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I still don’t think companies serve you ads based on spying through your microphone
(simonwillison.net)
this post was submitted on 02 Jan 2025
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Technology
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The speech recognition software used by digital assistants that come with most modern smartphones would make it trivial to process the audio locally and map the output to your ad profile. Much lighter lift than sending audio recordings.
And a much smaller footprint. It could even be binary data for tweaking your algorithmic profile, say the name of a branded product or in the case of a product with few options just the type of item. Audio runs in the megabytes per minute, transcripts in the kilobytes, but reducing to a conclusion of interest in a single specific item is really very small, hard to notice tbh.