I had a small side project extension, ~25,000 installs & free to use. I got enough inbound interest trying to "help me monetize" that I thought it would be worth cataloguing all the different unsavory avenues: https://mattfrisbie.substack.com/p/the-ugly-business-of-mone...
It's currently not economically possible to listen to user's conversations, transcribe them to text, and serve ads based on that. It would cost orders of magnitude more in processing power than you could get from the extra sales.
This might change in the future, of course
Google had (and has afaik) significant challenges implementing multiple wake-word detection for precisely this reason.
Transcribing a couple of words accurately on-device without a major performance penalty (so that it can be running in the background always) is just _barely_ coming out now.
Of course running it 24/7 in the background would ruin my battery, you would have to be smarter than that.
Anedoctally I belive Meta does something like that because I consistently get ads on Instagram about topics I talk with a friend on Whatsapp and sometimes that is done completely via audio messages. Though I might be wrong and leaked the topics in text messages among other possibilities.
I think it can be economically feasible. They can have a model optimized for their topics which can be orders of magnitude faster than general-purpose speech recognition. Low accuracy probably wouldn't be an issue as they are able to fine tune the user topics of interest via its interactions with the ads (e.g. click rate, time spent before scroll).
[1] How much more money will a $100B ad business make if they improved tracking accuracy by %1? It's some positive number, but significantly less than $1B.
It's picking up pennies in front of a steamroller. You'd have to be a truly desperate PM to consider it.
[1] Still all the legal risks of holding that data, but they are easier to mitigate.
Don’t get me wrong it’s shitty and gross. But they are different things.
I'm just glad we are not there yet.
> When music plays nearby, your phone compares a few seconds of music to its on-device library to try to recognize the song. This processing happens on your phone and is private to you.
https://support.google.com/pixelphone/answer/7535326?hl=en&s...
Imperceptible to human hearing, but readily picked up by a listening mic. In fact, there are static analysis tools for picking out apps that access such API's in FDroid, along with taking measures to feed said apps dummy data. At least for Android anyway.
30% on Android 13 is absolutely not believable, both from personal experiences and data collected.
Even some old games I paid for are gone from the Play Store too. Like, I paid for Puffle Launch and it's just plain gone from my library.
Edit: ahah, I was looking in the wrong spot! Its still in my "not installed" list, just not in my "family library". Either way, not compatible with any device I own.
I just found https://archive.org/details/PuffleLaunchAPK and https://archive.org/details/PuffleLaunchAmazonAPK (both point to each other), with a note that says that the latter generally works and the former crashes. I can verify this; on my (Android 8, 32-bit compatible) device the Play version crashes with:
08-10 14:55:03.864 25995 25995 E linker : ERROR: OOPS: 0 cannot map library 'libmono.so'. no vspace available.
08-10 14:55:03.864 25995 25995 D AndroidRuntime: Shutting down VM
...
08-10 14:55:03.865 25995 25995 E AndroidRuntime: FATAL EXCEPTION: main
08-10 14:55:03.865 25995 25995 E AndroidRuntime: Process: com.disney.PuffleLaunch, PID: 25995
08-10 14:55:03.865 25995 25995 E AndroidRuntime: java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError: Bad JNI version returned from JNI_OnLoad in "/data/app/com.disney.PuffleLaunch-rjdXjIyhGz7STdfxQ9xH2g==/lib/arm/libmono.so": 0
One problem is that some games aren't just incompatible, but also were enshittified with ads and nonsense after I paid for them (before they were killed altogether).
Offhand, the ones I remember: a paid version of Angry Birds Space, Amazing Alex (Rovio's excellent take on The Incredible Machine), Swords and Soldiers (fortunately there's a Steam version of that), Noodlecake's "Wave Wave", Pool Break Pro, and some classic ports like Dead Space, Spy vs Spy, and Ur-Quan Master, but there are better non-mobile ways to play those games.
The word "just" doesn't belong in that sentence. The ad companies being able to know things about you without actually listening to you is even more scary.
Evil-Ad-Company Neo: "You're telling me I can know things about my customers by secretly listening to them?"
Evil-Ad-Company Morpheus: "No Neo, I'm telling you that with the right license agreements, data sharing partnerships, and algorithms, you wont need to secretly listen to them."
Advertising is evil.
- I use ad blockers for my browser on both mobile and PC
- pay for the ad free version of all of my streaming providers
- don’t use apps that have ads and don’t have a method to pay to get rid of them
Modern advertising is not just "showing a product to induce demand". Car adverts don't just highlight functionality, they use mass market analytics to play emotionally driven messaging and visuals so that you associate that feeling with the car ad.
Do you know what Bernays called what services he offered before the word got tarnished?
Propaganda.
It explores the power fear has to shape behavior.
and then bernays' nephew started netflix
Googling X is a voluntary act to search for X.
Speaking about X with a friend, while the phone sits in a bag nearby, has exactly zero connotations of wanting to search for X.
Sure, there are varying degrees of this evil, but IMO even the least-objectionable advertising out there still can't be called "good".
In my experience, the case where advertising gets you to buy something that ends up being materially useful, that you would not have bought (or found a substitute for) without that advertising, is the exception, not the rule.
Oh, and to address your specific example: if you search "best diapers", and get shown ads for diapers, that absolutely is evil, because some ad-presentation algorithm is pushing you toward whatever diapers will generate the most money for the ad network, likely not toward which diapers are best. Not to mention that "best" often means different things to different people, and the ad networks only care about that insofar it increases their profit.
I've heard somewhere that ads are rich people screaming "give me money".
(i know, i know, but i like it)
> To me, that's evil.
Bill Hicks on marketing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHEOGrkhDp0
That makes me think of this Paul Graham piece on "the PR industry, lurking like a huge, quiet submarine beneath the news." [0]
> If you really want to be a critical reader, it turns out you have to step back one step further, and ask not just whether the author is telling the truth, but why he's writing about this subject at all.
Followed quickly by being hopelessly naïve about the future:
> Whatever its flaws, the writing you find online is authentic. It's not mystery meat cooked up out of scraps of pitch letters and press releases, and pressed into molds of zippy journalese. It's people writing what they think.
Surprisingly though, for some reason I don’t find podcast ads to be as offensive.
People are spending money because they see that they are getting value from something. If people didn't want it or thought it was worthless they would not buy it.
Thinking something is "worthless" and not wanting something are opinions. A lot of modern advertising attempts to change peoples' opinions, so that they do want something, and think something has worth. It's just like propaganda, which actively attempts to sway peoples' opinions.
Of course, there's only so far you can take this. Convincing anyone who isn't seriously mentally impaired that a sandwich made with literal shit isn't worthless is probably not going to work. But away from the extreme end, there's a lot of room to manipulate people.
Target Sends Coupons to Pregnant Girl and Unawares Dad Explodes
https://www.workplaceethicsadvice.com/2012/02/target-sends-c...
> Pole had identified about 25 products that, when analyzed together, allowed him to assign each shopper a "pregnancy prediction" score. More important, he could also estimate her due date to within a small window, so Target could send coupons timed to very specific stages of her pregnancy.
And things just get worse from there, as companies figure out more and more ways they can extract information from the information they have about you, and share it with each other.
After that, we just wait. We know we have you. It’s just a matter of time till you need a product like ours (you’re already our target demo), or an impulse buy occurs.
Without evening knowing it. You’ve been manipulated into trusting our brand, and you’ll think it was all an organic choice.
Nothing malicious or dangerous here.. move along.
but what are you protecting yourself from? What's the threat model?
I like to think I'm immune (the only ad I've ever taken up was years ago for Privacy(.com), and only because I then knew about it later, and could choose to pursue it on my own), but I wouldn't be surprised if at some point before I started being allergic to every type of advertisement imaginable, some ads managed to get my attention for one reason or another. (maybe subliminal messaging's done something before, I dunno.)
I'm not too concerned about it since I know it's been kept to a minimum, so at this point basically everything I've done is something I actually wanted to do, there are no concerns about having been manipulated. But that's just because I've managed to avoid seeing targeted ads almost whatsoever.
Not whether it's something in the world that's ever been marketed at all, because literally everything has.
With prolific cases as Robodebt and the Toeslagen Affaire, we can only hope these automated scoring systems remain isolated from governmental overreach.[3][4]
[1]: https://themarkup.org/privacy/2023/06/08/from-heavy-purchase...
[2]: https://themarkup.org/privacy/2023/06/23/how-your-attention-...
[3]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robodebt_scheme
[4]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_childcare_benefits_sca...
Then there is the fact that a large amount of data about me is being stored, possibly insecurely for people with even less scruples to analyse. I have very little to hide (white, middle class, straight, male, cis, no criminal activity beyond some unlicensed TV/film access, etc – there is little or nothing about me that would be frightening for anyone else to know) but there are many out there who do have things that could be (unfairly) held against them with terrible consequences. Consider women in Texas where there is effectively a reward/bounty program to encourage snitching on those who have had, or are considering, an abortion, or people in law enforcement who don't want certain groups to be able to derive their home address with any accuracy, people in one or more closets through fear of being ostracised from their family/community and left pennyless & without support, and so forth. I grew up with friends who were gay when it was still effectively illegal to be, despite what the Sexual Offences Act (1967) said, and when getting beaten up for being gay was almost acceptable (“act more straight, and it wouldn't have happened”: something a friend was once told by a policeman that saw no cause for arrest) – the fear of consequences from collected information “getting out” and/or being used to derive other information (true or otherwise) is real and for many people not at all irrational.
Back to my icky feelings, which are perhaps a little bit less rational: I wouldn't be happy with someone following me between shops, watching what I'm perusing, then to the pub and noting who I was there with, then back to my home, in order to be able to serve me relevant ads (perhaps for shoes that would be more comfortable for that much walking? or for condoms because they noticed I was accompanied by a female friend, and you never know, right, nudge nudge wink wink), and I'm not happy about the same happening in a more virtual environment. How do I trust that is really (or only) why I'm being followed? And I how do I know who else my stalker is selling news of my activity to?
[actually, the “I have little or nothing to fear” isn't entirely right – any of us could suffer from plain old identity theft in various ways]
This has been true for years to the extent that the nature of your purchases can tell a lot about you. https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targ...
I just did a virtual visit with a doctor that used a video conferencing service that work without an app on iOS and just used Safari. I had to give the page explicit permission to use my microphone
I open them to get my increasing amount of cash.
That data must be valuable???
Someone else on HN called it "elegant" last week.
What a biased, myopic comment. As if ad companies are a grassroots movement against centralisation. As if ad tech is not in the hands of the powerful few tech companies.
They have defended ads in 2021 as well. I wonder where they work. I mean, somebody must be writing the backend for all these ad companies.
One is actively censored and you can go to jail for, the other isn't even on the legislative agenda. There are semi-understandable reasons, but it's far from entirely non-hypocritical.
- Do you trust your constituency to make up their own minds or not?
- Who are you trying to protect?
- From what?
- From whom?
Now, add in psychological effects - "synchronicity", "frequency illusion" ("Baader-Meinhof"), "recency illusion", confirmation bias, etc... I'd expect a fair bit of compounding*.
Then, add in simple use of statistics, statistical inference, etc. and basic tracking of user navigation around the web, on a given website, etc.
I've had these experiences, perhaps one or two times a year, on average. Experiences where I was VERY surprised by ads presented. Experiences that would easily suggest a microphone must have been on when it shouldn't have been. Sometimes, I realized I'd used someone else's device in a way that could be tied to me. Other times, while some "leaps" would be involved, I could basically deduce myself that someone who had looked for information on some "X", and information on some "Y", might really be thinking about some "Z" that isn't easily arrived at from either X or Y in vacuo.
Spying, in the sense you suggest, can't be ruled out by the above. But, I would ask - why even spy? Is a company like "meta" really going to get much more useful (from their perspective) info by doing so? Particularly given the COST? It's becoming more realistic, arguably, but, really, these companies have had more than enough info on just about anyone for well over a decade to keep their algorithms and such well-occupied.
People gladly hand over tons of data constantly ... with full awareness and intentionality, and otherwise. The vast majority have no idea what statistical inference and other techniques can suggest based on seemingly obliquely connected info. Further, most users are so accustomed to "cookies" and other hidden types of tracking, and ignoring EULAs** ... really, it's hard for me to imagine a good case for doing anything more ... "invasive" and ... legally / otherwise dubious.
Edit: mostly came back to add one of my favorite (ab)uses of (statistical) inference:
(also, added the bit below about EULAs)
* Outweighing significantly, I'd suggest, other quirks of human perception, memory, etc. that may diminish awareness and recognition of potentially related events. I write "suggest" mainly because I don't have ready refs to offer this second and don't have time to dig a couple up ... IIRC, the research that exists strongly favors compounding, though, of course, this could be argued to be influenced itself by human psychology (including social and economic factors, e.g., "publish or perish" etc.).
** Jargon buried in legalese, what a genius way to get just about anyone to agree to just about anything! If only John, King of England (in 1215), had been more skilled in the ways of the EULA - perhaps "King Charles III" would be emperor of the world now. Oh utopia denied ... kek.
While that is a positive take that could explain it, I am not convinced by that number crunch. 2/situations per year, per person, that is still "a lot" to be considered plausible statistical coincidence.
You had the conversation with someone and that someone googled/shopped/amaozned/clicked it. Or did before already, you don’t initiate every conversation in your life after all.
Now go and try getting a denial that they are not using the fact that you share a wifi with someone as parts of the recipe for the recommendation cake.
And, it looks like that feature still exists: https://www.facebook.com/business/help/170456843145568
"Upload a list of emails to create a custom audience"
Seems easy enough.
It’s a really creepy feature though that can easily be abused.
I have a website, I'm sure it's worth money to someone. If someone were to offer me $1000? Piss off, i've paid more than that in hosting costs in the 15 odd years I've run it. 10K? Sounds compelling, I'll have to think about it. $1M? Fuck all of my online friends, I'm taking the money and cutting contact.
It would be shit and I'd probably regret it, but it's a lot of money. But this kind of corruption is everywhere, and worst of all, it's permeated in politics. But subtly, in the form of campaign contributions, lavish parties and vacations, connections (i.e. lavish positions in company boards during or after a tenure in politics), never in the form of wads of cash passing hands.
> I'm a fan of [extension name] and I really like how convenient and useful it is.
> Have you considered offering promotional spots to those interested in promoting their products on your extension? I'm interested in promoting my own extension on [extension name] and would love to discuss this possibility with you.
> Let me know if you're open to this.