Every time I read some technical description about why this isn't happening, the technical description seems convincing.<p>However...<p>A friend tested the theory a few years ago. He doesn't own a swimming pool, doesn't want to, and has never expressed any desire to. He put his and his wife's phone on the table and said to the wife (loudly), "Why don't we look into pool fencing?". She agreed with him. Shortly after, on both of their phones, on a particular social network, they were inundated with ads for....pool fencing.
My experience working at one of the companies that gets accused of this a lot is that many colleagues <i>wish</i> we were as evil as claimed because it would be so much easier do their jobs that way than struggling through the reality of it which is endless red tape over the tiniest issues that have even the slightest proximity to privacy. So I've been a bit skeptical too.
They don't need to: they can read your mind.<p>My proof? Yesterday I was driving home and I saw an old Toyota Previa minivan and thought to myself "Oh, a Previa, you don't see those very often these days." When I got home, I started scrolling through my Google News and it showed me an advert for the new Previa.<p>I agree with Simon: you basically aren't going to convince someone that their phone doesn't listen to you and serve you adverts based on it, because they've run into instances where it seems like it.
One thing that is rarely discussed in relation to this urban myth is that it is widely believe and yet it doesn't actually effect the behavior of most believers. That is one of the major reasons why most companies and many governments don't care about privacy, the public doesn't really care about it either.<p>People will of course choose privacy over no privacy with all else being equal, but privacy is the first thing sacrificed when push comes to shove. If the average person is given the choice of having everything said within earshot of their phone being recorded and sent to Facebook or giving up Instagram, they'll happily choose Instagram and forsake their privacy.<p>If privacy advocates want to start turning the tide in this battle, the first step needs to be convincing the average person why privacy is important on a personal and tangible level. No arguments about future totalitarian regimes or hypothetical ideals. Abstract concepts like that rarely motivate people who have so many more practical political concerns. It needs to be something that is more important to people than having access to Instagram. And I have absolutely no idea how that could be accomplished which makes me concerned that we're already too late.
I know someone who worked on smart TV software. They explicitly added audio fingerprinting via integrated microphone so they could determine which programs you were watching for ad profiling.<p>When in the history of online ads have advertisers <i>not</i> used available data?
I had this happen to me recently. I was speaking to a friend about a subject that suddenly started to appear in ads after I hung up. It was spooky. But I think it has more to do with the activities related to the people we know. I'm sure because of Android, Gmail and search they have a good understanding of our general association group. I bet my friend did a search on what we were talking about and Google was able to determine that others in the group would be interested in the subject. They don't need the microphone input. They have better (more direct?) ways to get the information.
> ...they would need to be feeding those snippets in almost real time into a system which forwards them onto advertising partners who then feed that information into targeting networks...<p>I think this is totally mistaken. An ad seller which also wants to respect privacy keeps this data in-house and does the ad targeting themselves. The advertiser never needs to see personal information for this kind of market to give people ads related to overheard conversations.
The reason I think this isn't happening (other than they have told us it's not happening and technically seems very difficult to do this long without researchers/people figuring it out), is that in my life I've spent millions and millions of dollars on ad budget, we spent so much with twitter they made us custom hoodie, nobody tried to sell this function to me, it's not an enterprise level option, I've seen those, and it's not a button in the ad platform, so how is the key word getting into an ad network getting attributed to my ad profile and my ad served? There is a lot of rich ad enhancement you can buy at the enterprise level, but I've never seen anything like that mentioned even remotely. There are A LOT of ways I can target you, some of them pretty creepy, but using convo snippets from the phone? I can't even think how that would work.
I dunno, seems trivial to me.<p>Like if an arduino can reliably carry 1 wakeword, an iphone could carry what? 64 at minimum?<p>Instead of waking up recording the conversation and sending it to the stasi, it could just toggle a bool in your secret advertising profile, then sync that up at random intervals.<p>They dont need context, they just need "Biscuit" "Nappies" "Birthday".<p>Not to say it isn't all made up. It probably is. I just dont think its technically difficult to achieve. It is probably all psychology. But sitting there with a packet capture going as you talk about dogfood isnt necessarily a great test to confirm the negative.
We search for everything we talk about these days…our location services are always on. The times I’ve noticed this I can usually trace it back to a friend had been searching for something and then we (our phones) were in the same place. Even the guy from the lawsuit with the doctor… his phone knows he was at that doctor and that doctor offers that procedure. Seems possible without listening.
This doesn’t seem that hard to test? Put a phone on WiFi, run it through a traffic sniffer, and see if it is constantly sending little audio packets to listener1486.facebook.com or whatever.<p>Or heck, open up a phone and stick a probe on the mic lead. See when it is getting power or not.
> 404 Media previously reported Cox Media Group (CMG) was advertising a service that claimed to target ads based on what potential customers said near device microphones. Now, here is the pitch deck CMG sent to prospective companies. Google has kicked CMG off its Partner Program in response.<p><a href="https://www.404media.co/heres-the-pitch-deck-for-active-listening-ad-targeting/" rel="nofollow">https://www.404media.co/heres-the-pitch-deck-for-active-list...</a>
The alternative is worse: more passive forms of targeting are so good that advertisers don't need to record your every moment in order to make a large number of people genuinely believe that they are.<p>It's relatively comforting to think they'd be so brazen as to care about your every word, as opposed to the fact that they own so much information about you that they can predict your actions and thoughts better than you can.
Reuters journalist Jon Stempel repeated the plaintiffs' paranoid and unsubstantiated allegations but did not include a single statement from Apple, just a vacant "did not immediately respond". If only there were years of statements made under oath in the courts to draw from.<p>Siri uses a pseudonymous identifier when communicating with Apple's services. The identifier is not linked to your Apple ID. Therefore Siri does not have access to your iCloud data. When you ask Siri to "call mom", it constructs a search query which is then executed on-device against your contacts database.<p>More of these requests are served entirely on-device. Just ask: how is that consistent with the idea that they are doing ad targeting based on Siri requests?<p>You can request a data export for your Apple account and see that there's no Siri data included in it. If they are caught lying, EU regulators will have a field day.<p>Apple describes their ad targeting here. They list the—frankly boring—signals they use for ad personalization, which does <i>not</i> include anything you say to Siri or have in your personal iCloud data. <a href="https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/data/en/apple-advertising/" rel="nofollow">https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/data/en/apple-advertisin...</a><p>No one is apologizing for Apple's nontransparent collection of Siri audio for QA purposes, which is what they settled over and made opt-in.
Neither do I. There’s no technical way it can be happening without it being easily spotted, not to mention how many would have to conspire.<p>However I am still waiting for a comprehensive explanation for how it is <i>actually</i> happening.<p>There there are many ways to correlate people and their interests, but I wonder how deep it goes. Basic geolocation and public interaction metadata: Sure. But I’ve also heard people believe that it ought to be possible to spot closeness via Wifi and Bluetooth.<p>This is such a culturally relevant topic that there <i>must</i> be some serious knowledge about it somewhere.<p>As for my own tests, I’ve made it a point to mention that I’m considering spending money on a well advertised-for product that I haven’t yet searched for online every time this topic comes up. No ads so far. In the next phase I’ll progressively tell more people to start looking it up.
The argument I use to convince people is to ask them how long your battery lasts when you’re running any apps, I’ll then ask how long do you think your battery would last if the apps were listening all day long.<p>I can’t tell if my friends are convinced or if they’re too polite (or disinterested) to argue.
It's hard to tell I can imagine some motivated individuals could utilize all sorts of packaging systems and embed them in third-party applications and so on, and extract pertinent information using this type of surveillance, and then sell this data to data brokers which would sell it to the large ad networks. I mean there's lots of ways to transcribe even most of the whisper models can run all the way down to 150 megabyte file not to mention the quantization versions of these models. I have something that I run on my computer for my server not throughout my house that does real Time transcription and whatnot but I use it for my own purposes, so you know someone who makes money off advertising or even selling insights about people, would certainly find ways to do this. I mean it's simply not regulated is it?<p><a href="https://huggingface.co/spaces/jilangdi/whisper-web" rel="nofollow">https://huggingface.co/spaces/jilangdi/whisper-web</a>
As of 2019 (my last contact with the industry), there was no real-time onboarding solution that could do this. Or if it existed it wasn't good enough to attract any attention. People were saying this in 2014 or so. I remember around 2017 thinking it would be pretty cool (repurpose wake-word detection to do some pre-determined segments or something) but no-one had it working. There's all sorts of stuff going on behind the scenes in ad tech and if <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=manigandham">https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=manigandham</a> would probably have something useful to share if he was still around.<p>But it wasn't real. Even back then people would publish "sources" saying it was being done, but I'm telling you that if it worked well people would be doing it and we were in the middle of it all and couldn't find anyone who was.<p>There were smart-devices that acted as beacons to report people to ICE and stuff like that and they used personal data to tie it together. So there was crazy stuff out there (none tied to the respectable ad tech industry HN knows as the "privacy-violators" and so on). But this specific thing wasn't there.
One option is that people you talk to look for the stuff to discuss.<p>E.g. person A talks about bouldering with person B. Person A then continues with their day while person B googles bouldering terms.<p>A and B then receive both bouldering ads. Person By because of the googling and person A because of proximity to person B.<p>Person A then assumes the phone spies what they say, but it doesn't. Location is enough.
Ask HN - let's say hypothetically, our phones are as bad as some think. Face camera taking covert pics, regular screenshots sent back home, microphone recording every conversation, every message, email, and bit of internet traffic scraped and harvested for ads and anything else - how would you change your habits if you knew this was happening?<p>Answer - you wouldn't.
The danger with this kind of opinion is that you start out doing some healthy critical thinking, and research. You form an opinion, based on good intentions. Then you spend all your time on explaining your conclusion to others. At that time, people who have the same opinion flock to you, and you don't have time to do more research.<p>This is the problem with experts and politicians. You can make money on either position, but once you have started stating your opinion, it's unlikely you'll do active research to disprove your opinion, as many have already concluded [1].<p>I'm happy that Simon only sees this as a hobby.<p>[1] <a href="https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/11/30/salary/" rel="nofollow">https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/11/30/salary/</a>
Related:<p><i>Apple will pay $95M to settle Siri privacy lawsuit</i><p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42579009">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42579009</a>
Has he read this:
<a href="https://www.404media.co/mindsift-brags-about-using-smart-device-microphone-audio-to-target-ads-on-their-podcast/" rel="nofollow">https://www.404media.co/mindsift-brags-about-using-smart-dev...</a>
From a potential culpability or liability perspective, the question of targeted advertising is irrelevant. Intercepting private communications without consent, absent an applicable exception, is still against the law, e.g., the Wiretap Act and/or the California Invasion of Proivacy Act, ads or no ads. Targeted ads would not be used as evidence that private communications have been intercepted.<p>Many years ago, Google was sued for wiretapping and lost. See Joffe v Google<p>More recently Apple was sued for eavesdropping without consent. They just settled for $95 million. See Lopez v Apple
My wife has a very new (<2yo) iPhone. We live in public housing, no luxuries. We were talking about getting her some slippes, and I made a joke about her not getting any Gucci slippers. The Gucci ad appeared on her phone within 30 minutes.<p>I sh_t you not. She was a bit gobsmacked. I was neither surprised nor disturbed.<p>That's real anecdata, my friends. It could have been coincidence, and while we have nothing to hide, it's not an optimal situation, whatever the cause.<p>Besides, we ain't buying no Gucci slippers, no way, no how.
My wife and I, just being goofy, have an inside joke featuring a relatively uncommon name that we ocasionally yell out, like a few times a week. Two months ago we got junk mail addressed to UNCOMMON NAME + our last name.<p>I don’t think its a coincidence. Something is listening. Its kind of messed up that I am a normally rational, skeptical minded person, fairly knowledgable about information security and in 2024 I can’t even draw any clear lines between a nutty conspiracy theory and reality.<p>I’m sorry but I don’t find this article basically just saying “yeah but what are the chances Apple would do that?” persuasive at all.
I suspect that it is emergent behavior that even the ad companies themselves aren't aware of.<p>I have definitely experienced it myself, and have no doubts that it happens.
There is something I've always been wondering about companies' privacy policy. When Google says that it does not send user audio data to their server, does that prevent them from sending say whisper embedding of the audio itself? Because technically it would not be audio. It would still include a very rich representation of what the user said. Rich enough to be used to sell things.
I find it completely plausible that either Google, Facebook or some other installed app is listening to your conversations to develop marketing profiles.<p>What I find amazing is that people don't use ad blockers! I wouldn't be able to tell you if they are harvesting my voice data, because I haven't seen an ad in years! It is trivial to block ads, why do so many people choose to see them?
What happens is that you in fact lend part of your brain to all the data that you see on your screen. You don't realize it but your subconscious mind sees senses a lot of stuff your conscious mind is not aware about. Until you see it after you just talked about it thinking it was your idea and panic.<p>What you actually talk about with people (excluding maybe the proffesional stuff) is mundane stuff you see on your screens, newspapers, billboards, etc.
The assumption is that it's either widespread or nonexistent, but I could see it being just a rare instance that gets A/B tested, and maybe by now the companies have decided it's not worth it. But IME all kinds of not quite kosher stuff gets A/B tested, and that would line up with anecdotes where it's too specific to be coincidence, but also uncommon and only affecting certain people.
I have successfully argued this for at least a certain class of devices. Namely, it practically can't happen _for small devices_. e.g., a TV remote with a voice feature activated by a button simply won't have enough _power_ to constantly be listening, uploading, or processing.<p>Harder to convince folks that _nothing_ does this, but takes an edge off their more paranoid tendencies.
What if the activation of the microphone for marketing purposes occurred not systematically but randomly, making it harder to detect such functionality? And what if this functionality were activated with code loaded remotely at the moment it needs to be used?
I've noticed people often research products, services, medical issues/ailments, etc. using Google (or similar). When they start seeing related ads on social media, they tend to attribute more to having discussed the topic out loud, forgetting about the searches they made from the same device or IP address.
Another option not mentioned is that the thing they’re talking about might have been in their subconscious because of an ad they’d recently seen but didn’t notice. The topic/concept/product eventually bubbles up to consciousness, they talk about it, then start noticing the ads that were already there.
Maybe the algorithms simply concluded that you might interested in things your friends are interested in.. that's part of why you're friends?<p>If any of your friends searched for something online, and you're connected to them in a social network, they might show you the same ad by proximity.
listen to me when i say this. we will start killing if we don't have same access to that tech. why kill monster? well I'm dead anyway as a slave to their machine.<p>people better demand equal access or start slitting throats right now.
The post's arguments can basically be summed up in three categories:<p>1) "Doing this wouldn't be technically feasible or would require a technical effort wildly out of proportion"<p>2) "There are lots of psychological biases that lead people to believe something like this happened even if it didn't actually happen"<p>3) "Apple is such a nice and honest company, they would <i>never</i> do such a thing..."<p>As for 1), there is enough technical discussion in this thread to disprove that point. But just as a reminder: Google build an always-on song recognition service into android, free of charge, without any obvious monetization, <i>just because they can</i>. OpenAI released Whisper last year as open source, a highly precise audio transcription model. By now lots of variants for on-device use exist.<p>All that tech doesn't just exist, it's not even seen as a moat. It's already being commodified.<p>As for 2), yes of course cognitive biases are always a thing. The problem is that you cannot use them to <i>disprove</i> something. They constitute an absence of evidence, not evidence of absence.<p>As for 3), yeah no comment here. Except maybe, remember Snowden. "No one would do such a thing" has already been spectacularly wrong in the past.
The author admits the fine for breaking this rule is basically a non-issue compared to the potential earnings. Why wouldn’t the most valuable company on earth see this as a huge, easy win to record and advertise based on those recordings?
OK, but query me this batman. Lately, I have been inundated by ads for anything to do with Kayaks. I do not own a Kayak. I do not want to own a Kayak and have never even spoken the word as far as I can remember. But for some reason, I am seeing ads for a Kayak carrier, a Kayak launcher, roof rack, you name it. It is so weird. I cannot figure out why suddenly these idiots think I am remotely interested in Kayaking. Kayaking, it is just so random. But way back in the 2000s, a friend of mine worked for a web site dev company. Her job was to visit with clients and take pictures of whatever they were hawking, write some copy and the dudes back in her office would turn it into a web page. She would occasionally ask me to come along and stare at whatever crap they were selling and act like I cared about it while she snapped some photos. I joked that meant technically I was a model. But then one time she was doing a web page for a marketing company that did focus groups. That was back before we had smart phones tracking your every move. I posed in a fake focus group with some other people and after that, the dude that ran the place asked me if I wanted to be in real focus group and I agreed. They seemed to think there were certain connections that made no sense. For example, they were sure that they could market adult diapers to nerds that play video games who were to absorbed in their game to get off their ass to take a simple dump. Apparently that is actually a thing? Then I went to this one focus group where they were asking if you own a dog and buy a lot of peanut butter. Read between the lines. So gross. So, I am guessing, some marketing weirdo thinks there is some weird connection between something else in my life an Kayaks. It would be interesting to know what that is. But, I think, a lot of times, they might be right about those weird connections that make you feel like they are reading your mind. Just in this case, whatever it is, maybe that I watch a lot of documentaries and that means I like Kayaking? I guess they only have to be right some percentage of the time. Just not in this case.
It's because the big companies have the simulation's/global consciousness' hacked endpoints as uplinks into their infrastructure. lol
> As one report put it, “Amazon can acquire more comprehensive data on people’s living habits....” The company wants to sell real-world services such as house cleaning, plumbing, and restaurant delivery, but according to some insiders, the vision is more far-reaching: an omniscient voice that knows all experience and anticipates all action! Already, forward-looking Amazon patents include the development of a “voice-sniffer algorithm” integrated into any device and able to respond to hot words such as “bought,” “dislike,” or “love” with product and service offers.<p>The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2018) - Zuboff, Shoshana<p>Given that this is form 2018, the rise of voice assistants since then, all the market forces at play and the reward highly outweighing regulatory penalty payments there is little that's supporting that users are not being recorded. The TOS phrasses like 'service improvement', 'may share with third parties', and 'user experience' are common place and are not particularly concise. Simply dismissing anekdotes and honing in on Apple Inc., the only company which does not want/need to sell data, is not convincing.<p>I think people tend to shoot the messenger, when it comes to privacy discussions. Getting told one is being spyed on by a divice, which is so intimt and close to one slef is embarassing. Of course things are more like a spectrum and differ from case to case.
To all the people expressing doubt and disbelief, refer to every whistleblower story which was derided as tinfoil hat conspiracy until blown up. If we still haven't learnt that money will make corporations (and people) do despicable things, only we are to blame ourselves.
What I worry about sometimes is malware sniffing for hardware wallet seed phrases being practiced out loud by users when they think they're alone. I always tell people if they keep crypto on a hardware wallet - NEVER speak your seed phrase aloud. This could also be spied on by laser microphone surveillance.
I had a brand of wine in a closed, we were discussing with my life our wedding. Immediately this one brand of wine popped up on my wife user feed, wall. That happens from time to time, so, yeah... I know that it works like this for sure.
Many mobile apps use an adtech SDK which does on-device audio keyword spotting.
The company making this SDK is super secretive, so not much information about it.
oddly enough, I compare this conspiracy theory with clout-chasing word-of-god christians on social media: there's an element of "i don't understand how it works, therefore the simplest answer must be correct"<p>if everyday people knew just how much data companies have on them and their habits, they'd be absolutely horrified. There's so much personal attribution data that most companies that know how to market properly are going to get you at some point. You may think you're careful with what you share and what is being recorded, but if you are friends or relatives of someone who does, or if you live in the same street as someone who does, they data on you.<p>I used to work for these kind of companies, and have a lot of friends and family who currently do, and the stuff they track and the patterns they have never fail to surprise me and make me laugh.<p>Sure, if they could, they would absolutely listen in to you, that would make their jobs a hell of a lot easier, but they don't. But the data they have on you so goddamn accurate, it's easy to assume they must be.
Theres a reason why they put a microphone in every single Internet connected device they can, even when it serves little purpose. My remote has a mic ffs, not to mention oddly specific ads after certain conversations.
I now believe it's happening based on this article.<p>We already know about TV piracy detection leading to bars showing soccer without a license being fined.