I know my devices are (probably) not listening, but I can't explain it either. Neither of us searched for the product or saw it online or anything, we just discussed something and got ads about it a few minutes to hours later.
The wierdest instance of this is I told my wife her father should consider geting those fixed bridge dentures, next day I start seeing all-on-4 ads on the phone. I asked her if she looked it up (to rule out IP tracking) and she said she hasn't. It's a very random thing to advertise to me, I'm not the target group, I didn't look it up.
A lot of it is IP tracking - I'll start browsing for guitars or some other random stuff my wife has no interest in - she'll start seeing ads for it.
Preparation:
1. Get two identical phones, one that you use, and one that has a dead battery.
2. Fix a set of product-categories.
Experiment:
Every week,
1. Label the phones A and B. Use a coinflip to decide whether the working one is A or B. Record which it was.
2. Hand the phone to someone else. They exchange the labels for 1 and 2. If heads A=1, if tails A=2, and record the coinflip.
3. Get the phone labelled 1 back. Neither of you know whether it is working or not.
4. Randomly pick a topic from the pre-fixed list and talk about the topic near the phone.
5. Let the other person remove the labels.
6. Pick out the working phone and go about your day.
7. Write down whether you see ads relating to the topic, yes or no.
Analysis:
Join the records, to see which weeks you used a working phone, and if those corresponded to seeing ads.
Good target markets are: Grown adults with $$$ who either don’t have teeth or know someone who doesn’t have teeth (likely parents/grandparents/in-laws). This is basically every upper-middle class adult. More people than you think are missing their teeth.
This is perhaps even more creepy than just "phones listening in", but it's not an explanation I hear very often.
If it's listening, you'll start getting ads specific to that snack food, best to try it with a bunch of different products to try and find a pattern.
Ads are getting more targeted and getting closer to the kind of things you would talk about based on your interests and data that networks have collected about you, but we are still pretty far from continuous ad surveillance.
Not thinking this is happening either. But just to speculate on a fictitious scenario..
Given a shady company, maybe even outright involved in illegal practices, where employees employ any surveillance tech they can lay their hands on. All in order to collect as much personal information as possible, from as many people as possible. As such, they won't shy away from breaking & listening in and do subsequent speech-to-text information gathering (e.g. via some Ad-obtained Windows malware, or a malicious mobile app).
They trade the collected info on the data markets, selling to anyone who'd pay. Wouldn't it be likely that this data then indirectly ends up at Google, so they can indeed target - in this case Voltaren - ads to you?
Also: If any illegally obtained information enters the data markets.. won't it be 'whitewashed' automatically as it is trading hands?
It's probably statistical to a certain extent: people of your specific demographic are interested in a certain thing, and you are talking about it the same as all of your peers are, and a statistically significant amount of your peers did Google for it such that now Google assumes that anyone in your demographic will be interested.
Of course that only metas the problem up one level, which is that Google knows enough about you to do this kind of analysis a) on your cohort and b) on you.
Right. This was is actually much more alarming to me.
Whenever this topic comes up in conversation I point out that the fact that the most attractive-seeming explanation is “they’re listening”, but they actually _aren’t_, should have one even more concerned.
How do you know?
I used to believe that too. You might call it the unwieldy conspiracy principle. But I'm not as certain of it anymore. Things like the Snowden revelations might seem evidence for the principle but I kind of see it the opposite. For years, thousands even tens of thousands of people knew about that and they still kept it secret. It's entirely possible it could've gone on for years more without a particularly conscientious person happening to be let in on it.
The same goes for the Pentagon papers. And COINTELPRO was only uncovered due to people actively breaking into an office and stealing records.
Who's to say if stories like those are inevitable conclusions that befell all the major conspiracies worth writing about in our recent history or if they are just some portion of ones uncovered. Similar maleficence has persisted in the private sector too.
I'm not saying for sure they are listening in but at the same time, I'm not sure I buy unwieldiness as a surefire principle demonstrating it is not happening either.
I've seen examples of this too, and it's downright creepy. At the same time, I love my Google Assistant. Yes, I know. I'm the product.
