Comment on I still don’t think companies serve you ads based on spying through your microphone
jordanlund@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Instagram showed me an ad for a medical condition I only discussed out loud, in person, in my doctors office.
Instagram was immediately uninstalled that day.
I hate to add to the conspiracy, but I know my eye doctor uses a 3rd party which has sections of their hipaa privacy acceptance which allows them to use your info to sell you ads if you don’t decline. Phreesia, is the 3rd party company. Now add the other apps that track your location… time spent there…
and I know my grocery store does the same when you use the discounts. and worse, they have facial recognition so I can’t even opt out (kroger).
Your issue was likely a combo of that.
Can’t be facial-recognized if you always wear an N95 mask in stores ;)
A random person recognized Luigi in just a couple days, and he was wearing a mask in all the video footage released.
Modern recognition systems can scan footage a lot faster than humans. Many modern systems don’t just use facial recognition but other factors like general height, walking gait, stride length, etc. to make more accurate recognitions.
Wasn’t his face revealed in cab footage where he’d taken his mask off within like, a day?
I think there is also probably a difference of scope in what is leveraged when Kroger is trying to get your facial pattern while you’re in the store to track where you go and get more data to sell advertisers vs like, the lengths gone to by the state in order to catch someone who shot a rich person dead in the street.
Other methods of data collection can be scarily effective. Stores have identified people were pregnant before they knew.
Very likely they identified you as someone that could have that condition, and you noticing the ads after talking to your doctor is a form of recency bias.
You can collect almost all the same data from traditional surveillance methods. Collecting and processing mocrophone data just isn’t effective enough to make up for the massively increased costs from processing it.
As much as I logically know this to be the case, especially now that Android and iOS indicate when things like the mic are active… My brain still wants to reject it because it is just too coincidental.
I do not trust mic switches however, unless someone can provide proof that it physically disconnects the circuit to that microphone, it can be bypassed somewhere and there’s no reason to trust the manufacturer.
It displayed the ad before I could get home and research it. It had only been discussed out loud and in person.
Did you connect to the clinic’s WiFi?
Yes, I was on the wifi before the appointment.
Just being near their WiFi is enough.
eager_eagle@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Your age group, sex, location, profession/industry, income estimation - you can assume they have this data.
That + a few data points that could be tracked by apps or websites:
Cross some of that, personal info, and ads of treatments for conditions of X.
That said, if it’s a fairly common condition, it might be the case you were presented the ad before and never noticed it.
jordanlund@lemmy.world 1 year ago
None of those data points apply. It was nothing I had searched for or spoken to anyone until I saw the doctor that day and the Instagram ad was present by the time I had driven home, specifically mentioning the clinical term mentioned by the doctor.
It wasn’t even the stated reason for my visit, it was an afterthought at the end of the appointment… “Oh yeah, as long as I’m here, what is this…?”