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this post was submitted on 01 May 2024
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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.
~Anti~ ~Commercial-AI~ ~license~ ~(CC~ ~BY-NC-SA~ ~4.0)~
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)
Instead of guessing, you people need to learn to use Wireshark and find out for yourself.
No, they don't just listen all the time with an open mic and just send all audio to the cloud. Anyone in cybersecurity would definitely notice that and sound the alarm. There's probably tens of thousands of people watching what these companies and their tech do all day long.
They can get all the data they need through other means, like trackers. Most of us aren't consciously aware of the metric shitton of bread crumbs we all leave behind on the net.
Wireshark may or may not help you here. The proposed mechanism is abusing the wake words, which are processed locally on the device. Each marketing wake word could be processed, set a flag and go back to sleep with no network activity. Periodically a bit array of flags would be sent to the server with any other regular traffic (checking for notifications, perhaps). The actual audio never gets sent. I'm not saying that Facebook actually does this, but it's a reasonable explanation for the behaviour seen in the Vice article.