Your phone doesn’t listen to you, but it builds a fingerprint and uses that fingerprint to serve ads.
It also serves ads for things based on who you’ve been around recently. The example given was the guy’s wife asked for a power drill for her birthday, and then the guy started seeing power drill ads.
This wasn’t because of the conversation, but because his wife had looked up power drills and opened herself up to ads about them. Because the husband had been around the wife, the ad algorithms thought he might be into the same sort of things she is, and so they started serving him ads based on what they think his wife would like.
The article takes issue with this and considers it an invasion of privacy. It’s the same sort of story we’ve seen dozens of times before; John Oliver did it better.
You are my favorite kind of person. May you always find the best parking spot right in front of your destination and may your pets always choose to cuddle with you, even when there’s a cozier spot nearby.
They aren’t listening to you speaking because they don’t have to do that. They already know about everything you and your friends do because of all the other shit they track about you and them collectively. The article is fine. Not really new information for most people here or that would probably be reading Lifehacker though, which makes me think they might not buy enough user data…
It has a microphone right there, so why wouldn’t it be sending our voices to Google headquarters or wherever so they can send me an ad? What other explanation is there?
She made a search on wifi for a cordless dremel. Ad companies saw “this IP is searching for cordless dremels we should give ads there”
Author joins same wifi network and goes to a page served by said ad company (or company in general like amazon). Gets ad for dremel.
Anyone wants to take one for the team and spoil the article? I don’t click on clickbait article. I’m curious but fuck this practice.
Your phone doesn’t listen to you, but it builds a fingerprint and uses that fingerprint to serve ads.
It also serves ads for things based on who you’ve been around recently. The example given was the guy’s wife asked for a power drill for her birthday, and then the guy started seeing power drill ads.
This wasn’t because of the conversation, but because his wife had looked up power drills and opened herself up to ads about them. Because the husband had been around the wife, the ad algorithms thought he might be into the same sort of things she is, and so they started serving him ads based on what they think his wife would like.
The article takes issue with this and considers it an invasion of privacy. It’s the same sort of story we’ve seen dozens of times before; John Oliver did it better.
You are my favorite kind of person. May you always find the best parking spot right in front of your destination and may your pets always choose to cuddle with you, even when there’s a cozier spot nearby.
They aren’t listening to you speaking because they don’t have to do that. They already know about everything you and your friends do because of all the other shit they track about you and them collectively. The article is fine. Not really new information for most people here or that would probably be reading Lifehacker though, which makes me think they might not buy enough user data…
She made a search on wifi for a cordless dremel. Ad companies saw “this IP is searching for cordless dremels we should give ads there”
Author joins same wifi network and goes to a page served by said ad company (or company in general like amazon). Gets ad for dremel.