My previous employer - a multi-billion dollar internet search company would secretly listen to people’s conversation via their mobile devices then place ads on the same devices (e.g in the browser search results or at the start of videos) based on keywords from the conversations, this had to be kept hidden of course and this large well-known company shall remain nameless.
You sure about that? because if it’s Google, that particular method of doing this would be easily discovered.
Also, the scary part isn’t that they could do this by listening to your phone, the scary part is that they DON’T need to listen to your phone to do exactly that. Much easier to identify multiple devices coming from the same network (both physical and social), and then figuring out query interests, and then send ads down the same pipelines.
Yeah, people who believe that Google is listening in to their conversations just to sell ads really don’t understand a) how pointless that is considering how much they already know about you from the stuff you voluntarily give them, and b) why it’s legally not even something they’d consider. If they were doing it and someone discovered proof then the company would be sued out of business. Why would they risk the damage to their rep and finances just to sell ads, when they can already sell ads accurately based on data they’ve legally acquired
And not to mention the amount of storage and processing power it would take to record everyone’s conversations, 24/7.
Google being sued out of business? By the AMERICAN “justice” system, criminal or civil?
If you truly believe that would ever happen, I have a mountain chalet in Florida to sell you.
If they were doing it and someone discovered proof then the company would be sued out of business.
Are there any examples of large companies being sued out of business for something like privacy breach? I may be mistaken, because it’s one of the common conspiracies that large companies are listening though your mic, but weren’t there actually cases like that? With sometihng like FB or Alexa or whatever?
Is it the one that reminds you when your microphone is off when you say the key phrase?
Ah, well if it isn’t the exact reason I sold my google nest/ mesh routers the same day that I bought them! Imagine voluntarily placing microphones around your home owned by some shady corporation.
They had a physical off switch for the microphone, but could still somehow remind you that your mic was disabled when you talked to it. Cool. Very cool.
I’ve had a suspicion for a few years about this phenomenon. I know that simply recording audio and transmitting it for processing to serve ads is a violation of the federal wiretapping laws. I know they know it too.
So do they get around it by doing the processing locally on the device? So the phone effectively has tens of thousands of wake words that are trained for different things. “I want a big truck” -> phone parses that out “big” “truck” and sends those words up to google in a keyword dump. So technically it isnt wiretapping. Right?
Plus, it avoids the security researchers who use wireshark to monitor those devices. They are looking for audio streams, not a keyword dump that is encrypted and can be sent asynchronously at a later date in a much smaller file size.
How would they know that because you mentioned a thing, that it means you’re then worth targeting a ad for? “I wish i could find my fork”, or “I saw someone eating a Mars Bar” or “My mate Phil just got the new Lego Batmobile” or all sorts of conversations that just mention a product in passing. What, do they have a secret set of phrases that they’re listening out for that is linked to an intent to want to buy it?
It’s just so far-fetched that I’m baffled that people truly believe this is actually happening.
Just because technically something might be possible, doesn’t mean that there’s actually a valid reason for anyone to actually do it. What is actually in it for Google to do this? Their regular, not unethical or illegal advertising processes already work so spectacularly well that they’ve killed off entire advertising industries already.
Can you explain more, because the way this is written I’m not sure how they would do that technically.
Assuming this is Google, I could maybe see it with things like Gmail. Text is easy to scan and ads in things like Youtube videos are dynamic so they could be doing that. Same with something like Microsoft and Outlook.com.
But listening to actual conversations (as in phone calls) at a large scale and then using that to put dynamic ads in videos or search results seems impossible to do at scale.
The other day I decided to rewatch trailer park boys . Watching on a Roku tv with Plex . The next day I get an ad for the trailer park boys app or something. There’s no way it’s a coincidence .
Is there something I can do to prevent this from happening? I don’t want to ditch my smartphone and use a fliphone tho
That requires on-device AI to avoid suspission from mobile data usage and OS admin rights to hide the <microphone in use> light, or a “excuse” to why its on.
Even if you cant name them, go ahead and let others, connect to tor, create an account with a burner email service and post their insites on the matter.
Dont forget, they can hold all the physical buttons at once until the screen goes black, and head to the local library
Also, try out a de-googled pixel somtime (graphine,lineageos,etc…)