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- cross-posted to:
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Not my title! I do think we are being listened to. And location tracked. And it’s being passed on to advertisers. Is it apple though? Probably not is my take away from this article, but I don’t trust plenty of others, and apple still does
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I’ve literally seen advertisements for products that I was talking about but explicitly did not search for or type or anything on any device. All I did was talk about it in real life.
It’s literally a thing that happens, I have seen it happen first-hand.
“I’ve seen it first-hand” isn’t significant evidence because the frequency illusion effect is a thing. If you see dozens of ads a day and ignore them unless you notice them matching something you talked about, you’ll end up thinking ads can track what you talk about whether or not it’s true.
While i understand and agree with the premise, i think it’s lacking context. It is quite disturbing to have an obscure conversation (you know, we’ve never been to tahiti), and suddenly you’re getting banner ads or sponsored results about trips to tahiti.
This is absolutely a thing that happens. It happens to my wife frequently (the amount of times i hear giggling, i was just talking about that! Now I’ve got an ad! What a coincidence!), but i disabled all my google permissions (outside of location for maps), so it doesn’t seem to happen to me at all.
I don’t think every company does this, but some do. I also had to uninstall WhatsApp because my microphone usage was up while i was sleeping. That was quite concerning to discover. Whatsapp claims it’s a bug, but I’m not sure about that.
I would agree with you about the frequency illusion effect IF it weren’t something very specific and niche.
It is literally a thing that happens.
I have worked for an advertising company before (they hid that they were an advertising company) and you would be surprised how sophisticated and scummy ads can be.
In September, I was using reddit, had an iPhone, etc. I was generally aware of digital privacy, probably moreso than the average person, but by no means was I knowledgeable.
I was running a beta on my iPhone at the time, for context. I had a short conversation with my roommate while my phone was in my pocket. I took it out to text my partner and pressed the dictation button. My phone proceeded to type out the majority of the conversation I had had maybe five minutes earlier with my roommate. Literally ruined my ignorance is bliss and now I have a Pixel with grapheneos and use almost exclusively open source software with a major focus on privacy. Obviously this is an anecdote from some idiot online and I can’t verify what I’m saying at all, but the experience definitely shook me.
I used to think the same. I’m all for digital privacy, but listening to a microphone? That’s ridiculous, the legal ramifications would be enormous. Plus, encoding and sending all this data? Not practical, and of course, we are fully aware of confirmation bias and selective memory so for sure those personal anecdotes must be coincidences.
Then it happened to me. I use a VPN, all my devices have a billion types of ad blocking, private DNS, JavaScript disabled by default and so on. Then I mention a product next to my girlfriend, a product that only interested me and I had recently discovered, nothing she was ever aware of… and while I was still right next to her, five minutes later, her phone is showing up ads for said product. Her phone, not mine. The product is not Coca-Cola, it’s not something that often pops up.
What other explanation could there be? The coincidence of the year? They are listening.
The speech recognition software used by digital assistants that come with most modern smartphones would make it trivial to process the audio locally and map the output to your ad profile. Much lighter lift than sending audio recordings.
And a much smaller footprint. It could even be binary data for tweaking your algorithmic profile, say the name of a branded product or in the case of a product with few options just the type of item. Audio runs in the megabytes per minute, transcripts in the kilobytes, but reducing to a conclusion of interest in a single specific item is really very small, hard to notice tbh.
“Is it Apple though, probably not…”
Can I ask, why are you so ready to performatively forgive them here? Apple is not your friend, Apple and Tim lined up to donate the million like the rest of those greedy, transactional cowards.
Apple doesn’t “do” it per se, instead Apple shares certain data with third party partners for the purposes of “improving your product experience” the data is then laundered 17 times through middle layers and added to a shared digital fingerprint of you and your household’s web of connected devices. You and your family are then sold on a marketplace as advertising targets actively interested in X category or product (Apple is also subsequently a customer in that marketplace). You then either receive that advertising or your family is targeted with it so that they can then casually mention the product back to you (company knowing you were already interested) so it feels organic and “I was just thinking the same thing!” and boom, you’re buying that new set of pots and pans.
We’re already living in the matrix, you’re just a little drone being pinged around according to other people’s will, to support the pursuit of endless growth. So yes, in a way companies are spying on you… After you’ve given them individual permissions to access your microphone and permission to share “certain data” about you with third parties, in a carefully orchestrated dance - so that they have plausible deniability and so you don’t have to threaten your parasocial relationship with their brand and can continue saying “probably not Apple though…”
The worse part is, they don’t really need to bug your mic to figure out what you are talking about to target ads to you. The best sales leads are the family and friends of your existing customers. So say you talk to you coworker about how they switched to this new diaper rash cream for their baby. You might not have a baby but you talked about it and somehow you got ads for diaper rash cream. What really happened though is that your coworker bought their cream on Amazon and that brand purchased target ads for everyone whose location data was nearby them. Or they bought it for everyone whose phone was connected to the same IP address. We have so much data tracked about us that they can guess what we are talking about without actually having to tap our phone lines
In addition to location, the data collected moreso resemble demographics than specifics. And on some of the most mundane shit at first glance, but actually gives a very clear picture of the consumer. Things like 1. OS installed 2. version of OS installed 3. Battery percentage 4. Total device memory 5. Remaining total memory and more things like that.
I liken it to how a psychic fools people into thinking they are magical when really they are incredibly perceptive and experienced in making judgements based on client’s clothes, appearance, demeanor, etc before they even open their mouths.
This is a great case of confirmation bias, too. The one time your ad happens to match a conversation you had earlier, you’ll be convinced forever, and tell everyone you know about it. The ten million other times you have a conversation that doesn’t appear in your ads will go unnoticed.
Forgive me if this is here already but this is how your post showed to me.
Using your search data is bad enough
Literally the news story that this author cites as motivation for writing this article in the preamble to the article.
Apps listening to your mic to give you targeted ads is an urban legend. There’s tools to see which apps listen to you and there isn’t any evidence that any of the popular stuff ever open the microphone (unless you’re in a call or something). If you’re too worried about it, you can always turn off the mic permission for the app.
The ads are actually coming from other ways of tracking you like browser fingerprinting to follow what things you browse and build a profile on what you like/are interested in.
See also EFF’s article on it: https://www.digitalrightsbytes.org/topics/is-my-phone-listening-to-me
agreed. online tracking is so good it just seems like they’re listening to you.
The ones serving up the ads aren’t even the ones listening. They’re buying collated data from many different sources, then their algorithm matches your interests with one of the products they’re contracted to sell. Next thing you know you’re looking at a Rolex ad because you zoomed in on someone’s watch on their Instagram post.
Jfc, finally some sanity in this thread. Thank you. You’d think a bunch of supposed computer nerds would have done a fucking experiment before going off on some anecdotal bullshit.
I’m not so sure. When my partner and I were on a road trip we had android auto connected and were singing along to songs we listened to via Spotify. At some point though, when I tried to fiddle with some settings the connection between the car and the smartphone bugged out and while trying to fix it we suddenly heard his voice being played back on the speakers “whispering” some lyrics he had sung 30 to 60 minutes earlier.
I put whispered in quotes because he certainly didn’t whisper those lyrics and I recalled the moment he sang them quite clearly. Beside his singing and the music playing there were no other sounds at that time.
My best guess is that he was actually recorded while singing and something was stripping all the background noises and music to make his speech more clear for speech to text analysis. It was creepy as fuck.
We both work in IT and I truly have no other idea what this could have been given the circumstances. He said there is actually a company that provides a framework that listens to, records and analyses whatever is spoken near smartphone microphones and all the big tech players like Google are using it. I don’t remember the name though. Would have to ask him.
That’s the most unlikely story I’ve heard in a minute… Even assuming there’re some deep rooted kernel level shenanigans, which no one has found yet, how would you fiddling with some settings expose that?
Probably just got a dropped call, and it resumed the playlist in shuffle, I’ve had it happen where the music comes out as if in a phone call (messes up frequencies) for a few seconds before it goes back to normal. Occam’s razor and all
Believe what you want, I don’t really care. The whole connection bugged out and the car’s infotainment system including android auto became unresponsive. There was no call, it wasn’t shuffle and it was definitely his voice, not the music playing. Especially since there was only the whispered singing. No other instruments at all.
I believe it was sunspots that caused bit flips on the phone CPU and regurgitated data from the L5 cache. /s
I once worked in a charity providing mental health services to people without insurance, or who wanted to not have their insurance record the service for whatever reasons.
I once had a homeless man that I would see regularly. We set up each appointment at the end of the preceding appointment, because the only other way to get a hold of this person would be to call the fast food place he worked at, during his work hours, which weren’t consistent. This man did not own a phone, or any other electronic device. His facebook, and all of his online activity was done at his local library. I emphasize this because I need it to be stressed that there was no way any algorithm could connect his location to mine. There was no way for a system to recognize that his device was near mine, because he did not have a device. There was no way for any of his online habits to be algorithmically connected to mine, at all.
One session, we’re speaking. The only devices in our small, sound proofed room, were my cell phone, a digital clock not connected to any system, and a digital camera, turned off, and also not connected to any system. He mentions that he’s been contacted by someone who wants him to move to the Phillipines. We briefly discuss flights and work in the Phillipines. Then we move on to other things, yadda yadda, end session.
By the end of the day, I’m getting ads on Facebook for flights to the Phillipines. Freaked me the fuck out because those sessions are HIPAA protected. From then on I kept my phone turned off, and in a completely different room in our building than any of my sessions with any patient. Never ever had it happen again.
Difficult to judge. Could be confirmation bias, as well. Meaning you got ads for flight befores. But you were not paying attention to them at that point. Which changed after your session and now you think these are connected. (Or you looked something up about that location and that kicked it off.)
These are the usual findings in the rare cases people are able to trace it back and they write some article or podcast about it. Mainly confirmation bias. And once you interact with one ad that got you taken aback, you’re trapped.
Doesn’t rule out other possibilities, though. I guess what I’m trying to say is, this counts more as anecdotal evidence. And we have plenty stories like this. It’s not enough to infer anything. More a reminder to investigate some more.
And yes, it’s good practice to keep your phone someplace else when you’re having protected/confidential conversations. Smartphones are very complex and they certainly have the potential to spy on you. In fact we know a lot of the apps and computer code is meant to analzye your behaviour and transfer that information to third parties.
How many anecdotal stories before it becomes data? If hundreds of people are saying that this happens and there’s no other explanation? Thousands? How many things can be written off as “Oh, something you don’t understand is happening, even if we can rule out basically everything.” ?
The plural of anecdote is not data
Yes, this is the common statement I am referencing.
There are billions of smartphones out there. Thousands of people getting ads relevant to what they just discussed is normal. And it’s not just about the number of stories. It’s also about how unscientific these reports are as well. If you want to come up with actually useful evidence you would have to test this multiple times to prove it’s not random and you would also have to objectively measure the effect. You need to show a significant increase in the probability of getting a relevant ad, which in turn means you need to know what the baseline probability of getting one is (when the phone has not been allowed to spy on you).
All that being said, I don’t think proving that smartphones spy on us is all that useful. The fact that it can happen very easily is already a problem. Security and privacy are protected when we design systematic solutions that prevent abuse. They are not protected in unregulated systems where we might sometimes prove abuse has happened after the fact. There’s plenty wrong with a modern smartphone regardless of whether it happens to be spying on you right now.
Btw, I think it’s pretty much accepted fact that smartphones do spy on everyone. It’s the main business model of any big tech company. Google, Meta… They definitely have algorithms to tailor their targeted ads to someones personal profile. And per default they look at what you’re doing online all day. Keep track of your location if they can… The one thing that’s unclear is whether they use the microphone and also listen to your offline conversations. My main point being: Listening in with the microphone isn’t that far off. If you feel uncomfortable with that, you might want to re-consider a few other things as well.
Thanks for the heads up. I am aware of the spying issues with smartphones (and any way you access the internet really). This is part of the reason why I don’t think proving the unauthorized use of the microphone to spy is really important and why we need systemic solutions to prevent abuse in any case.
Can there really be an objective measurement? You should think first thing data harvesters would implement is a sort of cloak, to erase any traces of what’s going on. Think Dieselgate, but more sophisticated. E.g. phone detects it’s being tested the way you described, or is in the hands of a state attorney or whatever, the recording/ forwarding/ prcoessing of data stops.
That’s only really feasible for phones they knowingly send to regulators. The phone would have no practical way of knowing that I’m having staged conversations around it and keeping track of the ads I see.
But even if you’re right, that doesn’t change the fact that a lack of objective measurement means all these stories are unreliable.
With the scientific method and anecdotal evidence: kind of never. It’s illegitimate to draw that conclusion, this way.
You got to dig down to the facts. Or we can just tell the fact that a lot of people feel that way. And I mean “confirmation bias” is a very good explanation. We also have thousands of people believe in esoterics, homeopathy etc. The mechanics of psychology are well-understood. And it’s kind of the reason why we invented science in the first place. Because we found things aren’t always as they seem. And there are a lot of dynamics to factor in.
If we want to get to the truth, we have to do a proper study. I’m not an expert on this, so I don’t know if we got to that, yet. I know people have demonstrated this is technically possible. But as far as I’m aware people have also taken apart a few of the major apps like Facebook etc, logged the traffic and couldn’t find anything that uses microphone data to do targeted advertising.
Conclusion: It’s either not there, or we missed it.
Playing devil’s advocate here - we know voice information is being sent back to both Google and Apple, if the analysis were done server side dissembling apps isn’t going to show us anything we don’t already know.
That’s kind of the important question… We know it sends audio on request, if you trigger it somehow. But does it transmit anything clandestinely in the background? And does it suppress any microphone icons from showing up? I believe that’s where disassembly and sniffing network traffic come into play.
Now I want to do some kind of experiment where I speak things into my phone and see what happens. It still seems too much to be coincidental.
I think that no amount of anecdotal evidence would be enough. For a very long times doctors had anecdotal evidence that bloodletting saved patient, yet they were fooled by their bias. I’m not saying advertising isn’t spying on our microphones, I don’t know, it might be. But it doesn’t seem very plausible to me: the amount of processing necessary, and the amount of network seems way too high. Also, voice recognition is still not great currently, it was even worse years ago.
Same here. Confidential discussion with lawyer/ doctor/ pharmacist, get extremely relevant ads at once. Therefore, I made it a habit to completely turn off my phone before entering such situations, and, if I can, put it in a switched-off microwave or some other Faraday cage structure, Snowden-style.
Great story.
Even if anecdotal fuck all of that better safe than sorry.
My dad use to say that Facebook listened to him back in the 2010s. We blew him off as conspiracy nut.
He would say diamond ring diamond ring diamond ring and then all his ads would change next day. We blew him off as conspriatorial and now the algorithm is common knowledge.
Who knows. Scary.
I’ve had a very similar experience.
Once discussed something, out of the blue, something I’ve never been curious about in my life, in the car, with a friend who also has never thought about the same thing.
Hours later we’re both seeing related ads.
Now, I get that the amount of data required for such analysis is supposedly outside the bounds of what phones can do. But I can’t see any other explanation. Neither of us ever searched anything in this subject, we talked about doe a couple minutes and moved on, never doing anything about it. We have very different interests, too.
What made you bring up the Philippines in the first place? Even if you have not been served ads before then, or the other guy. Someone either of you have interacted with could’ve done who brought up the Philippines to you or them.
And because there’s an ongoing campaign in your area, eventually you’ll get one of them ads too.
As I said in the original post, the client was contacted by someone over social media about moving to the Phillipines for work. It turned out to be a scam. Nobody else I interacted with made any mention of the Phillipines to me.
Yeah but that scam may have been going around the area elsewhere and had caused a spike of searches in your area so the add companies programmatically fill in what they see as an area with potential leads with ads.
The comments here show the real problem, adverts dont have to say why they’ve been selected.
All online ads should have to say which filters they matched to advertise to you. The advertising in most cases now is centralised into Google or Facebook, this is absolutely technically possible.
All online ads should have to say which filters they matched to advertise to you.
According to the Signal foundation, the reverse is true. They claim they got banned for revealing that info.
https://signal.org/blog/the-instagram-ads-you-will-never-see/
Wow.
This gives me that gut uneasy feeling. Those grabs are hyper specific examples.
Sharing data with the plebs is the true crime.
phew
Except it is also listening. This was a minor scandal back in September. I believe Cox media has since been dropped by Facebook and Google and such, but it happened.
What’s Happening: In a pitch deck that has surfaced since the initial story broke out, Cox Media Group (CMG), a digital marketing outfit based out of Atlanta, Georgia, was spotted touting “the power of voice” in a pitch. In it, they outlined how they can use AI to collect and analyze voice data from users through more than 470 sources.
https://news.itsfoss.com/ad-company-listening-to-microphone/
That article covers a pitch deck by an ad agency with absolutely zero detail of how it works.
If this is happening, it should be easy to test.
According to the company, CMG Local Solutions’ access to advertising data based on voice and other data is collected by third-party platforms and devices “under the terms and conditions provided by those apps and accepted by their users.”
In the since-deleted blog post, CMG Local Solutions discusses whether Active Listening is legal. “We know what you’re thinking. Is this even legal? The short answer is: yes. It is legal for phones and devices to listen to you. When a new app download or update prompts consumers with a multi-page terms of use agreement somewhere in the fine print, Active Listening is often included,” the company said in the post.
Apps still need mic permissions to do so. Many Android ROMs include notices when the mic is being used, it would be very easy to tell if an app was actually doing this.
I think we will need a few more lawsuits such as Apple has agreed to pay $95 million to settle a lawsuit alleging that its virtual assistant, Siri, recorded users’ conversations without their consent before this is no longer treated as confirmation bias or people been paranoid.
My wife used to tell me that her adds would change after discussing something and at first I did not believe her, but it just kept happening again, and again. It reached the point that we would put our phones away, discuss something and there is no change in ads about the topic. If we had our phones near adds would change.This would happen on things that we would not see adds for normally. For example we would discuss a trip to a place we have never been and she would start seeing adds about the destination after that.
ADS
This article’s preamble cites this news story as the motivation for writing the rebuttal presented.
Ads is from advertisement, not adds
Yeah it would be pretty annoying if her active directory domain changed that often.
One of my weirder hobbies is trying to convince people that the idea that companies are listening to you through your phone’s microphone and serving you targeted ads is a conspiracy theory that isn’t true.
ARS said, that reuters said, that users said.
Someone needs a new hobby. “Proof” from 3 layers of journalists interpreting a case that they themself said never went to court. Trying to use evidence of absence as proof will never win any hearts in a debate.
I didn’t seriously believe it happened either for quite some time because confirmation bias is a bitch. But I’ve seen it happen a few times where it would have to be a seriously unlikely coincidence.
If it was searched for in Google, Facebook, apple, or whatever sure
If it was correlated with locality and time, sure.
You can infer a lot from a few searches but there are times where nothing was searched for and a novel concept came out of conversation and book there’s ads and search completion for it.
Maybe, just maybe, someone settling a lawsuit without being found guilty, doesn’t ACTUALLY mean they’re innocent.
Quick experiment. If you don’t own a dog or a cat, talk about buying dog or cat food a couple times today.
about buying dog or cat food a couple times today.
I have both, also, if it’s real, you’d have to match up with an advertiser that really wants your profile.
I search for crap all the time but don’t get ads most of the time, then one time, I look up this one kaz air filter and get nothing but ads for it for a week. hundreds of home depot ads.
I love how having both a dog and a cat is somehow dismissive
My big problem isn’t with the concept I could talk about buying parrot food.
But there has to be a vendor out there that says hey whoever I’m buying this data from, I need to put an ad in front of parrot owners.
These are going to be very high cost ads, so whatever products they’re going to sell you probably have a respectable profit margin or respectable expected lifetime value.
Trying to trigger it on purpose, without any idea of who’s advertising or for what is somewhat of a fool’s errand.
How many dog and cat owners are out there anyway? Dozens perhaps.
So Apple and Google have created the most sophisticated spyware known to man, so undetectable that tens of thousands of developers and researchers have never even seen a sign of it, and then they use the data for ads so sloppily that anyone can prove they’re listening?
I’m sure Apple just paid 95 mil because they were bored.
That Siri was bugged in a way that activated it unintentionally, which then sends recordings to Apple, is not in dispute. Turning that into “they’re always recording your conversations” is a big leap. Why would the whistleblower that revealed the recordings being misused not bother mentioning that?
It was activated at times in which it was unintentional and then they sold that data.
People are saying, and I have observed, extreme coincidences with the ads were timely, They were on novel data that wasn’t thrown through searches, and they weren’t explainable by locality.
You don’t have to be recording 24x7 to get they observed outcome.
Do you have any proof they sold that data? I’d love to know why the plaintiffs settled out of court if they thought they could prove Apple is feeding every voice recording into their ads. They had to pay 5x as much just for slowing down old iPhones, actively selling voice recordings would undoubtedly be worth far more than that.
The issue is that contractors had access to the recordings, which is certainly a breach of privacy, but not a grand conspiracy to target ads.
I’m not going to play move the goal posts with you all day long.
At what point did I move the goalposts? I never denied that the recordings existed. I simply fail to see how someone at Apple would decide that selling private conversations is worth the insane risk.
