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Comment by majormajor | Hacker News Reader

"Ad targeting is listening more often than you think" is a "conspiracy theory" I believe in.

I've had too many "mentioned an idea, then got targeted ads for it within a day" incidents to not think some combination of things on the Google Home or iPhones or other smart devices is spying. Yeah, yeah, familiar with all the "someone else on the same wifi probably searched for it" or "Baader-Meinhof" or what have you, but I don't live with a lot of people and Instagram ads in particular are VERY focused these days in a way that Baader-Meinhof doesn't really fit - if I'd seen the ad for [specific thing] a couple days before I mentioned it, it would've been noticeably weird and out of place in a different way.

I was in ad-tech for a bit in the last decade, and even at a tiny company there were some data sources we bought or heard about that were pretty spooky, so I would not be shocked if there are some wild ones out there today.

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And yet there's still zero remotely plausible evidence for it.

Nobody has caught continuous audio feeds being transmitted from smart devices to the cloud (which would be noticeable due to increased network traffic and bandwidth usage) nor identified any secret speech recognition code on the client (which would be noticeable due to severely shortened battery life). Nobody who's worked in adtech has come forward to blow the whistle or admit that they shipped this feature for a big tech company.

I get why it's an appealing conspiracy from a gut instinct perspective, but it really makes no sense. When you're observing the behavior of billions of people and using machine learning algorithms trained to get the best results possible, some uncanny shit will naturally result. Look at how effective LLMs like ChatGPT have gotten without an obvious route to profitability, then think about how much more money has been invested into ad targeting algorithms just in the last couple decades alone.

If I was going to do it... I'd definitely hook in through non-battery-powered IOT devices. Something like a smart TV or various other home security stuff. The TV seems ideal, you have non-trivial compute there so you could do some local speech-to-text and keyword matching, then just periodically phone home with tiny bandwidth usage; that's enough to associate IPs to interests, and then that dataset doesn't even have to look that creepy at the surface-level (you wouldn't tell many people where you got it exactly) when you sell it on to ad networks...

Sneaky apps would be another source, obviously the phone OS/computer vendors wouldn't want this, but I imagine there's some cat and mouse. It's just a new version of browser toolbars, not something hard to imagine some unscrupulous 3rd party data collection company building.

I definitely wouldn't expect Facebook or Google to be doing it directly.

TVs already do a lot of such tracking, and they are open about it. Samsung famously has their ACR feature[1] which works in a manner similar to what you suggest - it basically phones home periodically with screenshots of what you're watching.

[1] - https://www.samsung.com/us/business/samsungads/resources/tv-...

> I was in ad-tech for a bit in the last decade

I'm glad that you got out! I tend to be shy about calling things "evil", but I really do think the entire ad-tech industry qualifies.

It would be trivial to confirm yourself, Wireshark can scan for outgoing network packets and audio would require a large, continuous, byte stream.

Unless you assume that Facebook et al are running ASR models on-device all the time and somehow making it invisible to the end-user.

Good call, I’m going to try this actually

I can save you the effort, it's not happening. This would be a monumental national security concern for non-US states, not even considering the technical limitations that exist for storing or utilizing literally millions of audio samples a minute.

People are incredibly predictable using only a handful of demographics, there's simply no need to invest the astronomical amount that would be necessary to process these conversations when there's already many simple ways to track/generate user interest.

The main problem with the ad-companies-are-listening-to-you theory is that audio processing is very power hungry. Running an ASR model locally would eat up a ton of power. Just doing wakeword detection (where you're only listening for a specific phrase like "Hey Siri") generally requires a dedicated specialized chip so as to not impact power consumption too much.

Same problem if they were surreptitiously streaming audio to their servers. You would see it from the outgoing packets and streaming that amount of data would also be fairly expensive.

What if it's not audio processing real time?

Some voice codecs get their rate down to 2-3kbps. Maybe it could store and forward with content loads without raising flags?

Just spit balling here.

Audio doesn't require all that much bandwidth. 20Kb/Sec should be plenty for reasonable fi. "CD quality" would be 40Kb. Ultrasound maybe double. So... 20Kb would be 20 packets per second and that's being generous. That's without compression.

20 packets per second continuously from your phone to a single server, when you’re otherwise sitting there doing nothing would be very noticeable (for anyone who cared to look for it). And yet I’ve never seen any evidence reported of this.

My wife uses Instagram, and at times, she receives ads related to things we discuss together or with her friends. Initially, you might consider these occurrences as mere coincidences, given that they only happen occasionally. However, the level of specificity in these ads is uncanny.

Interestingly enough, we find ourselves getting unusually excited when this happens, primarily because English is not our native language. When the spyware manages to comprehend our conversations despite our heavy accents, it gives us a sense of improvement in our language skills.

Conversely, our sentiments take a complete turn when we unintentionally activate Apple’s Siri while discussing unrelated topics. For some reason, the dedicated chip for detecting “Hey, Siri!” interprets one of us uttering that command and starts listening in. We exchange glances, shed a few tears of frustration over the misunderstanding, and then burst into laughter.

I’m not entirely sure how they manage to accomplish this, but perhaps there’s an idea for an app hidden in these experiences. For instance, an app that consistently listens in the background and occasionally shares a relevant joke based on the ongoing conversation. That would certainly add a humorous twist to things.

You're just predictable and not that interesting, sorry.

I need to try disabling adblock and say random words. Chariots, chariots. Had anyone tested that?

I mentioned not being flexible enough on a Facebook comment and instantly my reels feed is full of flexibility videos.

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