goes close to a smartphone “BLOODY MARY! BLOODY MARY! BLOODY MARY!” gets advertisements from local pubs and restaurants serving Bloody Mary at a discount
These companies absolutely do use your microphone to listen.
My wife and I have tested this and you can too.
Have a conversation near your phones about purchasing something offbeat. We used a kitchen garbage disposal in our test. Talk about them for a few minutes, about needing to buy one, different brands, etc.
Almost immediately you’ll be served garbage disposal adds.
Facebook listening in on your microphone is one of those things that I actually believe to be true. Ever had conversations with people to then realize that you’re being served targeted ads based on these conversations? Seems very coincidental.
At least on iOS, it takes it a step farther and tells you specifically when an app is accessing your location, microphone, camera, etc… It even delineates when it’s in the foreground or background. For instance, if I check my weather app, I get this symbol in the upper corner:
The circled arrow means it is actively accessing my location. And if I close the app, it gives me this instead:
The uncircled arrow means my location was accessed in the foreground recently. And if it happens entirely in the background, (like maybe Google has accessed my location to check travel time for an upcoming calendar event,) then the arrow will be an outline instead of being filled in.
The same basic rules apply for camera and mic access. If it accesses my mic, I get an orange dot. If it accesses my camera, I get a green dot.
Wouldn’t want to be mean to Facebook users, but the vast majority of them probably has micophone access enabled for Messenger at least, if not Facebook.
There were whole threads of people saying this stuff doesn’t happen. They would say it just didn’t make sense that companies would do this, it’s not worth it to them. That all the ads I was seeing at convenient times were just a coincidence.
The next iteration of gaslighting is already here: That it’s no big deal anyway since you can just use an ad blocker. Riiight, let’s all just turn our eyes away to make the monster go away. Surely, it’ll get bored and stop listening and recording, and surely, it will not sell its collected data off to banks, insurance providers, the government, law enforcement… right?
It’s about to be a lot more with the chrome manifest update. I got my dad into chrome some 15 years ago and explaining why he should switch to Firefox is completely confusing for him. He thinks his own business listing on Google won’t work if he’s not using Chrome.
Even people you’d really expect to use adblockers. A good example is right here on Lemmy, people here are generally pretty tech-savvy yet you get threads with lots of people complaining about ads. This has been a weird lesson as I get older, seeing that most people somehow don’t even think about lifting a finger to fix things they see as problems, they really just complain and then do absolutely nothing to help themselves.
It’s the same with if someone mentions something they don’t know what it is, instead of taking 5 seconds to just look it up they comment to ask about it and then never reply to people answering their question. I’m certain that it’s very common to have some weird need to make others do work for you, they don’t actually care about finding out what something is or how to do something to fix a problem, they just care about making others spend any kind of effort for them.
I work as a software engineer with other software engineers. Even software engineers and UX designers using the internet that way. Talented ones. Many of them - maybe the majority. It takes me a second to get over my astonishment when they share their screens. Not only astonishment at how overboard ads have gotten w/o an adblocker, but also that this particular person doesn’t use an adblocker.
So many people aren’t well-informed about what ad networks or doing, or how different the web experience could be.
if someone is like, half of the described vampire i don’t mind. Honestly it feels strange to have our ancient way of finding things out (asking your friends if they know) be somehow seen as wrong nowadays. I want to learn from other human being, not disembodied pieces of information oftentimes tied to ads for driver updating software
Yeah, there was a viral video years back about a couple that thought this was happening to them, so they started talking about cat litter for 1 day, only inside their house, and then within 2 days they were being served cat litter ads for the first time in their lives.
Yea they can deny it all they want, but I’ve had similar happen to me countless times.
Even better, last time I tried to buy something from one of their adds it turned out to be a scam. I reported the post (add) and they said they wouldn’t remove it because it didn’t break any policies. lol.
This is such a strange reality to live in. All of the futuristic, dystopian fiction I have consumed has the same premise that people living in the dystopia know it and know it’s bad. Somehow reality is worse.
Unroll.me was a service that would scan your email and clean up your inbox. The New York Times reported that the company was gathering sales receipts emails, anonymizing them, and selling them to rival companies; for example Uber paid them to hand over all the sales receipts they could on Lyft rides in people’s mailboxes. The bad press made them eventually sell the company to Slice, mainly for the email archives they amassed.
Until now it was really annoying to collect audio and then use it. The app needs to constantly record, send out the datas and then lastly process it to be useful. Today the cost versus benefits are really not to their advantage.
But tomorrow this might change, if they find a way of using the mic to serve ads be sure that they will. The only question today is how? The only option at this time is for me to process the stuff offline. As they do today with “ok google”. Within the next months-years we are going to see more and more phones and it stuff using dedicated or specialized AI chip, they will be great with really low consumption to run 24/24. They could analyse offline the speech, make a resume and lastly when the connectivity is sufficient and enough datas are collwcted, the phone sends out all the infos to the companies servers.
I’ve seen some comments about the fact that others companies that Google cannot really use the mic in this way, this is right…today. But in the future make sure that when they will have developed correctly this concept, Google (and Apple) would surely be okay with this approach (maybe in exchange with some bucks).
Today phones are surely not listening to us, but they know so much things that we are actually thinking that they are. But this way is maybe not enough profitable for them, so they want to invade even more our privacy to gain more of this fucking thing called “money”.
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goes close to a smartphone “BLOODY MARY! BLOODY MARY! BLOODY MARY!” gets advertisements from local pubs and restaurants serving Bloody Mary at a discount
I am not against this.
These companies absolutely do use your microphone to listen.
My wife and I have tested this and you can too.
Have a conversation near your phones about purchasing something offbeat. We used a kitchen garbage disposal in our test. Talk about them for a few minutes, about needing to buy one, different brands, etc.
Almost immediately you’ll be served garbage disposal adds.
I’ve tested this many times and never saw it happen.
deleted by creator
Facebook listening in on your microphone is one of those things that I actually believe to be true. Ever had conversations with people to then realize that you’re being served targeted ads based on these conversations? Seems very coincidental.
At least on iOS, it takes it a step farther and tells you specifically when an app is accessing your location, microphone, camera, etc… It even delineates when it’s in the foreground or background. For instance, if I check my weather app, I get this symbol in the upper corner:
The circled arrow means it is actively accessing my location. And if I close the app, it gives me this instead:
The uncircled arrow means my location was accessed in the foreground recently. And if it happens entirely in the background, (like maybe Google has accessed my location to check travel time for an upcoming calendar event,) then the arrow will be an outline instead of being filled in.
The same basic rules apply for camera and mic access. If it accesses my mic, I get an orange dot. If it accesses my camera, I get a green dot.
Yeah it’s great, same thing on the Google Pixel. The mic/camera thing brings peace of mind
I know you mean well, but you are making assumptions that the software is not lying to you. You can’t trust a UI element.
Wouldn’t want to be mean to Facebook users, but the vast majority of them probably has micophone access enabled for Messenger at least, if not Facebook.
Ever use voice in messenger? If so FB has the permissions it needs to open your mic.
deleted by creator
There were whole threads of people saying this stuff doesn’t happen. They would say it just didn’t make sense that companies would do this, it’s not worth it to them. That all the ads I was seeing at convenient times were just a coincidence.
I have my camera and microphone deactivated on the OS level because Youtube and Spotify would show me things workmates mentioned way too often.
I didn’t notice it since.
Could still be a major coincidence though, the biggest of them.
And they are right. This company is full of shit. Show me any proof the tech from the deleted advert actually existed.
The next iteration of gaslighting is already here: That it’s no big deal anyway since you can just use an ad blocker. Riiight, let’s all just turn our eyes away to make the monster go away. Surely, it’ll get bored and stop listening and recording, and surely, it will not sell its collected data off to banks, insurance providers, the government, law enforcement… right?
We know? It’s not a coincidence that when you mention something like Cheap Flights to Dublin, it soon ends up on your ad rotation.
Honestly I’d rather that than ads for the things I already bought.
uOrigin user : you have ads?
Techbros really went full police state just to deliver ads I wouldn’t click on straight into my adblocker
You’d be surprised how many people raw dog the internet.
It’s about to be a lot more with the chrome manifest update. I got my dad into chrome some 15 years ago and explaining why he should switch to Firefox is completely confusing for him. He thinks his own business listing on Google won’t work if he’s not using Chrome.
I’ve had people that refuse to use an adblocker because “the creators deserve to get paid”. Well, your funeral if you get malvertising…
Even people you’d really expect to use adblockers. A good example is right here on Lemmy, people here are generally pretty tech-savvy yet you get threads with lots of people complaining about ads. This has been a weird lesson as I get older, seeing that most people somehow don’t even think about lifting a finger to fix things they see as problems, they really just complain and then do absolutely nothing to help themselves. It’s the same with if someone mentions something they don’t know what it is, instead of taking 5 seconds to just look it up they comment to ask about it and then never reply to people answering their question. I’m certain that it’s very common to have some weird need to make others do work for you, they don’t actually care about finding out what something is or how to do something to fix a problem, they just care about making others spend any kind of effort for them.
I work as a software engineer with other software engineers. Even software engineers and UX designers using the internet that way. Talented ones. Many of them - maybe the majority. It takes me a second to get over my astonishment when they share their screens. Not only astonishment at how overboard ads have gotten w/o an adblocker, but also that this particular person doesn’t use an adblocker.
So many people aren’t well-informed about what ad networks or doing, or how different the web experience could be.
Dude. Paragraphs.
They’re called help vampires in the programming world.
https://communitymgt.fandom.com/wiki/Help_Vampire
if someone is like, half of the described vampire i don’t mind. Honestly it feels strange to have our ancient way of finding things out (asking your friends if they know) be somehow seen as wrong nowadays. I want to learn from other human being, not disembodied pieces of information oftentimes tied to ads for driver updating software
This is why I don’t have the Facebook app installed. However, what about messenger? Did the collect the data from messenger?
Thought this was common knowledge by now
Can something that’s not true be common knowledge?
Yeah, there was a viral video years back about a couple that thought this was happening to them, so they started talking about cat litter for 1 day, only inside their house, and then within 2 days they were being served cat litter ads for the first time in their lives.
They didnt own a cat.
Yea they can deny it all they want, but I’ve had similar happen to me countless times.
Even better, last time I tried to buy something from one of their adds it turned out to be a scam. I reported the post (add) and they said they wouldn’t remove it because it didn’t break any policies. lol.
At this point it doesn’t even matter if it’s real or not, after Snowden no sane person believes big tech since they were all in on PRISM.
Dildos, lots of dildos! I’m just gonna repeat that while I’m driving to see if I start getting Google ads for dildos.
I tried that. Didn’t work. There may be some filters so they don’t serve inappropriate ads to people with families or some such.
I am so numb to outrage that this just seems… Meh. What happened to me.
Normative nihilism is going to get us all.
This is such a strange reality to live in. All of the futuristic, dystopian fiction I have consumed has the same premise that people living in the dystopia know it and know it’s bad. Somehow reality is worse.
It’s the world we live in. It’s very much intentionally designed to make you complacent.
Isn’t this an old article?
What’s the last “bombshell scandal that would ruin a company” that actually ruined a company?
Unroll.me was a service that would scan your email and clean up your inbox. The New York Times reported that the company was gathering sales receipts emails, anonymizing them, and selling them to rival companies; for example Uber paid them to hand over all the sales receipts they could on Lyft rides in people’s mailboxes. The bad press made them eventually sell the company to Slice, mainly for the email archives they amassed.
Slice like… the pizza website?
That’s what I assumed too but it appears to be a package tracking website
Shocked, I tell you!
Until now it was really annoying to collect audio and then use it. The app needs to constantly record, send out the datas and then lastly process it to be useful. Today the cost versus benefits are really not to their advantage.
But tomorrow this might change, if they find a way of using the mic to serve ads be sure that they will. The only question today is how? The only option at this time is for me to process the stuff offline. As they do today with “ok google”. Within the next months-years we are going to see more and more phones and it stuff using dedicated or specialized AI chip, they will be great with really low consumption to run 24/24. They could analyse offline the speech, make a resume and lastly when the connectivity is sufficient and enough datas are collwcted, the phone sends out all the infos to the companies servers.
I’ve seen some comments about the fact that others companies that Google cannot really use the mic in this way, this is right…today. But in the future make sure that when they will have developed correctly this concept, Google (and Apple) would surely be okay with this approach (maybe in exchange with some bucks).
Today phones are surely not listening to us, but they know so much things that we are actually thinking that they are. But this way is maybe not enough profitable for them, so they want to invade even more our privacy to gain more of this fucking thing called “money”.