Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Please don't post about US Politics. If you need to do this, try [email protected]
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either [email protected] or [email protected].
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email [email protected]. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
I've had a suspicion for a few years about this phenomenon. I know that simply recording audio and transmitting it for processing to serve ads is a violation of the federal wiretapping laws. I know they know it too.
So do they get around it by doing the processing locally on the device? So the phone effectively has tens of thousands of wake words that are trained for different things. "I want a big truck" -> phone parses that out "big" "truck" and sends those words up to ~~google~~ in a keyword dump. So technically it isnt wiretapping. Right?
Plus, it avoids the security researchers who use wireshark to monitor those devices. They are looking for audio streams, not a keyword dump that is encrypted and can be sent asynchronously at a later date in a much smaller file size.
How would they know that because you mentioned a thing, that it means you're then worth targeting a ad for? "I wish i could find my fork", or "I saw someone eating a Mars Bar" or "My mate Phil just got the new Lego Batmobile" or all sorts of conversations that just mention a product in passing. What, do they have a secret set of phrases that they're listening out for that is linked to an intent to want to buy it?
It's just so far-fetched that I'm baffled that people truly believe this is actually happening.
Just because technically something might be possible, doesn't mean that there's actually a valid reason for anyone to actually do it. What is actually in it for Google to do this? Their regular, not unethical or illegal advertising processes already work so spectacularly well that they've killed off entire advertising industries already.