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Comment by genewitch | Hacker News Reader

I can't parse the meaning of this. Why would a journalist buy an ad?

To prove that it's possible to buy ads targeted on microphone audio. If this kind of targeting was really as widely available as the article implies, a journalist would be able to do it fairly easily and write an article about it.

But how would you know how the targeting was done? You place an ad and it gets a lot of clicks because it was targeted accurately (for example by using microphone recordings). You look into the dashboard and see a high click rate. What’s your story now?

The meaning of this is that the proposed technology doesn't exist and is bullshit. If "CMG Local Solutions" were actually able to listen in on your conversations, investigative journalists would be all over this trying to prove/disprove and understand the privacy implications. The fact that they haven't speaks volumes.

Or maybe it's not a good enough story, and they know most people will not be shocked, and most people will not care, so it's a non story for most people.

Oy, come on.

If your phones and other devices were secretly listening to and recording every word you said to market to you, despite Apple, Google, Amazon and others explicitly saying they don't do this, not only would this be a scandal of epic proportions, every lawyer who could fog a mirror would be salivating at the billions in class action payouts that they would win.

That's why I hate this stupid conspiracy theory so much - it makes no sense in the real world even if you assume all the companies and people involved solely care about making more money.

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