NGL this is driving me crazy. Without searching for things, just talking about them, they start showing up in ads. Even in places that don’t have google/alexa speakers.
At this point, I’m reaching full-tinfoil and think they have a voice chip installed under my skinl…
One time I was in a car with some people, and the clouds looked really nice, and out loud I said “I wonder what kind of clouds those are? Are they like cumulus? I don’t even know all the types of clouds” or something along those lines. About a minute later, I take my phone out to look it up and I type “What kind of” and the google auto-fill was “clouds are those” and I was like "There’s absolutely no way that my phone is not listening to me at all times. I do not believe for one second that the most popular search is “What kind of clouds are those”. That was very very specific to what I had just said out loud.
I’m usually not one for tinfoil hats, but this is very difficult to explain.
I remember somewhere, I believe it was the congressional hearings where they called all the heads of the biggest companies to testify for something…a couple years ago…when Bozos refused to show.
Well, anyways, a congressman asked Zuckerberg why this happens because he doesn’t appreciate them listening, through his phone microphone, to conversations hes having. Zuck replies that the algorithm knows you so well, that it pretty much predicts what your going to say at the exact time you say it…were definitely not listening to you from your phone speaker, he says, thats technology we just dont have.
Or something to that effect. 🤨
Way too many people in this thread need to read up on cognitive biases. Frequency illusion would be a good place to start.
I once stopped in a gas station to get coffee, and instead of using brand names to refer to the sweetener, they used the colors: “yellow sweetener” for splenda, “blue sweetener” for equal, etc. It was weird to me, so I noticed. Later that day, I was on my flight and ordered coffee, and the flight attendant offered the sweetener using the same color coding instead of brand names. Weird, right? Then after I got to my destination, at the hotel, same thing!
The only logical conclusion isn’t that our brains are wierd and stuff like this happens as a result of the way we categorize and remember information, but instead that I am in a Meta simulation and Zuckerberg is reading my thoughts.
Is it though?
forbes.com/…/how-target-figured-out-a-teen-girl-w…
And that was over ten years ago. This stuff has only got better since then. I don’t believe they need to listen in to get scary levels of information from you. More than enough to make people convinced they’re listening like some kind of Batman shit.
Oh I followed that one, too.
The thing is, unless there’s a great breakthrough, individual behavior is dramatically less predictable than mob behavior. The Target algorithm was a great case study, but they sent those ads/coupons to EVERYONE who fit the algorithm, and much of the time they were EITHER right OR wrong. Target dropped that particular style of campaign because it had too low a match rate (hitting too many non-pregnant folks and missing too many pregnant ones). When it had that “shocking success”, was it truly a great moment for predictive AI’s, or just the chips falling right with the AI simply adjusting odds a bit?
But no, the predictive technology is harder; I say that as someone who has worked in a predictive data science division. The tuning required to make a model work better than control is hard. Ultimately, if you get ads for something you’ve never searched for before the same day you SAY you want that something, it’s the voice recognition. I’ll be clear, most models we’d work on would fail to prove themselves, get thrown out, and be picked up again. If we’d had the abililty to buy voice matches for the word “insurance” from Amazon/Google, we have been in bloody paradise.
“Oh, you wanted me to make a soda fizz, right? We should get St. Germain because that’s good in it.” … starts getting St. Germain commercials every 5 minutes. Didn’t even know they had commercials. Fucking St. Germain.
nope. they do all the tracking and manipulation themselves. selling to other ad agencies would allow said other agencies to compete and they don’t want that.
they might share data between each other though, we can’t really prove they don’t
Here’s the fun part, they don’t need to listen to you. You are far more predictable than you realize. They already know everything about you, what you search, what apps you use, what kinds of exercise you do and when, what you eat, what articles you read, movies and podcasts you consume, music you listen to, what you buy, where you go, who you hang out with, and everything about the people you hang out with. Every minute of your life is meticulously tracked and analyzed and compared to the hundred thousand people who are just like you in terms of interests and patterns. They can predict to a scary degree what your thinking before you might even realize it yourself. They know you better than you know yourself. Why waste the resources sifting through hours of recordings when they already know everything going on in your head from the million data points you voluntarily transmit to them everyday?
The other part of this to keep in mind is that you are bombarded with ads all day most of which you ignore. It’s just that those few times where they manage to hit a straight bullseye, showing you an add for something you were just talking about or even just thinking about, those are the ones that will stick in your memory.
Nah, none of this explains the Lemonbalm Tea incident.
I assure you, the Lemonbalm Tea incident does not require further explanation than “whatever many steps you think is the answer, you can add plus 2 to it and still come up short”.
I cannot replicate any of these claims no matter how hard I try. I ran out of contact solution this weekend and I spent a good 20 minutes repeating the words “contact solution” “contact solution delivery” “1-800-contacts” "I need contact solution " with Facebook open, directly into the microphone. All I get are vaguely relevant ads for shit I obviously would want (bike parts and bikes because, spoiler alert, I use FB almost exclusively to keep up with local mountain bike events) and absolutely nothing about contacts or contact solution.
But guess what? This still doesn’t prove anything because, like your example, it’s an anecdote. And a single anecdote counts for fuck all in terms of evidence. I find it exceedingly unlikely that any of the tech giants are wasting time and resources listening in on our conversations simply to target us with advertisements when they already have sufficient data based on past search history, app usage statistics, our friend groups, location data, demographic data, …
This stupid conspiracy is just as illogical as the vaccine tracking chip conspiracy. Hello, you are voluntarily carrying a tracking device you bought with your own money and keep charged with your own power, and you willingly expose even more data to it like private messages and photos. There’s absolutely no reason to invent GPS tracking nano technology to solve an already solved problem.
And I by no means am saying that these big tech companies are innocent or that they don’t abuse the data they collect. There’s a 100% chance they do. But you are ascribing a level of sophistication they don’t really need to “read your mind” or listen in on your private conversations. You are human, and they have a few billion other examples of humans they can use to analyze behavior. We’re pretty predictable, it turns out.
DOES YOUR PHONE LISTEN TO YOU ALL THE TIME IN 2023?.. I Think It Does.I always see ads on Facebook & Instagram related to the things I talked about with othe...
The video you linked would be stupid easy to reproduce by recording a voice over after scrolling ads on Facebook for a minute. If you want to convince me, you would need to perform a controlled experiment with multiple unrelated search terms, fresh Facebook accounts with no browsing history, etc.
Or, what if this is real? Maybe the YouTuber wasn’t just phishing for view counts with clickbait to boost his channel and actually did make that video in good faith and sure enough, Bluetooth speakers show up in his feed? What’s to say he hasn’t been seeing Bluetooth speaker ads because he’s a tech inclined, middle aged man with disposable income and the opposite effect is true: maybe he chose Bluetooth speakers because he’s been seeing ads for them on Facebook recently? Our minds aren’t exactly good at keeping track of that kind of thing and advertisers take advantage of that shit all the time. Look at the familiarity principle or mere exposure effect.
My point isn’t to say Facebook and Google don’t collect tons of data about us, they do that all the time for sure. It’s just that there are simpler, more reliable and less processor intensive ways to build a behavioral model. Google knows where I work, what I search for, how old I am, how many kids I have, what YouTube videos I watch, … There’s more than enough there to figure out what kind of ads to serve me.
Yes! I was going to mention that, I heard about that years ago, so things have to be way more sophisticated now. Just looked it up the story was from 2012, and target was just tracking credit card numbers and noticing when women started buying things like unscented lotion. So this is waaay less sophisticated then the information companies are sucking up in present day.
As Pole’s computers crawled through the data, he was able to identify about 25 products that, when analyzed together, allowed him to assign each shopper a “pregnancy prediction” score. More important, he could also estimate her due date to within a small window, so Target could send coupons timed to very specific stages of her pregnancy.
One Target employee I spoke to provided a hypothetical example. Take a fictional Target shopper named Jenny Ward, who is 23, lives in Atlanta and in March bought cocoa-butter lotion, a purse large enough to double as a diaper bag, zinc and magnesium supplements and a bright blue rug. There’s, say, an 87 percent chance that she’s pregnant and that her delivery date is sometime in late August.
forbes.com/…/how-target-figured-out-a-teen-girl-w… The story I found was a girl who got a target mailer for pregnancy stuff and her dad was pissed, only to find out later that her daughter was pregnant. Target changed tactics, instead of sending mailers with just baby stuff, they start sending personalized mailers with some baby stuff mixed in, increasing as the due date approaches. And again this was 11 years ago and just used credit card information and target purchase data. It’s wild to think of what they can do now.
It’s the smartphone conspiracy theory that just won’t go away: Many, many people are convinced that their phones are listening to their conversations to target them with ads. Vice recently fueled the paranoia with an article that declared “Your phone is listening and it’s not paranoia,” a conclusion the author reached…
Unfortunately I need it daily for work ;/
I’d love an alternative, but… You know. Gotta pay the bills and share my life with the zuck
AeroInsta outright blocks the trackers. I’ve never seen a search related content on Instagram because of it.
Revanced, alongside paused history and opt out of ad personalisation, keeps entire history to yourself.
Even YouTube on web can only recommend videos based on my subscription and nothing else.
I just did some volunteer work to help some flood wreckage.
We were using these generic ass storage totes to package shit up in and help people move out or whatever.
Me and like 5 other people all had ads for the generic totes.
I figure it was like "YO THAT GUY THAT BOUGHT 100,000 TOTES IS HANGING OUT WITH THESE GUYS, MAYBE THEY WANT 100,000 TOTES TOO??!
anyways welcome to the future it sucks.
So many of you are on Lemmy and have ZERO privacy awareness. Gtfo please and leave the actual techies alone.
This isn’t “hopeless” you fuckers. DuckDuckGo how to protect yourself from things like this photo.
Dude, calm down wtf?
Also like… just using DuckDuckGo doesn’t mean u have privacy online…
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