this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2024
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These companies absolutely do use your microphone to listen.
My wife and I have tested this and you can too.
Have a conversation near your phones about purchasing something offbeat. We used a kitchen garbage disposal in our test. Talk about them for a few minutes, about needing to buy one, different brands, etc.
Almost immediately you'll be served garbage disposal adds.
This has been common knowledge for several years now.
And there have been push back against the idea by naive, trusting people who think the toggles for that do anything. The fact that there's leak conversations now of advertisers admitting they do it will sink any counter argument against it.
Also, if advertisers are doing it, you can bet that the government can too.
No that's being pushed back on the idea from people with tech skills who work in the cyber security industries. You don't think they would realize if something like this was happening and shout it from the rooftops?
It's everyone's favorite past time to dunk on Facebook but that doesn't mean we should make stuff up without evidence. Calling people naive because they don't believe you is the same as saying it's true because you want it to be.
Evidence must be presented. I've never seen any not in the 10 years these claims have been made. No one has ever bothered to provide a shred of evidence and all of it is who I talked about X and then I saw an ad for X.
Pardon me for wanting something a little bit more concrete
Sure thing... Just install Facebook Messenger on your phone and don't pay attention to all of the permissions it needs that are completely unrelated to communicating with people in a messaging app. It is literal malware.
Nope. Too many people are just trying to collect a paycheck. This is testable without access to the backend or source code and too many sociopaths work in the industry. My default is to distrust anything when the other party has a profit motive to lie. It's anti-skeptical, but you have to prove that they aren't spying on me if you want me to trust something.
Okay so address my fundamental point which is show me the evidence because otherwise you're living in exciting reality of your own creation. I am positive it is very fun in there, but it doesn't have much to do with here on Earth
Come leave here on the other side of the reality curtain we have donuts.
This is not the court of law and no one is going to jail because of my distrust of corporations. "Innocent until proven guilty" does not apply here. Any batshit idea I could come with on how a corporation could siphon my data, they have already thought of and tried. They do not deserve the benefit of the doubt.
I used to work in adtech and the most we could do was track locations. Even that didn't work properly for our purposes because most shops are in malls where several different stores co-exist on the same coordinates. It only worked for outlets in retail parks which were separated from one another.
It's wild how much trust people are willing to put into capitalist corporations again and again as if they give a single shit about them.
People are lazy and life is easier when you just blindly trust things you don't understand. People think I'm weird that I don't want a Ring camera INSIDE my house. I wouldn't even put on outside my home.
The reverse is just as true:
"People are lazy and life is easier when you just blindly hate things you don't understand."
As a network engineer, it's frustrating to see laymen make outlandish claims about technology with their source being "corpo bad". I hate corporations too, but it would be an absolute bombshell if it were true. There's just no possible way that every single hacker and security engineer are in league with the corporations.
Honestly, with how people reacted to covid numbers being fudged downward or accepting whatever lie that claims that climate change is fake, I do not believe that any more evidence that corporations are listening in on your conversations would get any reaction out of the population. Hell, did anything come from the Panama Papers or Paradise Papers? The average person does not care.
Sure, people might not care, but that doesn't change the facts. Experts aren’t denying the legitimacy of the Panama or Paradise Papers, but they are saying that the idea of megacorporations secretly listening to your microphone and selling you products based on that is false. If they were doing that, it would be pretty easy to find out. Smartphones aren’t some mysterious black box; security engineers and hackers are constantly checking for these kinds of exploits. If corporations were actually spying on us through our phones, it would be the biggest topic at DEFCON. Believing that this could be kept secret would require assuming that all these experts are either paid off or in cahoots with the corporations, which veers into full-blown conspiracy theory territory.
There are deniers. They're wrong.
I've tested this many times and never saw it happen.
I even got an email out of nowhere right in my inbox from Dell the same day I was talking about Dell laptops with my book club. I would be so shocked if these examples are mere coincidence
Having worked on the tech side of email marketing campaigns I would actually be impressed
Setting aside confirmation bias (idk, because it's boring?): So people you're in a book club with, an established group which it is very easy to associate you with, were discussing Dell laptops... and you think it's strange you got looped in? If three people from your book club all looked up dells later, or earlier, or etc. etc., why wouldn't they figure you might also be interested in dell laptops? An approach that doesn't require NLP of god only knows how much hypothetical audio taken from pockets, and works much better?
I'm just shocked that there are marketing departments that actually know what they're doing. Granted I haven't worked for any huge companies, so that's probably why I have difficulty picturing it.