However...
A friend tested the theory a few years ago. He doesn't own a swimming pool, doesn't want to, and has never expressed any desire to. He put his and his wife's phone on the table and said to the wife (loudly), "Why don't we look into pool fencing?". She agreed with him. Shortly after, on both of their phones, on a particular social network, they were inundated with ads for....pool fencing.
So how does the phone + ad networks decide which words to prioritize to trigger which ads when?
So for this anecdote to be true, not only would the phone have to be listening, but the targeting algorithm would need to decide to actively exclude all the other audible triggers from that time period, and fill your limited ad impression inventory with the one phrase you were intentionally testing.
How would it do that? Especially if this is indeed an outlier one-off topic of conversation that you cover in a single sentence. There would not be contextual clues (like repetition over time) that might indicate you are actually “in market” for a pool fence.
To me this is the problem with these anecdotal tests. You understood that that was an important phrase in the context of ad targeting. But how did the automated ad system know it should serve you ads on that topic, and not one of the many other advertisable topics you talk about over the course of several days? Or that your phone hears over several days?
2) If the app detects a consumption-related trigger word, the related conversation is flagged for transmission to the server.
3) Flagged audio block is converted to text. Consumption related verbs ("buy", "purchase", etc) are identified. The syntax of the sentence clearly indicates which noun is the target of a given consumption-related verb ("new car", "pool fencing")
4) Serve related ads
Really smart people have been working on these things at Google for decades and that’s barely scratching the surface of this nuanced discussion. CPU/GPU has only gotten faster and smaller with more RAM available and better power management across the board for mobile devices.
Anything is possible if there is money to be made and it’s not explicitly illegal or better they can pay the fines after making their 100x ROI.
It doesn't have to be your phone. Could be your TV or any other device.
Most importantly there's just patterns of behavior. Companies are absolutely desperate for every scrap of data they can get on you. Why would they not capture audio from your mic?
The same way they analyze your email and web searches. Basically, statistics.
>To me this is the problem with these anecdotal tests. You understood that that was an important phrase in the context of ad targeting. But how did the automated ad system know it should serve you ads on that topic, and not one of the many other advertisable topics you talk about over the course of several days? Or that your phone hears over several days?
Buddy, so many people have witnessed this happening for at least 10 years and even done experiments at this point that it's common knowledge. I know for a fact that one of my friends now has a phone that is especially receptive to hearing me say things around it, because our conversation topics ALWAYS come up in my searches, ads, and feeds shortly after. Think about that. Someone else's phone sends data to a cloud that I never gave permission to. It then puts that together with data from MY phone about where I was (perhaps even the devices chirping at each other!). The aggregation happens within a week then I see relevant ads. I've seen this happen dozens of times. It's no coincidence.
As far as the article, I'm not even going to read it. It's got to be stupid. We know from leaks, reverse-engineering, and personal experience that this spying is going on. I question the source of this article, but I suppose we should never underestimate the lengths someone will go to in order to feel that they are smarter than the rest of us with our eyes open.
AI.
That is entire premise of 'Nexis' from Yuval Harari.
Individualized bot driven surveillance .
https://www.theregister.com/2024/09/16/oracle_ai_mass_survei...
""Ellison declares Oracle all-in on AI mass surveillance, says it'll keep everyone in line
Cops to citizens will be 'on their best behavior because we're constantly recording and reporting'""
For the next week or so, I got many ads on my phone about underwater packages for Hawaii, along with ads for various snorkeling and swimming gear. Now I had never researched any of that on my phone, however obviously my brother has. And the ad trackers saw that both my phone and his had communicated out over the same IP address (my parents wifi) on other random internet connections, so that is probably why they were then targeting my tracker cookie with ads that would be related to his tracker cookie. (This is all technically "easy" for the trackers to do, and seems logical that they would, because "why not").
On an unrelated note, I was making a peanut butter sandwich, started browsing some sites, and started getting ads for Skippy peanut butter. My phone must have smelled the peanut butter in the air.
But, recently I started thinking about the average user, who will install anything and approve any permissions requested without reading it. And imperfect App Store reviews approving a Trojan horse accidentally.
Am I positive someone hasn’t inadvertently allowed mic access to a malicious party? I wonder if that person’s phone may, in fact, be listening to them.
Occam's Razor and the answer to the question, "What kinds of companies are at work in the environment?" push that probability in a specific way, because the motives and means are definitely there. Do you think they are the kinds of companies that would waste such an opportunity?
Their Chief Councel's recommendation depends on how slimy they are, right?
What would happen if they got caught? Slap on the wrist would be all, if that, no?
I was walking to work and my backpack zipper broke getting off the elevator. When I got to my cube I set my phone on the desk and said to my coworker, "damn, my backpack zipper just broke!" 45 minutes later I was in a meeting and checked my phone and backpack zipper ads appear. I had never googled backpack zippers before, never seen backpack zipper ads. Literally the only proceeding thing before getting these was was telling my coworker that mine had just broken.
We were watching it in Italian, our main language, and I wanted to know more about it, as I typed "g", the first result was "gatto siberiano", exactly the cat I was looking for. Way too specific.
Another time as my girlfriend said she was interested how much a specific model of a watch a friend of him costed, the very same happened, as I typed the first few letters the very watch brand and model appeared.
Since then, I just don't care about how much technical description I can read, nothing's gonna convince me of it being a coincidence.
Did you know that you can set up a proxy from your phone and capture all traffic from it? It would be so trivial to find the traffic from your phone. There are ways to MITM and inspect the traffic, too.
There are also many people doing static reverse engineering of phone apps looking for security vulnerabilities. To believe this urban legend, you’d also have to believe that none of them have ever encountered this hidden voice analysis code.
If we ignore that, you know there are OS-level security controls on apps, right? iOS and Android don’t make it easy for apps to use the microphone constantly and run in the background to process it.
Finally, if we ignore all of that, how can anyone believe that these companies are recording conversations but none of their employees have ever chosen to blow the whistle? We’ve seen numerous FAANG “whistleblowers” come through with everything down to trivial or baseless complaints, but nobody has blown the whistle on these supposed widespread spying programs?
The whole urban legend is preposterous to anyone who has any experience with apps or phone security, let alone common traffic analysis or reverse engineering tools. I don’t understand why the myth is so persistent among even some technical people.
As for whistleblowing... Is there really that much to whistleblow about it? We already know that ad-based companies like Google are collecting our data every chance they get, because they make billions of dollars from it. They're scraping our emails, studying our GPS location, paying attention to who we are in proximity with, etc. The level of surveillance is incredible and people don't really care. It wouldn't be headline news to find out that they are taking advantage of yet another side channel.
The phone knows about your proxy. There are phones - actual brands - that were caught on sending secret telemetry to their manufacturer, but only when not listened - definitely only on mobile data, no wifi, and I assume with cert pinning.
I know a person who was researching this and they needed a Faraday cage and a BTS to conduct experiments. So it's not exactly trivial.
The difference is that these were small Chinese brands that were not even that popular in my country - and still someone researched this. Imagine how much research Android and Iphone get, and there's not a single proof of and wrongdoing. Now that is unlikely.
You might think the pool fencing example might be an extreme coincidence, but far weirder things happen every day. And what made your friend consider pool fencing as an example if they don't like pools? Maybe something they saw recently gave them the idea? Hmm...
Then theres the time a friend told me about a very specific brand of Ramen, I opened up Facebook, and there it was, very first ad.
Either they have the most technically impressive spying system that can't do anything right or it's just not happening and people are making connections where there isn't really any.
That's kind of the smoking gun when you can create a disjoint set of topics and a disjoint set of mediums of communication delivery and see what shows up in the ad space from those discussion topics strictly expressed verbally.
Who knows.
I'm just saying, the technical, ethical, and legal implications of creating an ad network that surreptitiously slurps up audio 24 hours a day in violation of the claimed terms of service without anybody leaking anything about it is a conspiracy that seems less likely than people just being more predictable than they would like to believe.
...unless there were actually several thousand people who performed this experiment, got a negative result, and therefore don't remember it or post anything about it.
Having knowledge of the technical limitations and challenges myself, I used to be on board for this argument, but now less so.
All of the technical arguments against the listening seem to ignore the "Ok, <DEVICE>" or "Hello, <DEVICE>" initiating phrases for the voluntary surveillance devices people put in their rooms, and offer only a worst case defense ~"how could they process everything everyone is saying?!"
Why is it such a stretch to imagine these devices grab Direct Objects and Subjects and store those singular items for ad keywording?
We have cookies and know how they work, why is it difficult to extrapolate?
simonw is a breathless proselytizer of LLMs and likely is suffering from "a man's salary depending on misunderstanding" and all that.
It bears repeating, "these corpos are raising billions and hiring former alphabet heads to their boards for reasons other than just making you a better programming assistant."
How about because Apple say they don't do that, and can and do get sued if they say things like that which are not true?
(Sadly I make basically no money at all from my "breathless proselytizing" of LLMs. I hope to fix that this year, someone should pay me for this stuff!
You know I've written more negative things about LLMs than almost anyone else, right? 121 posts tagged AI ethics right here: https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai+ethics/ )
Isn't the technical hurdle just changing the "Alexa" or "Siri" wake word into a keyword for an ad campaign?
And people also are terrible at math. Modern ML (regression & neural nets) are ridiculously good at predicting stuff you might be interested in, particularly when rich data sources like browsing and e-commerce histories are available; the decision to show the ad to you at some point almost certainly was made long before any audio-to-marketing pipeline could act on it.
They don’t need to be listening to us, and wouldn’t know how to even begin hiding it if they were. Something like that would require tons of compute and thousands of conspirators risking massive backlash, all to prop up a relatively tiny part of their business.
> Convincing people of this is basically impossible
Absolutely correct IME, btw. This is one of those things a smart engineer learns not to argue online, or at the Christmas dinner table for that matter. People tend to stand their ground on this one and move quickly to accusations of bias and naïveté…
> A marketing firm called Cox Media Group has recently revealed that it is listening to user conversations via their smartphones through its so-called "Active Listening" Software. With this, the company will push advertisements that users will see on certain platforms based on the heard conversations as unveiled by a report.
https://www.techtimes.com/articles/307372/20240904/cox-media...
Is techtimes.com junk?
My proof? Yesterday I was driving home and I saw an old Toyota Previa minivan and thought to myself "Oh, a Previa, you don't see those very often these days." When I got home, I started scrolling through my Google News and it showed me an advert for the new Previa.
I agree with Simon: you basically aren't going to convince someone that their phone doesn't listen to you and serve you adverts based on it, because they've run into instances where it seems like it.
That's not me taking a stance on whether it's true, though. There would be a lot of fame in it for a whistleblower, but on the other hand if Google or Meta figured out a way to do it with a low chance of it being proven, why wouldn't they?
“Be part of the richest portion of the middle class and never have to worry about money again orrrrr mysteriously die 6 months from now leaving no identifiable impact”
This is trivializing people in my opinion. The non-trivializing interpretation would be that for whatever reason people are skeptical that a black box that they don't understand very well, don't know how to audit, and don't know how to exert low level control over is doing things that they don't want it to do.
When framed that way it is immediately clear that this is an incredibly reasonable stance to take. The default assumption should always be that a third party who has a vested interest is pursuing it.
As an example. It is paranoia to assume that a 1970s era vehicle with almost no electronics in it is reporting on me to the manufacturer. It is willful ignorance bordering on delusion to assume that a vehicle manufactured in 2020 is not.
The Previa ads were always there but that was the first time you noticed it because it was on your mind.
The trouble is, what does "suddenly" and "a bunch of" mean? This doesn't sound very specific, let alone scientifically rigorous. How many ladder ads were you getting previously, and how would you know? Exactly when did the rate of such ads increase? Unless you have these details, it's highly possible you're estimating them inaccurately.
(A) Explains why you noticed the Privia. (B) Explains why you searched for something that might have triggered a Privia ad.
To a layman this might be indistinguishable from magic. So in some way maybe the phone really can read your mind :)
For more consumption.
People will of course choose privacy over no privacy with all else being equal, but privacy is the first thing sacrificed when push comes to shove. If the average person is given the choice of having everything said within earshot of their phone being recorded and sent to Facebook or giving up Instagram, they'll happily choose Instagram and forsake their privacy.
If privacy advocates want to start turning the tide in this battle, the first step needs to be convincing the average person why privacy is important on a personal and tangible level. No arguments about future totalitarian regimes or hypothetical ideals. Abstract concepts like that rarely motivate people who have so many more practical political concerns. It needs to be something that is more important to people than having access to Instagram. And I have absolutely no idea how that could be accomplished which makes me concerned that we're already too late.
If people really do believe that their phones are spying on them all the time to show them ads that means that people are basically surrendering to an imagined surveillance state. They shut up and accept it, because they'd rather keep Facebook/Instagram installed than fight back.
I find that really depressing. I want people to have more agency than that.
We need people to understand the imagined v.s. the actual privacy threats, so they can push for better standards. If they believe in and submit to the conspiracy theories good luck getting anyone to campaign for actual meaningful improvements to the problems that are real.
People have only vibes, they think that if they paid with cash it would proobably be more private than a credit card, but what data is being sold and to whom for what uses? Is that even the case or are there regulations? If I constantly make cash withdrawals at the bank am I actually inviting extra scrutiny by looking like a money launderer? If I install this browser add-on maybe it sells all my data. But I'm also using chrome literally made by the ad company, and that youtuber told me if I don't use a VPN I'm constantly being tracked anyways...
If you just have a giant morass of confusing information about every digital decision, and a lot of annoying first steps you would take are likely to be no-ops, you just don't engage. People are defeated by ambiguity and lack of attention span, same reason lobbying works and people were constantly being poisoned by food & drug additives before the modern era.
I do think that this is a very "lightly held" belief. It's something people kind-of believe, they'll tell this to each other, but it doesn't affect any behavior - not because it's not important IMO, but because people mostly don't really, deep down, believe it.
And I do wonder if convincing people this isn't happening will have the opposite effect than we intend. Instead of being more aware of what actual privacy violations are, it'll just make people write off the whole idea of companies invading their privacy. Idk.
Yeah but I don't care, I have nothing to hide, let them have my data.
It's a slap in the face of me, trying to meticulously remove all internet access of programs and devices that don't need it, and moving from all free and not-privacy-friendly services to mostly paid and private-friendly ones - probably "losing" a big chunk of my lifetime doing this. I feel paranoid sometimes, when I hear this argument.
It sucks, yet I drive a Free Tank, and now help people online take care of theirs. The other day I was talking with one from the future generation about what type of computer they would want and they said "A Fedora gaming desktop". And that made it all alright :)
When in the history of online ads have advertisers not used available data?
I completely disconnected my TV from the internet, but it still prompts me to connect it to Wi-Fi, to agree to policies, etc. This page is full of horribles: https://www.consumerreports.org/electronics/privacy/how-to-t...
And that's the one that's actually happening. Listening to your conversations isn't technically possible and is easy to disprove.
I think this is totally mistaken. An ad seller which also wants to respect privacy keeps this data in-house and does the ad targeting themselves. The advertiser never needs to see personal information for this kind of market to give people ads related to overheard conversations.
And as we know from the lawsuit, it seems that there's been a lot of data gathered accidentally too.
I don't have any evidence either way that that happens, but it seems like a more practical way to accomplish it.
Still, you’re right that Google could be keeping it all for themselves and feeding it to their black box targeting services. I really strongly doubt that’s happening with incidental assistant snippets much less intentionally-eavesdropped recordings, but it is more plausible than this makes it seem.
Like if an arduino can reliably carry 1 wakeword, an iphone could carry what? 64 at minimum?
Instead of waking up recording the conversation and sending it to the stasi, it could just toggle a bool in your secret advertising profile, then sync that up at random intervals.
They dont need context, they just need "Biscuit" "Nappies" "Birthday".
Not to say it isn't all made up. It probably is. I just dont think its technically difficult to achieve. It is probably all psychology. But sitting there with a packet capture going as you talk about dogfood isnt necessarily a great test to confirm the negative.
And the chance that Pool OR Fencing is one is pretty high.
I watched a Nigerian film on the seat back display on the plane the other day. I looked it up on my laptop when I got home because I didn't finish it.
The next day in my Instagram explore page I had a Nigerian meme...
Yes, I get it -- could be frequency illusion or some IP address/cookie shenanigans. Still feels weird.
Put another way, if you googled a Swedish film then saw Swedish memes you would think that was targeted. Then upon viewing the Nigerian memes you would have attributed it to a random video rather than anything targeted.
That is the real mechanism for triggering the ads and memes, not that “your phone is listening to you.”
At least feel creepy about the real cause and not some imagined monster under the bed.
Or heck, open up a phone and stick a probe on the mic lead. See when it is getting power or not.
https://www.404media.co/heres-the-pitch-deck-for-active-list...
It's relatively comforting to think they'd be so brazen as to care about your every word, as opposed to the fact that they own so much information about you that they can predict your actions and thoughts better than you can.
Siri uses a pseudonymous identifier when communicating with Apple's services. The identifier is not linked to your Apple ID. Therefore Siri does not have access to your iCloud data. When you ask Siri to "call mom", it constructs a search query which is then executed on-device against your contacts database.
More of these requests are served entirely on-device. Just ask: how is that consistent with the idea that they are doing ad targeting based on Siri requests?
You can request a data export for your Apple account and see that there's no Siri data included in it. If they are caught lying, EU regulators will have a field day.
Apple describes their ad targeting here. They list the—frankly boring—signals they use for ad personalization, which does not include anything you say to Siri or have in your personal iCloud data. https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/data/en/apple-advertisin...
No one is apologizing for Apple's nontransparent collection of Siri audio for QA purposes, which is what they settled over and made opt-in.
However I am still waiting for a comprehensive explanation for how it is actually happening.
There there are many ways to correlate people and their interests, but I wonder how deep it goes. Basic geolocation and public interaction metadata: Sure. But I’ve also heard people believe that it ought to be possible to spot closeness via Wifi and Bluetooth.
This is such a culturally relevant topic that there must be some serious knowledge about it somewhere.
As for my own tests, I’ve made it a point to mention that I’m considering spending money on a well advertised-for product that I haven’t yet searched for online every time this topic comes up. No ads so far. In the next phase I’ll progressively tell more people to start looking it up.
I can’t tell if my friends are convinced or if they’re too polite (or disinterested) to argue.
But it wasn't real. Even back then people would publish "sources" saying it was being done, but I'm telling you that if it worked well people would be doing it and we were in the middle of it all and couldn't find anyone who was.
There were smart-devices that acted as beacons to report people to ICE and stuff like that and they used personal data to tie it together. So there was crazy stuff out there (none tied to the respectable ad tech industry HN knows as the "privacy-violators" and so on). But this specific thing wasn't there.
E.g. person A talks about bouldering with person B. Person A then continues with their day while person B googles bouldering terms.
A and B then receive both bouldering ads. Person By because of the googling and person A because of proximity to person B.
Person A then assumes the phone spies what they say, but it doesn't. Location is enough.
Answer - you wouldn't.
This is the problem with experts and politicians. You can make money on either position, but once you have started stating your opinion, it's unlikely you'll do active research to disprove your opinion, as many have already concluded [1].
I'm happy that Simon only sees this as a hobby.
Apple will pay $95M to settle Siri privacy lawsuit
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/12/no-a-marketing-firm-...
Discovery in a lawsuit.
Credible insider leaks confirming this happens and how.
TVs and cars have microphones now and are privacy nightmares. Car companies have patents [3] for in-car keyword based ad targeting. Without legalisation, it's really only a matter of time.
[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/90999277/cox-cmg-active-listenin...
https://www.404media.co/heres-the-pitch-deck-for-active-list...
[2] https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/24224884-how-voice-d...
[3] https://www.pcmag.com/news/ford-patents-in-car-advertising-s...
Go to a public library without any electronic devices and pick up a print copy of a magazine with some ranked list of products or brands. Select a handful that you don't think would be targeted towards you. For example, beauty products, childcare products, cruises marketed towards seniors, etc.
Over the course of a few weeks, use Siri to send text messages mentioning these brands, add them to your Reminders list, etc. Just don't allow it to redirect you to any apps or web searches, since that would invalidate the experiment.
Browse Apple News daily, which uses Apple's internal ad service. If you see any ads related to at least 2 of your canary brands, you have plausible evidence that your Siri interactions have been used for ad targeting.
Many years ago, Google was sued for wiretapping and lost. See Joffe v Google
More recently Apple was sued for eavesdropping without consent. They just settled for $95 million. See Lopez v Apple
I sh_t you not. She was a bit gobsmacked. I was neither surprised nor disturbed.
That's real anecdata, my friends. It could have been coincidence, and while we have nothing to hide, it's not an optimal situation, whatever the cause.
Besides, we ain't buying no Gucci slippers, no way, no how.
>Gucci
Gucci is classified as an "aspirational luxury" brand. In other words, luxury for poor people. It makes total sense that it would be pushed to people in public housing. If you get recommendations for European brands you've never heard of selling $5000 t-shirts, then I'd be worried.
I guess we should all just blindly trust Apple. Thanks, friend.
I don’t think its a coincidence. Something is listening. Its kind of messed up that I am a normally rational, skeptical minded person, fairly knowledgable about information security and in 2024 I can’t even draw any clear lines between a nutty conspiracy theory and reality.
I’m sorry but I don’t find this article basically just saying “yeah but what are the chances Apple would do that?” persuasive at all.
I had an experience a few years ago where I had talked about a fairly niche product (I can't recall exactly what it was) and the next day I started seeing ads for that product all over the place. I commented about it to two of my coworkers that day, how I had been skeptical about the conspiracy that our phones were listening to us for marketing purposes but that this felt eerie. What shocked me was their response: They had seen the same ad all over the place. Since then I've had a hard time deciding what to be more concerned about: That my phone might be listening, or that I might have been subtly influenced into thinking about this thing; that my whole experience was actually a result of being susceptible to marketing directed at my demographic
Are you sure it's not because of an opsec fail? eg. you used your nickname when registering for some service, and that made it into some sort of mailing list? What you're seemingly implying (ie. that there's some sort of secret listening system that can figure out your nickname, tie it back to your address, and then send spam to that) makes little sense. Your name + address is already readily available. It's in the public records. You freely hand it over to random websites (eg. for online shopping). There's zero benefits in anyone making such a system to figure out people's names using surreptitious listening.
I am not sure about there being no benefit either. We moved here very recently and scraping local property records would take time and not be easily automated. So what if some data aggregator still had a blank under the name field for our address and needed to fill it in so they could address letters since we more or less automatically throw away “current resident” letters. I just don’t know, yes its far fetched but I don’t see any other explanations as much more parsimonious.
I have definitely experienced it myself, and have no doubts that it happens.
What I find amazing is that people don't use ad blockers! I wouldn't be able to tell you if they are harvesting my voice data, because I haven't seen an ad in years! It is trivial to block ads, why do so many people choose to see them?
What you actually talk about with people (excluding maybe the proffesional stuff) is mundane stuff you see on your screens, newspapers, billboards, etc.
I also believe people very rarely only speak about a thing -- without there being any digital footprint at all of them engaging with it.
I have literally seen this play out with family and traced it back to make a point.
Harder to convince folks that _nothing_ does this, but takes an edge off their more paranoid tendencies.
Transcribing all spoken text and sending it home, sure, not feasible.
What if we have 256 keywords, or 65536 keywords, maybe preconfigured for particular products or product classes. Some basic linear predictive coding mechanism ( you know, what powered those '80s chips Stephen Hawking style, speak and spell, etc) - very very low computational overhead. When the word is triggered, queue a message back home at the next reasonable opportunity - user id, timestamp, word. It will only take a couple bytes. It can be slipped in anywhere and obfuscated by any means by nature of being so small, data-wise, even as a watermark of some sort. By using a timestamp and waiting until the next opportunity, maybe minutes, hours, or days away, no time correlation detection is possible either.
People say big tech is ethical, fine. Maybe some ad company is sponsoring some free app or game for the phone, and slipping this in there. Now the developer can pay their rent and food costs. Maybe the ad company is then selling that data back to big tech who washes their hands of any wrongdoing. Maybe it's all legal because the fine print of the EULA allows for this.
Seems to me though this can be figured out empirically, just have a voice play something like "need to buy adult diapers" or "new tires" etc next to a device, enumerate every device, look for ads on whatever very specific topic, minding along the way to tell nobody and never enter it in any internet-connected keyboard.
So, we already know that it is
A. completely feasible for a smartphone to do this.
B. At least a subset of smartphones have always-on microphones.
Maybe not a remote control... But why would you put it in a remote anyways when everyone has a phone?
If any of your friends searched for something online, and you're connected to them in a social network, they might show you the same ad by proximity.
people better demand equal access or start slitting throats right now.
1) "Doing this wouldn't be technically feasible or would require a technical effort wildly out of proportion"
2) "There are lots of psychological biases that lead people to believe something like this happened even if it didn't actually happen"
3) "Apple is such a nice and honest company, they would never do such a thing..."
As for 1), there is enough technical discussion in this thread to disprove that point. But just as a reminder: Google build an always-on song recognition service into android, free of charge, without any obvious monetization, just because they can. OpenAI released Whisper last year as open source, a highly precise audio transcription model. By now lots of variants for on-device use exist.
All that tech doesn't just exist, it's not even seen as a moat. It's already being commodified.
As for 2), yes of course cognitive biases are always a thing. The problem is that you cannot use them to disprove something. They constitute an absence of evidence, not evidence of absence.
As for 3), yeah no comment here. Except maybe, remember Snowden. "No one would do such a thing" has already been spectacularly wrong in the past.
Between 2017 and today, there were massive changes, both in technological development but also in mindset: Surveillance capitalism became much more normalized and generally accepted as a standard part of business.
So if you argue that it was a baseless conspiracy theory back then, therefore it automatically must still be a baseless conspiracy theory today, that argument is flawed.
That would explain the intensity, but I’d still be surprised to see any patterns not found by ML/statistics.
It seems to me that somebody in your life has gotten into Kayaks. Take it as a challenge to find out who it is.
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2018) - Zuboff, Shoshana
Given that this is form 2018, the rise of voice assistants since then, all the market forces at play and the reward highly outweighing regulatory penalty payments there is little that's supporting that users are not being recorded. The TOS phrasses like 'service improvement', 'may share with third parties', and 'user experience' are common place and are not particularly concise. Simply dismissing anekdotes and honing in on Apple Inc., the only company which does not want/need to sell data, is not convincing.
I think people tend to shoot the messenger, when it comes to privacy discussions. Getting told one is being spyed on by a divice, which is so intimt and close to one slef is embarassing. Of course things are more like a spectrum and differ from case to case.
But read through this doc:
But thinking from the first principles, do you really think that all this phonetic keyword spotting[1] IP developed for defense tech in the late 90s and early 2000s was abandoned once recording entire phone conversations and doing full speech to text on them became technologically possible?
I still remember lots of startups who did this stuff openly a decade ago, before Cambridge Analytica scandal[2]. After that it became impossible to get funding or get acquired, so the few that stayed in this field became very secretive.
—-
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyword_spotting
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_A...
if everyday people knew just how much data companies have on them and their habits, they'd be absolutely horrified. There's so much personal attribution data that most companies that know how to market properly are going to get you at some point. You may think you're careful with what you share and what is being recorded, but if you are friends or relatives of someone who does, or if you live in the same street as someone who does, they data on you.
I used to work for these kind of companies, and have a lot of friends and family who currently do, and the stuff they track and the patterns they have never fail to surprise me and make me laugh.
Sure, if they could, they would absolutely listen in to you, that would make their jobs a hell of a lot easier, but they don't. But the data they have on you so goddamn accurate, it's easy to assume they must be.
We already know about TV piracy detection leading to bars showing soccer without a license being fined.
I don't like seeing people fall for obvious conspiracy theories, and I have used my own deductive reasoning to decide that this is an untrue conspiracy theory.
