this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2024
74 points (75.3% liked)
Privacy
31192 readers
680 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
Chat rooms
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
Not possible. To be explicit, he was asking me my opinion about car maintenance and if I changed the oil in my cars every X miles OR every six months, or if the expiration time of oil was BS. I told him my opinion was that the age of the oil is irrelevant unless you idle your car for many hours at a time, just change it based on the millage. Today I got fed an article about how a dude tested the oil from various cars, with various ages and miles against brand new oil and found that age made no difference on the key characteristics of the oil. That is a remarkably specific article from a VERY specific VERBAL conversation I had over a Teams call on a work computer. It certainly got me thinking but again its the first time I've had one of those super specific ads in a long time that made me question my privacy.
Edit: I'm getting down voted, so people don't think this is a markably specific ad response? People really think Google is just this good to infer this type of article in less than 24 hours is just dumb luck because 'oil change'?
Every day, millions of people discuss oil changes. If an article (was it an article or an ad?) is published on oil changes on X date, it is going to coincide with a large number of unlinked conversations. Today, it was you.
Once is a coincidence, if you can prove a pattern then you should concerned.
It was an article not an ad. And the specifics of oil age vs millage is pretty damn obscure in my opinion especially for a guy who works in tech.
It may be obscure, but that doesnt make it less of coincidence. Also, there is a pretty significant cross.over between tech people and car people (and a greater crossover with car owners).
Well, I'm not going to downvote you because I think it's a good contribution and conversation, but I do think that is a coincidence. They know your interests and stuff and it's black magic how good they are now of making these coincidences happen, but it's not the mic. To much data to process and send
Crazy that they wrote an entire article for one guy's conversation about motor oil. Sounds like a really effective use of resources that is very real and not made up.
Yep! Unless you idle the car a lot just change it based on mileage and not age!
I don't understand how people are still in denial that this is happening when it's so obvious.
Because human observations are notoriously unreliable. Show me data.
They're using data that people sent to their servers. If they were turning on peoples mics and sending the recordings to themselves then anyone that monitors their network traffic at all would notice all of that data being uploaded.
Which is why they process it client side and send keywords as text.
How? The data is locked up in Google servers? All the evidence I have is posted here.
There is a chance I guess he went off and researched the topic and our relations are tethered on googles back end so it figured I might be interested in his interests. But I'm stretching here. I should ask him on Monday!
Probably because no one has any proof other than anecdotal evidence. And the vast majority of times it's looked into it's because the person reporting it doesn't understand how else their information is collected (i.e. web searches, intranet data for other people, browsing histories, etc.)
Look at it this way, is it more likely that the majority of security researchers that look into it, find nothing, and deem these use cases as inefficient and improbable, are wrong; OR is it more likely that data collectors builds good profiles, mixed with some Baader-Meinhof, a little Dunning-Krueger, and a lot of coincidence?
Not everything is a big conspiracy, nuance is neccesary, or the sky will always be falling.
This is how we ended up with Q and anti-vaxxers.
I mean if you want to deny the sky is blue when plenty of experience says otherwise that's on you.
I agree that it would be very inefficient to send voice recordings, and those would be easy to pick out with some packet sniffing.
But a locally processed txt file of keywords would be such a small amount of encrypted data that it would easily pass under the nose of any security researcher and they would have no idea unless it was decrypted.
So no, this is not debunked.