I never made such claim. Instead, I claimed that such activity would be detectable by the operating system itself, due to the microphone activity indicators. That's not something you can sneak one word at a time, because you need to be listening all the time to pick up keywords.
I do think there's a lot of assumed knowledge gathered from your actions... my computers don't have microphones and I keep my phone in a box when I sleep (because I am that paranoid), but I started getting those when I switched from a day job to a night job.... being online on your off hours may class you as "having trouble sleeping"
I find this unconvincing evidence because: you already knew this (somehow) and found it an interesting piece of trivia to bring up at that time. It's unsurprising, then, that a YouTube channel also finds it interesting.
It's very likely that you were influenced to remember this piece of trivia because of something you observed, like (for example) subconsciously spotting an advert.
These are common advertisements. You only noticed them the next day because you talked about them the previous day.
In fact, not only keywords but even by just knowing verbal habits such as phrases used, frequency of curse words, accents, etc, could be very valuable in targeted marketing. The couple who regularly say phrases such as "please prepare the tea, dear" may be better to target different ads to than the couple which regularly say "wazzup dog".
And their is nothing illegal about listening for keywords, even if the companies currently deny doing so. There really is no risk: The people up in arms about privacy will remain up in arms, and the 99% who don't care will continue not caring.
And honestly, I don't think that they had anyway. Maybe one of the kids will take an interest in dad's boring facts about the world at dinner, but the wife has long since stopped even listening!
> First of all, your social media apps are not listening to you. This is a conspiracy theory. It's been debunked over and over again.
But frankly they don't need to because everything else you give them unthinkingly is way cheaper and way more powerful.
If that video about flags appeared when you hadn't talked about flags would you have thought about it? Probably not. You only made a note of it because you'd talked about flags and it "confirmed" your suspicions about phones listening to us.
What initially led you to talk about flags? Was flags something you'd actually looked at before? Maybe, but again you probably never thought anything of it and you probably can't remember whether you did or not. But youtube would remember.
Advertisers also use so many different things about you. They estimate or know your age, interests, location, eating habits, etc.
Maybe the sorts of things or the pace of your web browsing early in the morning indicates grogginess. Maybe the machine learning has even picked up on some pattern like insomniacs clicking on a higher percentage of war and poverty news stories vs. celebrity gossip stories. It's also possible the ML has also used your browsing habits to pick up on the cause of your insomnia, while you think the advertising is due to your speaking about its symptoms.
Also, there's a bandwidth/battery life tradeoff associated with 24/7 sophisticated voice conversation tracking. It would certainly take a lot of bandwidth to send everything to Google, and the amount of processing power to filter for conversations about thousands of potential advertising products is significantly more than just listening for "Hey Siri". This is especially true of the amount of semantic processing to know that, unlike 99% of the mentions of "Chad" in English (and maybe Romanian) conversation, "Chad" isn't referring to the dude down the hall who makes a mean quinoa ceviche. I would expect that the kind of sophisticated processing we're talking about would kill a phone battery pretty quickly, and offloading it to the cloud would cause operators to start complaining about the bandwidth usage. Though, I could be wrong.
Edit: so, I think something spooky is going on, but I suspect that machine learning is sometimes just spookily accurate. I think it's Target that mixes in other coupons with baby product coupons when its ML has figured out a woman is 2 months ahead of giving birth, to make it seem less spooky.
What I always wonder is: why not? We have the technology to recognize keywords in speech, the ability to passively identify handsets, and we certainly have the technology to target ads to people based on keywords. Unless there is no money to be made doing it, why the hell wouldn't your phone be overhearing your conversations and serving ads to you? Is it that we think Google and Apple and Amazon and Facebook and various ad platforms respect our privacy too much to do something that sinister?
It's so much cheaper and technologically easier to parse your browsing history and parsing things you enter in as text than it is to parse voice. Especially when you don't own the platform your software is running on (what would need to happen for Apple to allow Facebook 24/7 access to the iPhone microphone)?
Also, Google/Apple/Amazon/Facebook don't have to respect our privacy, but they do need to respect privacy laws like the GDPR, so they can't actually tap your voice without your consent unless they want to risk actual billion dollar fines.
PRISM was operating at the network level, as opposed to widely-available consumer devices. It's the difference between tapping a phone line at the call center, and going into every individual person's house and planting a bug under their counter.
While I would understand refusal to do so from non-technical crowd (e.g /r/technology or similar cesspolls), it's very difficult for me to understand this argument on hackernews.
I obviously agree with you as the GGP, but the logical counterargument would be, these phones upload so much data in the normal case that it's hard to know what's what. And all of it is encrypted with https, often with certificate pinning.
But, well, audio files are really quite large, at least in the quantities we're discussing. And so in order for the data transfer to go unnoticed, the phone would have to be processing it locally, to decide what to upload. That would be a lot of work, in terms of cpu usage and battery life, and that, again, should have caught some researcher's attention.
Suffice to say, while I don't think any of this is feasible today, this is why locked-down devices and certificate pinning scare me. Audio is expensive, but you can learn a lot with a keylogger.
Failing that some tape works quite nicely!
QubesOS allows you to assign certain devices to Xen VMs , compartmentalising your hardware. No spying if there is audio/video device (a Xen hypervisor escape not withstanding) available to the guest OS.
I do like devices with physical kill switches. Some USB sticks and devices by Purism.
If would like to defend yourself, consider Librem 5 or Pinephone, which have hardware kill switches for microphone and other things.
He's just using that as a general example, right ? He does not, himself, as a data privacy expert and knowledgeable user of networks actually use a grocery discount card, right ?
Further, the more general set of examples that make up his narrative rely, to some degree, on using a mobile device that is connected to, or even registered in, his actual, real name.
He doesn't do that, right ? Is anyone here doing that ?
It’s just not attached to any human identity.
Note, i don't own a dog. I didn't google or search anywhere about dogs or made any related purchases.
After i went home i opened facebook... low and behold, i see dog toys ads.
This has happened a few times that it became plain creepy. That was around 2014, i have since uninstalled facebook and barely open the website.
Do you think that's a line that even Facebook wouldn't cross?
1. Use smart TVs to listen for ad relevant keywords. 2. TV manufacturers sell the data to FB. 3. FB gets keywords & geolocation data, combines it with it's won data and voila. You know these 2 FB users where near this place and dog stuff was discussed.
Pretty safe and distanced from a scandal and yet very effective.
Another thing to consider: How many times do you hang out with a friend and not notice any particular connection in the ads you see later? Again I'm guessing that's the case most of the time. If they really had such sophisticated matching technology then why not do it all the time?
> If my phone is regularly in the same GPS location as another phone, they take note of that. They start reconstructing the web of people I'm in regular contact with.
> So. They know my mom's toothpaste. They know I was at my mom's. They know my Twitter. Now I get Twitter ads for mom's toothpaste.
That said, I'd expect a privacy tech worker to have adblocking on their devices and such a thing to not happen in the first place.
If I follow someone to a number of different locations with Wifi, then I can learn a lot about them by using a simple intersection of the ads I'm now getting.
For instance, if I get ads about diapers in all locations, then I have a strong reason to conclude that the person I'm following is pregnant or has a baby.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targ...
I realize he was at his mom’s house, but when he gets home ads should be blocked!
These types of stories absolutely bother me, but it’s all totally abstract because I don’t see ads on the internet essentially anywhere.
Sitting on the couch and mention I noticed some issues while doing gardening and the side fence might need replacing - next minute Facebook is advertising fencing companies to her.
I never googled, she never googled it. Somehow it keeps happening.
Reddit app shows me ads for US restaurants. I live in Europe.
AdTech is depressingly bad. You tell me the smartest and best paid software engineers in the world work on this mess?
I’m pretty sure adtech doesn’t pay the best.
Just like with anything: There are implementations that don't work at all/are easily fooled, but there are also systems running so effective, that you most likely don't even notice their "invisible hand" guiding you or at least guiding what you see.
But yes...geolocation, networks you log to, phones you are near, what you search. That all seems to play a part.
Linkedin has in the past for me suggested connections based on the wifi I was using. Someone who I don't have common friends or career as and I was getting their contacts as suggestions just after using the same wifi. I have no facebook account...but it seems every phone I buy has it preinstalled.
To me I have long assumed this was going on. With the number of sensors and the capability to have a near constant data connection it boils down to "if they can...they will". But as a good friend of mine says "I thought this was what we wanted". People seem to enjoy that the first button they see when they log in is the button they were actually looking for. (not saying everyone...some take security/privacy very serious...but the flame is bright for the masses).
I constantly have ads served to me for something that has been discussed in the room near me...or topics I would never have an interest in but the conversation was happening near me. My assumption is someone I was near enough for my phone to "see" their MAC address (if via common wifi or if it is adhoc...doesn't matter) and they searched the terms later.
I have become so used to this it has stopped bothering me. The real concerns I have are when I start getting served ads for things like Cancer or other medical treatments. It makes me say in my head "Does the bot know something I don't? Is there some sort of symptom I am having and the AI has picked up on it before me?"
At any rate...welcome to the future. Accept that tracking is a thing. I don't personally see a way to force the companies who have already become some of the biggest in the world by storing/selling data that they need to stop. Even through regulation. My personal opinion is we have passed the point of no return...it is the new normal until "the great reset" which will take a near extinction level event to force us back.
No. They don’t need to. Also, in iOS at least, they’d get caught as there are visual indicators now for when mic/camera are activated.
As an example: I live in a large apartements complex. I mostly always see the same people, because we have the same in/out hours and days. There are people I know who live here that I almost never bump into by chance, sometimes not even once in a year. This give an idea of how timestamped location data is personal and identifies you. This is quite impressive if you think about it.
That's the reason why Google keeps pinging you if you change the location privacy settings on your Android phone.
A while later after we ate, I was browsing Facebook and I was being shown ads for shrimp peeling tools. We had not done any kind of online search, etc. for it. We don't even have any "voice assistants" like Alexa, Google Voice, etc. (Though we both have iPhones so we have Siri).
So how did FB know we had been talking about shrimp peelers?
The article itself was unappealing in any other way.
I assume this is based on IP address? What can be done about this? If Firefox Focus/incognito isn't enough, what should I be doing? I already use NextDNS and mostly use Brave incognito on my laptop.
Don't use a phone and pay in cash.
I hadn’t even ever said the word ‘vacuum’ - iPhone literally seemed to have cued the sound of the machine in the background. And mind you it’s an iPhone 7 with few apps & not some Pro Max future phone ..
From that moment I’ve been convinced 100% microphones listening, cameras probs watching.
It’s not the first time this has happened but definitely the most extreme case where I’d been alone for an extended time (during Covid) and the ad was pretty much immediately after vacuuming.
Of course no proof but like the saying if it looks like a duck and sounds like a duck etc
I’m not too worried though, probably coincidence. The only place I really see ads anymore are on YouTube and most of the time they are irrelevant.
It put him into to the same bucket as his mum. And that is clearly not very “personalized,” not targeted.
speaker 1: I just bought a Turbobot 3000, you should get one they're great.
Speaker 2 thinks to himself: What the hell is a Turbobot, anyway speaker 1 is such a jerk and we have nothing in common anything he likes I'm sure to hate. If only he wasn't my brother in law.
Speaker 2: Sure thing.
Speaker 2 hangs up phone, goes on facebook, sees ad for Turbobot 3000.
on edit: of course I assume speaker 1 is not the parent commenter, as speaker 2 no doubt has multiple relatives.
> If you like D&D consider sticking around, my account is 85% tabletop RPG development and 15% leftist politics.
Kudos to the author for taking his audience what they should expect after following. But isn’t this a really narrow audience? Why not have 2 accounts: robertgreeveathome and robertgreeveatwork so I can pick which content I’m interested in?