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

  • rumba@lemmy.zip
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    3 days ago

    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.

      • rumba@lemmy.zip
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        3 days ago

        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.

          • rumba@lemmy.zip
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            3 days ago

            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.

    • nef@slrpnk.net
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      2 days ago

      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?

        • nef@slrpnk.net
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          1 day ago

          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?

          • rumba@lemmy.zip
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            1 day ago

            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.

            • nef@slrpnk.net
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              1 day ago

              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.

                • nef@slrpnk.net
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                  1 day ago

                  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.