I’ve always heard this as speculation, bordering on paranoia. But then it happened to me: my wife and I were having a conversation about shoes, and I said my wardrobe may need to include a pair of cowboy boots. End of conversation. At no point did anyone go browsing online for boots.
But a few hours later my wife got an ad for cowboy boots.
It’s a coincidence. There is no real-time conversation recording and tracking, especially tracking across devices.
It’s also possible your browsing habits did influence the ad shown to you, even though you indicate no one shopped for boots online. Targeted advertising is more sophisticated than parroting back search terms as advertisements. Regardless of whether the boot ad you saw was influenced by browsing habits, though, the timing of seeing the ad after talking about the subject is coincidental.
She probably also saw a hundred other ads that hour but only the one for cowboy boots stuck out due to the coincidence.
I’m unconvinced by your so-called “logical explanations.”
If you are using an Amazon Alexa or similar device, it may well not be coincidence. Bezos, et al, are not providing ‘free’ services out of some sense of altruism or generosity; they are using information gleaned from your commuication to figure out how to more effectively market to you and extract money from you, and it is not implausible that smartphones, fitness trackers, and so forth will soon be actively tracking your behaviors, movement patterns, and purchases to the benefit of marketers if they are not already.
This is not a surprise to anyone working in the data marketing industry; the only shocking this is how few people really understand how their personal data is being used, and how readily big data analysis systems can put together piecemeal information to predict your wants and needs with surprising precision and detail.
Stranger
Of course a device like Amazon Alexa is listening to you; that’s how the whole thing works! How else could it respond immediately upon your saying, “Hey Alexa” or whatever catchphrase it’s designed to pick up on, without listening constantly?
This why I always have my aluminum foil hat ready to don at a moment’s notice.
( I think , talk and read alot about aliens and cats…they might be the same thing, not sure)
Now let’s see how quickly you see an ad for aluminum foil.
Devices like Alexa and Google Home do indeed listen to everything you say and they are indeed collecting information. It would be naive to think otherwise.
I know I have read that the Facebook app uses its microphone permissions to listen to pick up what music you listen to and what TV shows you watch. At least this was true at one time, maybe not now.
My devices listen to me, constantly. How do I know this? Three of them have already died from boredom…
I did just see an ad for ‘I am radiant’…creepy!
Just for the record, I don’t have a smart speaker. I do have Facebook.
No, it wasn’t true. Facebook Isn't Listening Through Your Phone's Microphone. It Doesn't Have To | WIRED
Because FB doesn’t need to do that to get effective targeted ads. Besides, it’s currently not technically feasible to do so on a large scale or effectively.
Absolutely possible. Sometimes the program forgets it’s supposed to only let you know it’s eavesdropping when you use the “Wake Word”. But clearly, if it knows you’ve said The Word, it must have been hearing everything else you said that wasn’t The Word. There is absolutely no reason to assume someone/something isn’t doing some level of analysis of every conversation in the thing’s presence.
Aside from the fact that you’d see the CPU and data usage.
Well sure. But I’m not that good. Nobody I know is that good or that diligent. My cell phone bill comes, I pay it. My cable/internet bill comes, I pay it. If I get crazy I can bring up my CPU usage graph thingy on my PC and see what background programs are running, but I have no clue what most of them are and whether or not they are normal & necessary vs. nefarious eavesdropping things. So yeah, no reason at all to assume my appliances aren’t working against me when there is evidence exactly this has happened.
According to your link, others were able to detect it happened. Which is why you were able to provide a link to it happening…due to a bug in a yet to be released set of smart speakers. From a link in your link:
All of this was done quietly, with only the four lights on the unit I wasn’t looking at flashing on and then off.
The recordings were saved to his own account. Not exactly stealthy spying or quite the same as secret recordings being used to tailor advertising so “there is evidence exactly this has happened” isn’t exactly true.
For any device that interprets voice commands and has a connection to the Internet, it’s a virtual certainty that it’s listening in to you and sending audio data to the manufacturer or its assigns. This is basically how these devices work, and this is probably freely disclosed to you by the manufacturer (if only in fine print). What the manufacturer does with the audio data is hard to say; you should check the terms of use of your device to see whether the manufacturer employs this data for marketing or other purposes, stores it indefinitely, or shares the data with third parties. Even then, there is always the possibility that they are using/storing/sharing it anyway, either deceptively, negligently, or under court order.
For devices that have a microphone and Internet connection but which aren’t obviously designed to continuously monitor audio, they probably aren’t listening in to you, and may not even be able to. But without access to the source code (including the firmware), it can be hard to prove one way or another. According to the Wall Street Journal, law enforcement agencies can remotely activate the microphone on Android phones in order to eavesdrop on suspects. This feature or flaw (depending on your point of view) has been confirmed by independent security researchers for at least some Android phones. This has led to the community development of substitute operating systems such as Replicant, which try to plug the security holes by giving users more control over the phone hardware.
The Free Software Foundation has a page that surveys malware, backdoors, and other privacy-violating features built into certain mobile devices. It has a section describing some backdoors that allow for remote surveillance.
The temptation to put on my foil hat and run off with this is strong but it would be facetious and distracting. I will continue to harbor my unfounded distrust of voluntary bugging devices, but shall discontinue any attempts to persuade others to do the same. Apologies to all.