> <i>Advertisers can then use this information to learn more about consumers and target ads more effectively.</i><p>Stop writing like that.<p>For decades, this prompted the consumer to say, <i>Why would I care about advertisers showing me ads that are more relevant to me?</i><p>And so consumers didn't care about privacy.<p>Not realizing that that's not the entirety of what the surveillance will eventually be used for.<p>Hopefully everyone isn't about to learn, the hard way, one of the worst case scenarios.
Duplicate HN submission from over 7! years ago:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16119981">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16119981</a>
(2017) Original source: <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/business/media/alphonso-app-tracking.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/business/media/alphonso-a...</a><p>> Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter.<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html">https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html</a>
We know that microphone use on iPhone requires an entitlement and if an app is actively using audio in the background, an indicator appears on the screen. This has been true for ages.<p>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.
When an app gathers information on someone - for example via the microphone - how does it assign the data to a person?<p>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?