That’s just a tiny tiny part of it.
And on the other end are the actual ads, which are part of marketing campaigns. Where each campaign can define a specific target demographic (doesn’t have to, but usually they do as it’s just wasting money otherwise).
So for makeup the ad might target white single women in the age of 16 to 45 who live in better income areas for example.
I bet you have a hundred conversations with your friends where you didn’t receive a fitting ad afterwards.
It’s not listening to actual words, that’s already too complex (you’d have to parse language for that, which those low power chips can’t do). It’s listening for syllables, Oh-Kay-Goo-Gle or whatever. Depends on the chip and implementation of course, which is also why you get false positives when someone says something similar.
If you add more syllables to that then your phone would activate literally all the time, with tons of false positives.
Seriously, if we had low powered voice recording + voice to text you’d already have instant conversation subtitles on your phone, instant translation and so on. We simply don’t have that yet, those features do exist but they are power hungry (so if you do use them say goodbye to your battery life).
One is a bug, one is just a lawsuit that went nowhere, one is just an accusation (Google did pay a fine, but for geolocation tracking, not voice), the Amazon one is pretty bad, but again it’s not for a phone!!!
Yes, if your phone assistant accidentally activates then your voice might be uploaded without you knowing. That’s a fact. But you agreed to that by enabling the voice assistant (it even warns you about this).
If you switch your voice assistant off (I have) then you don’t have this issue. What is so difficult to understand here?
The low powered chips really just listen to a few syllables, they can easily have false positives. That’s just a technical aspect of it.
That’s more of a bug instead of someone actively monitoring you. The device accidentally thought you activated it, so it started listening.
You wouldn’t be able to access those recordings if they were trying to spy on you.
Besides that, you literally agreed to it when buying and setting the device up. This is not the case with your phone (if you switch the assistant off, if it’s on and heard the keyword it might still upload data of course).
There have been plenty of tests where CPU and network usage were monitored with one phone.
Once in a quiet soundproof room compared to sitting next to a conversation.
Zero difference.
Recording and parsing audio would kill your battery. And it’s not necessary when most people freely provide their data when using Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, …
There has been zero proof about illegal recording, even though it would be easy to find.
sigh You’re hanging out with your friend, both your phones are in the same location, same wifi, you’re friends on Facebook or whatever.
So you get ads for things they are interested in. No need to listen to your conversation.
The phones have highly optimized functions to listen to keywords. That’s the reason why you can’t change “OK Google” to “OK Jarvis” or whatever you want. Your phone needs to do this locally without wasting battery.
Until the keywords get said the listening is extremely basic. As soon as you say the keywords then the full audio processing kicks in, often including sending what you say to a server.
Mate, your Alexa is plugged in, it’s not a phone. You agree to your Alexa constantly listening when you buy it. It’s a feature, not a bug.
If your phone would listen as much as your Alexa you’d be out of battery in three hours.
Ask Meta?
Could be anti bot protection, or a feature where you can instantly start recording for creating new posts.
I don’t install shit like Facebook, Instagram or TikTok.
Speech to voice has gotten extremely good by now, but the good stuff needs CPU power. Not something you’d run on your phone 24/7 without your demolishing your battery.
You do realize you’re in Funny: Home of the [email protected]?
I wouldn’t expect high quality takes here. You’ll either have to curate the communities you see, or quit social media altogether I’m afraid.
Either way, it’s probably a good thing to check your attitude :)
That one is super easy. Your wife is near you and possibly friends on Facebook with you. The ad system knows that and that’s why your wife sees the ad, as there is a high likelihood that you talked with her about this topic. Though the ad seems to have a shitty target audience definition, your wife should never see it if she’s not into computers herself (waste of money marketing wise).
This is similar to a friend of yours having a new hobby, looked up a lot of stuff about it online, you hang out with them for two hours at a café and suddenly you get ads for this hobby (as it was very likely a topic in your conversation). No need to record your conversation, people are predictable.
designing a vote weighting system that favors similar instances
Would make the whole thing even worse, as I could create several new instances with 10 bot users each, then hammer out the votes.
The entire problem is that you can’t trace back each vote to a genuine user. It would be bad in case of fake instances that create 100 user accounts and upvote/downvote stuff, but you can ban the instance. It would be a disaster if a big instance creates fake votes (like lemmy.world suddenly adds 1000 fake users and uses them to manipulate other instances, if votes were anonymous you couldn’t check if it’s genuine lemmy.world users or fake accounts).
It would be damn easy to look up the instance and their “users” and see that the users are not genuine. Then ban the whole instance.
The big question is why did this topic come up “out of nowhere”?
And there can be several reasons!
You unconsciously saw an ad for it (could even be a billboard while driving) and that’s why you started to discuss this topic. If it’s a new ad it now also pops up on your phone (as it’s a marketing campaign) and you immediately recognize it because you’ve seen it before and discussed it
The ad campaign has been running for ages, but you never paid attention to it. Now that you discussed this topic with a friend you suddenly noticed the ad. Nothing changed ads wise, you just never paid attention to the topic
It’s a popular topic in general, could be in the news, could be hip at the moment, for some reason you and your friend started to talk about it, where did it come from?
There’s so many ways this can go. And if we go back to tracking: All it takes is for a friend of yours to later search something related and it’s also hard tracked (and then linked back to you as you hung out with them). Which can be a double whammy. Your phone being “ungoogled” is also worthless if you use Google, Facebook, Instagram or whatever.
This is only partially true. Yes, it’s listening for those keywords, but only for them. Sometimes that’s even an extra chip in your phone, otherwise it would kill your battery in no time.
Which is one of the reasons you can’t just customize the command to whatever you want to say.
The problem isn’t keeping votes anonymous, that’s easy. The problem is bots/spam. You could just create a new instance and then upvote a post from another instance a thousand times. If the votes are anonymous for the other instance it’s tough to say if they are genuine users or just bots.
That’s the main issue here, when votes are anonymous you could easily just spam votes with no way to trace it back. If it’s a rogue instance then fine, you can ban the whole instance. But imagine if lemmy.world starts using fake votes in the background towards other instances.
This keeps getting brought up and it’s simply not true. No, your phone isn’t listening to you, plenty of tests have been done. It could easily be traceable with higher CPU usage, higher battery usage, network usage and so on, but there is zero difference between having a conversation next to your phone or the phone being in a literal sound proofed room.
Meta data, people you spend time with, what you look up online, your age, your hobbies, your interests, ads you have recently seen, location data, … there’s so much about you online that it’s easy to predict.
And sometimes you talk about things because everyone else is talking about them. You’re not that special.
It can be a bit scary how much you can predict about a person by just using a few simple facts (sex, age, location, income, …).
My ISP doesn’t support IPv6, now what?
It’s really bullshit.
Damn, they are getting younger and younger. Just recently a 13 year old drilled into a patient during brain surgery in Austria /s