Hundreds of smartphone apps are monitoring users through their microphones
the-independent.com
the-independent.com
Stop writing like that.
For decades, this prompted the consumer to say, Why would I care about advertisers showing me ads that are more relevant to me?
And so consumers didn't care about privacy.
Not realizing that that's not the entirety of what the surveillance will eventually be used for.
Hopefully everyone isn't about to learn, the hard way, one of the worst case scenarios.
I called out a journalist, writing for a broader audience, who was effectively implying to the populace that those risks don't exist, and that the only thing in question was how relevant the ads they are shown.
> Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter.
I assume Android has something similar to this but I’m not in touch with the Android ecosystem. This article is pretty old so I can believe that apps, far enough in the past, could do this. But it is otherwise some fearmongering you would see copy-pasted among tech illiterate.
Say the person says "I will buy a new car next week". Now what? How will the ad agency bombard the person with car ads? I mean outside of the one app that has gathered the information?
And fingerprinting? Even if the fingerprint is unique - now what? They still could only target the user while the user is using apps that are complicit in this advertising scheme, right?
I think your belief that they can only target while using the app is naive. They can sell the data to aggregators for more sophisticated use.