scarily... They don't need to to be this creepy, but even I'm a tad baffled by this.
Yesterday me and a few friends were at a pub quiz, of course no phones allowed, so none were used.
It came down to a tie break question of my team and another. "What is the run time of the Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the ring" according to IMDb.
We answered and went about our day. Today my friend from my team messaged me - top post on his "today feed" is an article published 23 hours ago.....
Forgive the pointless red circle.... I didnt take the screenshot.
My friend isn't a privacy conscience person by any means, but he didnt open IMDb or google anything to do with the franchise and hasn't for many months prior. I'm aware its most likely an incredible coincidence, but when stuff like this happens I can easily understand why many people are convinced everyone's doom brick is listening to them....
No no, they listen. How do you think the "Hey Google" feature works? It has to listen for the key phrase. Might as well just listen to everything else.
I spent some time with a friend and his mother and spoke in Spanish for about two hours while YouTube was playing music. I had Spanish ads for 2 weeks after that.
Your phone listens for the phrase "Hey Google" and uses little processing power to do so. If it was listening to everything and processing that information, your battery would die incredibly fast. We're talking charging your phone multiple times a day even if you weren't using it for anything else.
As someone else mentioned in another commend, being near Spanish speakers' phones, Bluetooth/Wifi tracking are what Google is using to track you. They search Google in Spanish, Google can tell you spend time with them, Google thinks you speak Spanish.
Exactly. Phones have dedicated hardware that stores the trigger word and wakes up the OS when it detects it.
Well shit. That makes a lot of sense.
I need some metrics on this. It must be recording at least some things above a certain volume threshold in order to process them.
I mean the microphone is active, so it's listening, but it's not recording/saving/processing anything until it hears the trigger phrase.
The truth is they really don't need to. They track you in so many other ways that actually recording you would be pointless AND risky. While most people don't quite grasp digital privacy and Google can get away with a lot because of it, they do understand actual eavesdropping and probably wouldn't stand all their private moments being recorded.
I think this is the part I hold issue with. How can you catch the right fish, unless you're routinely casting your fishing net?
I agree that the processing/battery cost of this process is small, but I do think that they're not just throwing away the other fish, but putting them into specific baskets.
I hold no issue with the rest of your comment
This stuff isn't magic. It's tech. These things can be proved by analyzing network traffic.
It would be pretty easy to test, too.
Get a pre-paid phone. Set up a brand-new Google or Apple account. Activate phone using the new account. Put it through its paces for a few hours and note the ads you get.
Shoot the shit with your friends and family with the phone on the table for a few hours.
Put the phone through its paces again and note the ads you get.
The amount of processing power that would be needed to listen the output of billions of devices 24/7 just to push ads wouldn't make economic sense.
Well neither dies the cost of llm but that's bit stopping them
AI acceleration ASICs are already in a lot of hardware these days. It doesn't take a whole lot anymore for it to be both cheap and feasible.
Prove your extraordinary claim.