What I want to know is why when I’m talking to my wife in the car about buying new shoes do I get a YouTube ad that evening about new shoes, when I never got that kind of ad before.
Are our phones listening to us while we talk in the car, and then ads are generated from that?
I’d really like to know the answer to that question.
Some people like the option where they just say “Hey Google” (or whatever) and then the phone talks back to them, so they’re always listening so they can hear that initiation sequence. This old article from Vice describes what I’m speaking of.
Personally I’d like the ability to turn that feature off, so I have to explicitly enable the microphone to have Google listen to what I’m saying.
Isn’t the activation phrase on a separate piece of hardware that’s not networked?
[Citation required.]
NGL I don’t the the guy with the anti ai blurb in all his comments is very knowledgeable about tech lol
You know, if you have to try to “Kill the Messenger” to win a point, then you’re not really winning anything, and you’re just disrespecting another human being.
I’ll refer you to the Vice article that has been linked in this conversation above.
The mic is always hot, and neither you or I know what exactly is being stored locally and then sent in batch later on, or sent in real time. Only Google does.
But you see you’re wrong. We know how on device wake words work. I’m sorry, your vice article from 2018 is out of date.
Edit: I think I get it. You don’t know the difference between someone saying a microphone is always on (hot) for processing a wake word vs saying the microphone is always on (hot) for data collection. It’s two very different concepts. We know how wake words are processed. It’s done on chip in the device. Nothing is being sent across the internet.
We also have monitored cell phones when using wake words. There’s no network connectivity happening during that processing time. It’s easy to check.
Of course that doesn’t mean it will never happen in the future or that devices haven’t already been made to do so. We do know consumer cell phones do not appear to be doing this. Again, it would be obvious with suspicious battery drain and network activity.
You don’t know the difference between someone saying a microphone is always on (hot) for processing a wake word vs saying the microphone is always on (hot) for data collection.
No, I’m very aware of the distinction, my career was as a computer programmer, and have worked with hardware as well, and I’m very aware of technology, and have an Android certification.
You were just assuming one thing that I was saying, when I was actually saying a general thing.
The mic is hot by default. It has to listen for the activation sequence.
What I’m suggesting is that while that mic is hot it’s also gathering other data and storing it locally, and then it sends it off in a batch with other traffic later on, so it’s not detectable from someone who’s monitoring network traffic from the device.
Temporally, you’re assuming that all eavesdropping is transmitted in real time, where I am not.
What are the odds than anyone in the household searched for the shows? Targeting ads to all devices on the same IP or even devices that have previously been on the same network happens.
I was able to predict that my mom had been researching “bunion shoes” after I started seeing ads, seemingly randomly, for them not long after she came to my house to visit.
It’s not even just that, humans a incredibly predictable and that predictability is able to be microtargeted based on trends and past activity of an individual.
It’s not even just that, humans a incredibly predictable and that predictability is able to be microtargeted based on trends and past activity of an individual.
I literally let years go by between buying shoes, no kidding. So I don’t think that what you described would cover my specific case.
Especially out of the blue, and not shown ads for that at all before, and exactly around the same time when that discussion comes up in a moving vehicle.
(As an aside, and in case you’re curious, when it comes time to buy new shoes, I usually buy two or three pairs of the same shoe, and then stick the other ones in the closet (usually buy at a really good sales price). Then when the first ones wear out I throw them away, and grab the next pair out of the closet.)
From where I see it, there is no pattern of purchasing shoes there, unless you truly expect Google AI/servers to track you multi-years long (with the required CPU and storage requirements needed to do so), to establish an unique shoe purchasing pattern, instead of what they more likely are doing, which is looking at recent online and microphone activity.
AKA, Occam’s Razor.
And also, how would Google know beforehand, that I will walk into a shoe store and buy shoes, if I didn’t do any search for them ahead of time online?
I would only want the phone to listen when I actually ask it a question, not 24/7.
If the phone does not listen 24/7, then how does it know when you are asking a question? It should discard all information until the wake up word is called in theory.
Only way it could work if you have to press a button to start listening to your question. This was the case in the past, however people wanted to ask questions while showering or something since they introduced this “improvement”.
If the phone does not listen 24/7, then how does it know when you are asking a question?
I pushed the microphone button on the keyboard editor when I want the microphone to listen to me.
For example, when I comment here on Lemmy, I use the voice-to-text option to type out my comments, via the microphone.
It should discard all information until the wake up word is called in theory.
But even with always-on listening mode, it shouldn’t actually be taking any of your data for advertising (or legal issues for that matter) and using it, unless you explicitly authorize it to do so.
And it has to be very explicit, not buried down in some long multi-page license somewhere that only a knowledgeable lawyer would be able to know and find.
Oh, and you should be able to opt-out of that mode as well.
I’m not aware of any research that’s proven that phone are listening on conversations and serve ads based on that, just a bunch of anecdotal evidence. there has been some research a few years ago that proved the opposite, though.
there has been some research a few years ago that proved the opposite, though.
Could you supply a link for that article? I would very much like to read it. Also, I would want it to be a recent article, to be believable for the current conversation we’re having.
just a bunch of anecdotal evidence
Well, we all are just black boxing this, as we do not have access to these corporation’s servers and what data they collect.
But you have to admit, that in my case at least, Occam’s Razor would definitely point you in a certain direction.
you have to admit, that in my case at least, Occam’s Razor would definitely point you in a certain direction.
it points me in the direction of you either being in the demographic currently targeted by the ad provider, or you having been shown the ad before without noticing it, and only paying attention after talking about the topic, and experiencing frequency illusion afterwards.
This material is based upon work supported by the DHS S&T contract FA8750-17-2-0145; the NSF under Award No. CNS-1408632, IIS-1408345, and IIS-1553088; a Security, Privacy and Anti-Abuse award from Google; a Comcast Innovation Fund grant; and a Data Trans- parency Lab grant. Any opinions, findings, and conclu- sions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of our sponsors.
Ignoring ‘Gizmodo’ for a moment, not sure if its an unbiased paper or not (its a bit ‘sus’), and the date is from research done in 2017 and published in 2018. Today’s corporations most likely do not follow the same practices they did in 2017.
in that same article is one from Vice, which backs up what I’ve been stating and assuming
do I get to say “Vice? 2018? Yikes.” now?
Yep, you sure do, especially since it comes from the article you supplied. The point being that showing proof from 2017 does not necessarily cover today’s situation.
But it definatley defines that listening in on your phone used to happen back in 2018 at least. Wish we had today’s “word” on the subject.
feel free to link more up-to-date research results.
Considering I was asking you originally, you shouldn’t expect one from me. I was asking you about your initial point, since you were replying to mine, and would not have if I already the information that backs up what you stated.
I am skeptical about listening not only because it was not proven, but also because almost the exact same result is achievable via much, much simpler and omnipresent means.
Answer is no. Google Ads doesn’t work that way. If you perceive such a coincidence, it just happened by chance or you or your wife sent out other signals that buying new shoes is a topic for you.
Still a high chance for a coincidence. And the human mind tends to see patterns to structure the world. Shoe advertisement is not particularly rare in the web.
Coincidence in the sense that the ad that you saw had absolutely no connection to your talk. It was just a random ad. No all advertisements are targeted precisely.
I work in the field and a lot of campaigns on YouTube are just targeted to a selected YT-channel, or a topic like sport videos, or maybe an age group. That’s all. You see an ad because you watched a channel. Like on TV.
Coincidence in the sense that the ad that you saw had absolutely no connection to your talk. It was just a random ad.
I’m willing to admit that’s possible, but when I haven’t seen any for a couple of years (truly), and then see one the same evening, that seems like more than just a coincidence to me. /shrug
What I want to know is why when I’m talking to my wife in the car about buying new shoes do I get a YouTube ad that evening about new shoes, when I never got that kind of ad before.
Are our phones listening to us while we talk in the car, and then ads are generated from that?
I’d really like to know the answer to that question.
Edit: fixed typo, shoes, not shows.
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I highly doubt phones are always listening. Surely at some point by now there would be proof.
There’s no evidence of extra network activity ( your data would be through the roof ).
There’s no evidence of battery drain.
This is of course the phone OS we are talking about. Software like TikTok or Meta could / be when allowed to by the user.
But, they already are.
Some people like the option where they just say “Hey Google” (or whatever) and then the phone talks back to them, so they’re always listening so they can hear that initiation sequence. This old article from Vice describes what I’m speaking of.
Personally I’d like the ability to turn that feature off, so I have to explicitly enable the microphone to have Google listen to what I’m saying.
Anti Commercial-AI license (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
Isn’t the activation phrase on a separate piece of hardware that’s not networked?
NGL I don’t the the guy with the anti ai blurb in all his comments is very knowledgeable about tech lol
[Citation required.]
You know, if you have to try to “Kill the Messenger” to win a point, then you’re not really winning anything, and you’re just disrespecting another human being.
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Not in the context of this
postthread.“ Always listening ” would suggest they are recording at all times in a way that can be used for advertising.
It’s already well understood wake words are processed on device.
I’ll refer you to the Vice article that has been linked in this conversation above.
The mic is always hot, and neither you or I know what exactly is being stored locally and then sent in batch later on, or sent in real time. Only Google does.
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But you see you’re wrong. We know how on device wake words work. I’m sorry, your vice article from 2018 is out of date.
Edit: I think I get it. You don’t know the difference between someone saying a microphone is always on (hot) for processing a wake word vs saying the microphone is always on (hot) for data collection. It’s two very different concepts. We know how wake words are processed. It’s done on chip in the device. Nothing is being sent across the internet.
We also have monitored cell phones when using wake words. There’s no network connectivity happening during that processing time. It’s easy to check.
Of course that doesn’t mean it will never happen in the future or that devices haven’t already been made to do so. We do know consumer cell phones do not appear to be doing this. Again, it would be obvious with suspicious battery drain and network activity.
No, I’m very aware of the distinction, my career was as a computer programmer, and have worked with hardware as well, and I’m very aware of technology, and have an Android certification.
You were just assuming one thing that I was saying, when I was actually saying a general thing.
The mic is hot by default. It has to listen for the activation sequence.
What I’m suggesting is that while that mic is hot it’s also gathering other data and storing it locally, and then it sends it off in a batch with other traffic later on, so it’s not detectable from someone who’s monitoring network traffic from the device.
Temporally, you’re assuming that all eavesdropping is transmitted in real time, where I am not.
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What are the odds than anyone in the household searched for the shows? Targeting ads to all devices on the same IP or even devices that have previously been on the same network happens.
I was able to predict that my mom had been researching “bunion shoes” after I started seeing ads, seemingly randomly, for them not long after she came to my house to visit.
It’s just me and my wife, and we were both in the car together.
Also, I meant to say shoes, not shows. The voice-to-text doesn’t always get me perfectly, and sometimes I miss the typos it creates.
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It’s not even just that, humans a incredibly predictable and that predictability is able to be microtargeted based on trends and past activity of an individual.
I literally let years go by between buying shoes, no kidding. So I don’t think that what you described would cover my specific case.
Especially out of the blue, and not shown ads for that at all before, and exactly around the same time when that discussion comes up in a moving vehicle.
(As an aside, and in case you’re curious, when it comes time to buy new shoes, I usually buy two or three pairs of the same shoe, and then stick the other ones in the closet (usually buy at a really good sales price). Then when the first ones wear out I throw them away, and grab the next pair out of the closet.)
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You just described a pattern, though.
From where I see it, there is no pattern of purchasing shoes there, unless you truly expect Google AI/servers to track you multi-years long (with the required CPU and storage requirements needed to do so), to establish an unique shoe purchasing pattern, instead of what they more likely are doing, which is looking at recent online and microphone activity.
AKA, Occam’s Razor.
And also, how would Google know beforehand, that I will walk into a shoe store and buy shoes, if I didn’t do any search for them ahead of time online?
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It most likely is. And if it’s not your phone, then it’s your car (assuming it has been built in the last few years)
Yeah, that’s really creepy. I would only want the phone to listen when I actually ask it a question, not 24/7.
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If the phone does not listen 24/7, then how does it know when you are asking a question? It should discard all information until the wake up word is called in theory. Only way it could work if you have to press a button to start listening to your question. This was the case in the past, however people wanted to ask questions while showering or something since they introduced this “improvement”.
I pushed the microphone button on the keyboard editor when I want the microphone to listen to me.
For example, when I comment here on Lemmy, I use the voice-to-text option to type out my comments, via the microphone.
But even with always-on listening mode, it shouldn’t actually be taking any of your data for advertising (or legal issues for that matter) and using it, unless you explicitly authorize it to do so.
And it has to be very explicit, not buried down in some long multi-page license somewhere that only a knowledgeable lawyer would be able to know and find.
Oh, and you should be able to opt-out of that mode as well.
Anti Commercial-AI license (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
I’m not aware of any research that’s proven that phone are listening on conversations and serve ads based on that, just a bunch of anecdotal evidence. there has been some research a few years ago that proved the opposite, though.
Could you supply a link for that article? I would very much like to read it. Also, I would want it to be a recent article, to be believable for the current conversation we’re having.
Well, we all are just black boxing this, as we do not have access to these corporation’s servers and what data they collect.
But you have to admit, that in my case at least, Occam’s Razor would definitely point you in a certain direction.
Edit: You should also take a look at this old article from Vice.
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https://gizmodo.com/these-academics-spent-the-last-year-testing-whether-you-1826961188
this is the most recent one I know of.
it points me in the direction of you either being in the demographic currently targeted by the ad provider, or you having been shown the ad before without noticing it, and only paying attention after talking about the topic, and experiencing frequency illusion afterwards.
Gizmodo? 2018? Yikes.
Interesting enough, in that same article is one from Vice, which backs up what I’ve been stating and assuming.
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it’s a summary of a paper posted here: https://recon.meddle.mobi/panoptispy/
do I get to say “Vice? 2018? Yikes.” now?
feel free to link more up-to-date research results.
Thanks for the link. Checking the bottom of it …
… and from the paper …
Ignoring ‘Gizmodo’ for a moment, not sure if its an unbiased paper or not (its a bit ‘sus’), and the date is from research done in 2017 and published in 2018. Today’s corporations most likely do not follow the same practices they did in 2017.
Yep, you sure do, especially since it comes from the article you supplied. The point being that showing proof from 2017 does not necessarily cover today’s situation.
But it definatley defines that listening in on your phone used to happen back in 2018 at least. Wish we had today’s “word” on the subject.
Considering I was asking you originally, you shouldn’t expect one from me. I was asking you about your initial point, since you were replying to mine, and would not have if I already the information that backs up what you stated.
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I am skeptical about listening not only because it was not proven, but also because almost the exact same result is achievable via much, much simpler and omnipresent means.
This old article from Vice seems to have proven it, back in 2018.
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Hi.
I work with and for most of the major tech companies worldwide and yes, we are listening to your cell phone even when you turn off the settings.
Answer is no. Google Ads doesn’t work that way. If you perceive such a coincidence, it just happened by chance or you or your wife sent out other signals that buying new shoes is a topic for you.
None of that happened though. It was on a long car trip, no Internet web browsing done, and no previous searches done from home.
The only time shoes were relevant was a verbal discussion in the vehicle.
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Still a high chance for a coincidence. And the human mind tends to see patterns to structure the world. Shoe advertisement is not particularly rare in the web.
How? Its an isolated environment where the conversation is being had.
Its an explicit viewing of a commercial of a type that is not normally seen. Not exactly a pattern.
I never saw any on YouTube until the evening of that conversation. /shrug
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Coincidence in the sense that the ad that you saw had absolutely no connection to your talk. It was just a random ad. No all advertisements are targeted precisely. I work in the field and a lot of campaigns on YouTube are just targeted to a selected YT-channel, or a topic like sport videos, or maybe an age group. That’s all. You see an ad because you watched a channel. Like on TV.
I’m willing to admit that’s possible, but when I haven’t seen any for a couple of years (truly), and then see one the same evening, that seems like more than just a coincidence to me. /shrug
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