Is Google Always Listening: Live Test [video] (opens in new tab)

The fact that this dumb “Google/FB listens to you in the background and uses it to serve ads” myth is still around even on HackerNews is insane to me.

Do you all really think that if this contributed a measureable portion of ads that it wouldn’t leak? There’d also have to be a large amount of hardware dedicated to speech transcription—running constant speech to text on every google chrome browser would need so much compute.

Not to mention that it’d be possible to actually show that the company was lying by modifying microphone drivers and showing that they activate in the background. I’m pretty sure you could also just do it the same way they make game hacks—get access to chrome memory and show that there’s sections that match the recorded speech.

Indisputable proof that this happens would be a PR disaster for either company and cause legal action too.

I’m really in dismay at how long this myth has persisted.

I have had this happen with my Xiaomi android phone. I've had a couple of times where I get ads served pertaining to conversations I've had with random people when my phone is laying nearby, silently listenting. No googling the topics from my side, simply random conversation.

It even seems to be able to translate conversations in my native language into displaying English ads. Creepy as hell.

I'm thinking of going back to Apple, it's just that their phones as so bloody expensive now. Sigh.

It hapenned to me on two different occasions that I've been discussing a topic with a friend (one that I never searched for) that was later shown to me as an ad. In one particular case he told me of metal casted spinners (like the one in Ibception). About two days later I saw an ad for this. I don't believe this could be a coincidence.

Time for a company to leverage on hardware button to switch off mics, camera and gps. I know a lot of people who would buy it

There are lots of anecdotes around about things like this, but correlation does not constitute causation. Where are e.g. the wireshark dumps showing that data was transmitted to some server while/after he was talking? Capturing the traffic should be a simple exercises.

I think the first step for solving this problem on mobile is having an indicator that an app is "listening". Just like the "location" icon pops up in the top bar on Android (and going into settings for location shows you which apps recently requested location), having an identical icon/history setup for microphone access would be perfect. Same goes for front/back camera.

One could shoot everything on a desktop and search for dog toys on another device on the same network/IP. I'd bet the guy is trolling.

to be fair could this not be any app on his phone that is listening?

I assume that the big ad aggregators like google etc. would be up for integrating with anyone who provided testably good data, and also it may be that the system is being gamed from the other end.. where hints are passed to the ad bidding bot (of the dog toy company) to pay more for your attention.

its a pretty crappy state of affairs we have.. its a shame that our media (and so much of everything) is owned by so few - it makes it very hard to fight against any of this :( no one has any interest in actually fixing this or making big changes as they are all using it to power their growth and so their delusional valuations.

There was nothing more depressing than working as a BA for a big company and realising that every metric was openly being gamed, objectives were stupid and impossible to meet - but it didn't matter as so long as they kept a constant suite of major structural change projects on the go (buying companies, moving profits and ownership over boarders etc.) they could meet all of their targets and just keep the lies going.

The lower level staff had to play along as their managers would fire them if they didn't play the game. the managers had to keep to the line to maintain their promoted state and keep moving up.. the most senior management could just believe the numbers and fire a middle manager if they didn't like what they got. and the shareholders didn't care as if the targets are hit the share-price just keeps rising and rising.

There was no case i could make to do anything about this, I think i proved the issue to several people but there was no way of people doing anything about it without damaging their own lot :(

Since then I have had much more understanding with the broken nature of the world, how long it will take to fix and how sometimes (often) you really do just need to let the wheels come off before there will be any action - as by that point people are less worried about being blamed and are more likely to act.

The test in this video was obviously staged.

Betteridge's law of headlines strikes again.