Does Google have access to our phone conversations? | Hacker News Reader

Does Google have access to our phone conversations?

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31 pointsdeobrats22 comments

I think this post was written mostly as a joke, right?

First of all, it was written in 2009, secondly it starts:

Now this is really really eerie stuff. Today I came to office wearing my “Holland” T-shirt. I normally never wear this shirt to office.

I fired up my Gmail in the browser, and see a “Study in Holland” Google ad!

Now, maybe my sense of humour is way off, but I think the guy wasn't being serious about Google looking at his shirt and serving adverts based on it...

Google's privacy policy allows them to use a person's data to develop new products and services. Scanning voice communications for key words and then converting those into targeted advertising seems like it would be consistent with such use.

And without the intent to do something along those lines, it is hard to see a business case under which Google could justify devoting resources to Voice.

"And without the intent to do something along those lines, it is hard to see a business case under which Google could justify devoting resources to Voice."

I agree. They offer Google Voice, and it's easy to assume they apply the same type of analysis to voice communications like they do with other forms of communication.

http://www.google.com/googlevoice/about.html

The post itself is a bit looney but the question is fair. I once noticed in my GV history a transcript of an outgoing message I'd left on another machine. Which is weird, because I thought GV was only supposed to transcribe incoming messages. Unfortunately I didn't save a copy or take a screenshot so I have no way of proving I didn't hallucinate the whole thing.

voice search.

Google isn't in the search business.

Google sells search appliances, so they are most certainly in the search business:

http://www.google.com/enterprise/search/

However, obviously it's not their main source of revenue, but they are in that business.

Since most of their revenue comes from advertising, you have a point.

I would say that's a bad case of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronicity - but unfortunately not even a well-written one.

Fun fact: the wikipedia article contains a link to Littlewood's law (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Littlewood%27s_law), another lesser-known piece of trivia

Could be some kind of blue car syndrome.

Interesting. I just texted a friend "car insurance, need car insurance, buy a car and I need insurance".

My next advert on Gmail was "Ford Transit from £179 pm The Best Prices Guaranteed."

Possibly a coincidence, I'm not sure. I don't drive currently and haven't emailed anyone about wanting to or planning to, etc. I also use Ghostery and rarely am signed in to Gmail.

Since the first example given is about wearing a T-shirt with the Dutch flag on it and getting Gmail adds about Holland, I think this is a offhand post about coincidences rather than something suggesting Google is monitoring voice calls to give more relevant advertising.

I have heard others raise concerns about adverts reflecting recent google voice calls. I thought this was outside the current product terms?

However it would not be out of the question google had the technology to do this. Not sure this is a breach of privacy.

Did anyone try to look at this patent (mentioned in the original blog-post):-

http://www.google.com/patents/US20040083101

And the blog-post wasn't talking about "Google Voice". It was regular phone conversation (pre-android). The author believes (and I sort of agree with him) that Google perhaps has a deal with service providers (in India) that allows them to mine voice conversations and use the information to provide targeted content.

How would it map a voice conversation to a computer ('s IP) to serve ads to?

If both are using the same WiFi router, it's trivial to correlate a phone and computer on a small network. Particularly if you have lots of data regarding the browsing patters of both devices.

Phone number!

Telcos ask for email addresses at the time of subscribing to their plans. Most people end up providing their gmail address. This gentleman did too.

On a related note, a friend was recently telling me they think Apples big strategy is in being able to mine the Siri data stream of a user. So to me this doesn't seem as far fetched when considered from that perspective.

Getting Siri data and recording phone calls are totally different things. Siri using your data to improve itself isn't a big deal, in my opinion. That's because you're talking directly to a service, you shouldn't expect it to be totally private.

Phone calls are different, they're meant to be private.

I see your distinction. I'm not talking about Siri improving itself I'm talking about Apple suddenly now being the primary recipient of your search requests and mining the voice data. You could say your emails should be just as private as your phone calls. I see this as just Googles version of the same strategy. Not saying I agree with it though.

How do I opt out of interest-based advertising? http://www.google.com/policies/privacy/ads/#toc-optout

Huh? I mean, I would assume if you use Google Voice, they have an ability to do so. I doubt they are, if anything they might use text messages the way they use Gmail mails, but this article seems to be implying that Google has access to calls between arbitrary subscribers on arbitrary networks.

Besides that being an absurd claim, I'd rather Google do it than those who we already KNOW are listening to them....

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