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Comment by civilized | Hacker News Reader

This article is insane. It basically claims that

1. In 2018 our phones were constantly snitching on our conversations

2. The author verified this experimentally

3. No one can prove it because "it's all encrypted" (since, as we all know, "encryption" makes all forensics impossible)

4. "It's not a big deal" because "it's just an extension of television advertising".

With journalists like these, who needs disinformation? They'll spontaneously fabricate a better story than you could possibly feed them, just to get attention.

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But our phones are listening. We took a long drive today, and my wife and I discussed homosexuality during a significant portion of that drive. Once we got home, my wife started seeing ads for gay bars and events in Sarasota. Neither of us is homosexual, for what that’s worth.

This isn’t the first time this has happened. Every so often my wife would suddenly see ads on Facebook about things we’ve just discussed in meatspace. You might call this anecdata, but to me it’s a pattern because it keeps happening.

Agreed. Similar speech-to-ad conversions have been happening for years now, and they are definitely not coincidences or confirmation bias.

Sar…sarcasm?

And did you count the times it did NOT happen? How many times have you talked about a subject, and then no ad related to that subject appeared?

You're noticing the exception to the rule, not the rule.

I usually don't believe in this stuff and think it's coincidence, but it does happen very often.

One thing that happened in my case, I think I was discussing with someone at a table-tennis club about someone playing squash and he showed me a livestream of that guy playing squash. When I got home I started seeing ads for places to play squash even though I never searched for it on my phone, but this is what I think happened: my phone and his were on the same network, so someone the ad-network associated my device with the "squash" keyword because another device on the same network searched for it.

I think this is usually what happens when you "discuss" with someone, that person or someone else in your proximity might search online for that thing and your device will be indirectly associated with that search.

I think you are throwing a great deal of water on this, but, it sounds like it could be independently testable, and verifiable. Now, we might need to know more about what make model of phone was in use, as well as apps, provider, etc, to replicate this. However, this could be turned into a test campaign with a test plan, treating this as any SUT. To determine if there is any substance to it, of course.

Given some of the more recent exposures of "Phone always-on behavior", constant telemetry [1], apps violating policy, FB&Google collusion around bid rigging, bypassing privacy laws, and, data being sent to facebook whether or not it was intended to go there, it sounds like it is within the realm of technical possibility, or, that it is occuring in some situations that are not readily apparent, or a bug.

Maybe it isn't occuring too, that is a possibility also.

Given how much of the internet is trying to share data back with FB, Google, Apple, and many others just by looking at Umatrix/Ublock, and a few other privacy apps, there is no doubt that much of the mobile internet is really feeding data back to them all the time. Good luck controlling that on mobile though! And, I am not talking about back-end transactions either..

[1] https://www.tomsguide.com/news/android-ios-data-collection

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