Comment on I still don’t think companies serve you ads based on spying through your microphone
hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 4 days agoDifficult to judge. Could be confirmation bias, as well. Meaning you got ads for flight before. But you didn't pay 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.
Tidesphere@lemmy.world 4 days ago
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.” ?
patatahooligan@lemmy.world 4 days ago
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.
hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 4 days ago
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 rhey 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.
patatahooligan@lemmy.world 4 days ago
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.
TheBrideWoreCrimson@sopuli.xyz 4 days ago
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, or is in the hands of a state attorney or whatever, the recording/ forwarding/ prcoessing of data stops.
patatahooligan@lemmy.world 3 days ago
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.
Syntha@sh.itjust.works 4 days ago
The plural of anecdote is not data
Tidesphere@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Yes, this is the common statement I am referencing.
hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 4 days ago
With the scientific method and anecdioal evidence, kind of never.
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 a lot of people believe in esoterics, homeopathy etc. The mechanics of psychology are well-understood.
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 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.
Tidesphere@lemmy.world 4 days ago
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.
BeardedGingerWonder@feddit.uk 3 days ago
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.
BlueMagma@sh.itjust.works 4 days ago
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.