• I Cast Fist
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    442 months ago

    I remember reading some time ago that “the idea (of phones listening to everything you say to serve ads) makes no economic sense, because it’d be too expensive to run”

    Looks like it actually isn’t “too expensive” to run in the end.

    • @[email protected]
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      162 months ago

      Except Facebook never used it this was a 3rd party trying to hype up investors. Many audits have been run on these apps and there is no way they use your microphone. It’s way cheaper to just look at your search history.

    • Maeve
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      132 months ago

      Yep, and it’s not just Facebook, not just microphone. My lappie recently started serving ads for something I searched on a device not linked to it. I’m guessing it’s my ISP engaging in these sneak tactics.

    • @[email protected]
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      2 months ago

      It’s not when it’s your device doing the computing. All electronic devices should have visible hardware indicators for when their camara or microphone is on, but that’s a consumer rights issue most people are dismissive of, so it’s not happening. Some people even always want it on for the assistant functionality.

    • Schadrach
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      82 months ago

      Even then, you have local voice recognition. You don’t need to stream all microphone recordings to some central server for processing, you just do voice recognition and keep a log of say the last 100 nouns and a high priority log for the last twenty nouns used near verbs like purchase, buy or get. Then send those lists to the ad provider as context. All the hard work is done on the client device and the same backend used for ad context on web pages can be used for this as well.

      • mrinfinity
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        62 months ago

        Then hide it encrypted in an image upload or some other packet. Listen for ‘buy a <something>’ encrypt its text version, wait for something to cargo it with in a data transmission so people looking at data transmissions aren’t any the wiser, hide it in some obscure way that would look normal otherwise, it’s intercepted, sends off to advertisers. Adtech is cyber terrorism.

    • @[email protected]
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      22 months ago

      Yeah, a marketing agency selling snake oil to people that actually think they can do it is not expensive. Of course they never actually built the tech.