What You Say to Google Assistant and Alexa (Not Siri) Gets Used for Ad Targeting | Hacker News Reader

What You Say to Google Assistant and Alexa (Not Siri) Gets Used for Ad Targeting

consumerreports.org

71 pointsCharlesW17 comments

Headline hides the major difference between Google and Amazon in the article: apparently Amazon only targets based on purchases through Alexa, so it's not really Alexa itself at that point.

Is there any allegation here that personalized ad opt-out isn't being honored here? If you haven't opted out of ads, I would expect your activity to be used to personalize ads.

(I'm not saying that this is good - I hate ads and ad personalization - just that this story kind of describes the expected state of things)

They basically did a bunch of searches using Google assistant and then act shocked when they're treated like any other search.

Yeah, your searches are used to target you ads, that's how Google makes money.

Best solution is to avoid using those products, or anything that invokes them.

So Google and Amazon are not passively listening to conversations unless you query it? Not super surprising Google is using voice search for targeting just like web search. It’s sleazy but not surprising.

Oh, Apple Siri absolutely listens to your conversations and targets you too. I have personal experience of this in India where Siri on my friend's iPhone "overheard" our conversation about apps on app store and started showing very specific ads on my mom's iPad (on which Siri was disabled) app store. (This was around the time when Siri was first launched. And I suspect that they are more brazen about this in countries with lax to no privacy laws - both my friend's and my mom's iDevice was bought and activated in the middle-east).

It doesn’t have to be Siri itself. Any app that Apple gave access to the Siri private API could have done this.

Are you sure that wasn’t simple IP-based targeting because you or your friend was browsing the App Store? When suspecting conspiracies, it’s usually the dumb simple answer that is correct.

I worked in AdTech for a while, and this happened all the time. 1. People are more predictable than they think they are, and 2. People remember the times the ads were well targeted and forget the other 10,000 irrelevant ads.

I think this a is very important take-away most people underestimate.

I am talking about specific PR campaigns based on our conversation, not ads about specific apps. Please see my other comment. (And while I haven't worked in AdTech, I have experience with Print and Internet advertising.)

Yes, 100% sure because we weren't discussing any specific apps.

We were discussing in-app purchases in games and how it is unethical of Apple to encourage such kind of games on the App Store simply because they make more money for them. Suddenly I find Apple is promoting the "buy / pay once" (don't remember the exact PR campaign) games on the App Store. (What an amazing co-incidence!). It was, I am sure, one of the many PR campaigns created - after spying on people through Siri - to get people to actually buy apps on the App Store instead of only using the free apps. (I am one of the few who has never been attracted to giving Apple App Store mine or my mom's CC as India has so many better digital payment options that better protect our rights legally, and am loathe to the whole concept of "App Store").

There were two more incidents like this when we were subjected to very specific Apple PR campaign that were very suspiciously based on conversations I had with some Apple fans in my family (the kind who immediately call me up to find out when I am going abroad next so that I can buy them the latest iDevice).

> Suddenly I find Apple is promoting the "buy / pay once" (don't remember the exact PR campaign) games on the App Store. (What an amazing co-incidence!)

I get those promoted in the app store, too. Probably because they can tell from my purchase history that I don't like microtransaction based games.

Seriously, when I was in AdTech I saw how the proverbial sausage is made, and listening to your conversations would be been way less effective than predicting your habits based on other data and geographic location.

>I have personal experience of this in India where Siri on my friend's iPhone "overheard" our conversation about apps on app store and started showing very specific ads on my mom's iPad (on which Siri was disabled) app store. (This was around the time when Siri was first launched

According to wikipedia siri was launched 11 years ago. If this is happening on a serious scale surely you'd be able to provide a more recent anecdote than from "around the time when Siri was first launched"?

Not the original commenter, but here's a more recent anecdote:

My wife and I were staying at a family farm outside the US for several weeks during Covid lockdowns. We had data turned off since our plans would charge us hefty fees for international roaming. One day we took a walk outside WiFi range and I was explaining how grain augers operate, since we were walking to a few old rusted ones. About a half an hour after we get home, she shows me some advertisements on her iPhone for new grain augers.

Could it have been the IP address we were on? Perhaps, but the owner of that family farm no longer farmed for a living and hadn't been looking into purchasing new machinery for more than a year; to add to that, we had been there two weeks prior with no farm equipment advertisements.

Apple will use location services to serve ads to you.

If you were walking near old ones, and others had searched about them before (not you) the graph database would create an association between location and grain augers.

You assume that I continued using Apple devices. After that experience, I disabled Siri, iCloud, etc. on my mom's iPad and personally have never bought any new Apple devices.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com