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Comment by skybrian | Hacker News Reader

I don’t see confirmation of anything in particular here, other than some ad sales company made some rather vague and dubious claims. Does anyone know what specifically they were talking about and if there’s anything to it?

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From a Cox VP of Digital Strategy's blog post:

"Our technology is on the cutting edge of voice data processing. We can identify buyers based on casual conversations in real time. It may seem like black magic, but it's not-it's AI. The growing ability to access microphone data on devices like smartphones and tablets enables our technology partner to aggregate and analyze voice data during pre-purchase conversations."

IMO, the smoking gun here is their partner ingesting and analyzing the voice data.

Yeah but they say "pre-purchase conversations", could be some BS about how they call consumers sometimes, from call centers... it doesn't say that they eavesdrop.

Since we don’t know which partner it is and we don’t have any other proof that shows that they’re not just lying about what the tech can do (or confused), that’s more of a salesperson’s unverifiable tall tale than a smoking gun.

Some reporter would have to dig deeper to get to the bottom of it.

If I had to guess, the partner mentioned here is likely a library provider used in those ad-laden mobile games that are advertised in other ad-laden mobile games. If this is actually happening, I think the overlap between people who'd notice what's happening and actually run these apps for a prolonged period is small to non existent.

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