But every time this comes up the threads are flooded with people saying it doesn't actually happen and the ad companies just work out what you're interested in by what you're browsing.
> the ad companies just work out what you're interested in
The word "just" doesn't belong in that sentence. The ad companies being able to know things about you without actually listening to you is even more scary.
Evil-Ad-Company Neo: "You're telling me I can know things about my customers by secretly listening to them?"
Evil-Ad-Company Morpheus: "No Neo, I'm telling you that with the right license agreements, data sharing partnerships, and algorithms, you wont need to secretly listen to them."
They're saying it's scarier that ad companies can figure out these things without the data because it means that you can't protect yourself by withholding your data.
You're protecting yourself from targeted psychological manipulation. It's like the difference between someone spraying a cyber-attack over the entire IPv4 space, or spending a while trying to drill into a specific server. The latter is much scarier and harder to resist, but it's basically what targeted advertising is these days. They supposedly want just to help you find what you want to buy, but they do this by trying to make you want things you wouldn't actually need otherwise.
I like to think I'm immune (the only ad I've ever taken up was years ago for Privacy(.com), and only because I then knew about it later, and could choose to pursue it on my own), but I wouldn't be surprised if at some point before I started being allergic to every type of advertisement imaginable, some ads managed to get my attention for one reason or another. (maybe subliminal messaging's done something before, I dunno.)
I'm not too concerned about it since I know it's been kept to a minimum, so at this point basically everything I've done is something I actually wanted to do, there are no concerns about having been manipulated. But that's just because I've managed to avoid seeing targeted ads almost whatsoever.
Among other things, I would say the unknown collation of personal history, interests and spending activity that is often auctioned off to the highest bidder.[1][2] In an even more automated society than today, social scoring becomes the norm, and with it access to services.
With prolific cases as Robodebt and the Toeslagen Affaire, we can only hope these automated scoring systems remain isolated from governmental overreach.[3][4]
Firstly there is the emotional response: I don't want to be followed around in everything that I do for someone else's benefit, and I not at all convinced of arguments that targetted advertising is done for my benefit.
Then there is the fact that a large amount of data about me is being stored, possibly insecurely for people with even less scruples to analyse. I have very little to hide (white, middle class, straight, male, cis, no criminal activity beyond some unlicensed TV/film access, etc – there is little or nothing about me that would be frightening for anyone else to know) but there are many out there who do have things that could be (unfairly) held against them with terrible consequences. Consider women in Texas where there is effectively a reward/bounty program to encourage snitching on those who have had, or are considering, an abortion, or people in law enforcement who don't want certain groups to be able to derive their home address with any accuracy, people in one or more closets through fear of being ostracised from their family/community and left pennyless & without support, and so forth. I grew up with friends who were gay when it was still effectively illegal to be, despite what the Sexual Offences Act (1967) said, and when getting beaten up for being gay was almost acceptable (“act more straight, and it wouldn't have happened”: something a friend was once told by a policeman that saw no cause for arrest) – the fear of consequences from collected information “getting out” and/or being used to derive other information (true or otherwise) is real and for many people not at all irrational.
Back to my icky feelings, which are perhaps a little bit less rational: I wouldn't be happy with someone following me between shops, watching what I'm perusing, then to the pub and noting who I was there with, then back to my home, in order to be able to serve me relevant ads (perhaps for shoes that would be more comfortable for that much walking? or for condoms because they noticed I was accompanied by a female friend, and you never know, right, nudge nudge wink wink), and I'm not happy about the same happening in a more virtual environment. How do I trust that is really (or only) why I'm being followed? And I how do I know who else my stalker is selling news of my activity to?
[actually, the “I have little or nothing to fear” isn't entirely right – any of us could suffer from plain old identity theft in various ways]
Deanonymizing people across datasets for one. Maybe attacker or maybe next gov that goes full Hitler and subpenas tech companies to introduce social karma and you are put on a no-fly list because you expressed interest in UK royalty or have a cousin in Iran. Invisible bubble and radicalization for another.
I understood this to mean the amount of information they have is enough to uniquely fingerprint you and associate that with your derived wants and needs.
I am pretty convinced that modern advertising - from the most inane and innocent to tracking users 24/7 pretty clearly falls under evil. Gone are the days of advertising trying to raise product awareness and convert purchases - that field now exists to create demand. It induces desires in the recipients that play on psychological factors like FOMO to create customers out of thin air - and that process causes we the consumer to pay a constant attention tax and suffer higher levels of stress in our daily lives.
You do realize all forms of media embed advertising directly into the content going right back to the beginning, right? There's nothing modern about it. Showing you a product when you actually want to see it is the most effective way to induce demand. All your favorite shows, movies, youtube personalities, etc. still do this.
This isn't true. Originally advertising was designed around the premise of explicitly highlighting utility and functionality of goods/content. It wasn't until Bernays came along and adapted his uncle Sigmund Freud's theories into practice by designing advertising to manipulate people into believing that they actually need the product.
Modern advertising is not just "showing a product to induce demand". Car adverts don't just highlight functionality, they use mass market analytics to play emotionally driven messaging and visuals so that you associate that feeling with the car ad.
Do you know what Bernays called what services he offered before the word got tarnished?
If you think that the product that the lead actor in the series your marathoning through on your streaming provider isn't there on purpose, then you've just not been paying attention. There's a reason shows blur out logos on people's clothing or the crew covers them up with grip tape, or set dressers turn the cans/bottles/boxes of products around so the main logos are not visible. Even having copyrighted posters on the wall in frame can cause licensing issues.
Advertising, by its very nature, is emotional manipulation with the goal of getting you to give up some of your money for something you most likely don't really need and won't improve your life all that much, if at all. To me, that's evil.
Sure, there are varying degrees of this evil, but IMO even the least-objectionable advertising out there still can't be called "good".
In my experience, the case where advertising gets you to buy something that ends up being materially useful, that you would not have bought (or found a substitute for) without that advertising, is the exception, not the rule.
Oh, and to address your specific example: if you search "best diapers", and get shown ads for diapers, that absolutely is evil, because some ad-presentation algorithm is pushing you toward whatever diapers will generate the most money for the ad network, likely not toward which diapers are best. Not to mention that "best" often means different things to different people, and the ad networks only care about that insofar it increases their profit.
> Advertising, by its very nature, is emotional manipulation with the goal of getting you to give up some of your money for something you most likely don't really need and won't improve your life all that much
I've heard somewhere that ads are rich people screaming "give me money".
> If you really want to be a critical reader, it turns out you have to step back one step further, and ask not just whether the author is telling the truth, but why he's writing about this subject at all.
Followed quickly by being hopelessly naïve about the future:
> Whatever its flaws, the writing you find online is authentic. It's not mystery meat cooked up out of scraps of pitch letters and press releases, and pressed into molds of zippy journalese. It's people writing what they think.
>you most likely don't really need and won't improve your life all that much, if at all
People are spending money because they see that they are getting value from something. If people didn't want it or thought it was worthless they would not buy it.
>If people didn't want it or thought it was worseless [sic] they would not buy it.
Thinking something is "worthless" and not wanting something are opinions. A lot of modern advertising attempts to change peoples' opinions, so that they do want something, and think something has worth. It's just like propaganda, which actively attempts to sway peoples' opinions.
Of course, there's only so far you can take this. Convincing anyone who isn't seriously mentally impaired that a sandwich made with literal shit isn't worthless is probably not going to work. But away from the extreme end, there's a lot of room to manipulate people.
Sure, if you take the most benign examples, it doesn't sound so bad. But it's so much worse than that. Going back to 2012 for "acting on data analysis gone wrong"
Target Sends Coupons to Pregnant Girl and Unawares Dad Explodes
> Pole had identified about 25 products that, when analyzed together, allowed him to assign each shopper a "pregnancy prediction" score. More important, he could also estimate her due date to within a small window, so Target could send coupons timed to very specific stages of her pregnancy.
And things just get worse from there, as companies figure out more and more ways they can extract information from the information they have about you, and share it with each other.
No no no. First we start with trusted brands you know and love. We use the trust you have in them to slowly build a market around them. With our ad strategy, you’ll start seeing our product as related to Trusted Brand A. You will start seeing comments and reviews for our Brand in the same browsing contexts more and more until our Brand is now correlated enough to Trusted Brand A to remove purchase inhibitions.
After that, we just wait. We know we have you. It’s just a matter of time till you need a product like ours (you’re already our target demo), or an impulse buy occurs.
Without evening knowing it. You’ve been manipulated into trusting our brand, and you’ll think it was all an organic choice.
Two different things. The popular conspiracy theory is that the phone listens to and presumably transcribes your conversations, sending them to a third party. The example the OP gave is specifically listening for TV content: they’ll have hashes of known ads/shows/whatever to compare against rather than do something like live transcription.
Don’t get me wrong it’s shitty and gross. But they are different things.
Both iOS and Android show when your microphone is active so the whole conspiracy theory about it always listening to you and sending it back is pretty bullshit. And no one has yet found evidence of such network traffic either.
True, but the theory is far older than the indicators. So maybe Facebook stopped being sneaky once those controls came in? Not saying I believe them, but there's still room for doubt there.
Facebook doesn't have to be the one doing it - a 3rd party that controls an app on users' phones could be selling transcribed data to companies that want to run individually tailored ads on Facebook.
except it's always listening for you to say "siri" or "google assisstent". Some androids also show what music is playing nearby. You can thankfully opt-out but the ability to is still there.
Actually there are no servers involved; it uses an on-device database:
> When music plays nearby, your phone compares a few seconds of music to its on-device library to try to recognize the song. This processing happens on your phone and is private to you.
...They don't even need to hash content. Advertisers can just add ultrasound beacons to the audio track.
Imperceptible to human hearing, but readily picked up by a listening mic. In fact, there are static analysis tools for picking out apps that access such API's in FDroid, along with taking measures to feed said apps dummy data. At least for Android anyway.
8 major versions, that is surely less than 5% of the Android population. I'm sure the security flaws in those non-updated phones is far more serious than the lack of microphone indicator.
According to https://source.android.com/docs/core/permissions/privacy-ind..., the microphone indicator is only in there since Android 12. Android 12 and 13 cover only 50% of Android phones, according to https://gs.statcounter.com/os-version-market-share/android/m.... There were some "access to the microphone is restricted for background apps" changes earlier, reported for Android 9. But I wouldn't rely on them, and even if those restriction always worked, that still made ~10% of Android phones vulnerable.
It seems highly inefficient to listen to users 24/7 given the other more specific signals that are available. Rather have a transaction data point around everything someone has purchased then what they talk about.
Agreed. Android 4 was peak Android. Most of my favorite Android games are from that era and very few of them run anymore. I wish Google either make a sandboxed emulation layer for those old abandoned games.
Wait... what? As someone who's always tried to target the oldest Android version I can which Google Play will still allow uploading (for a long time, Android 2.3), this is alarming. Why don't they run now? I don't actually play games on Android myself.
Nielsen has sent me about $30 so far begging me to wear a microphone that records me all day. They repeatedly call and have started fedexing me letters instead of USPS.
Fly-by-night ad networks might engage in this. Ad networks that are in the sights of regulators, and can be slapped with $X billion fines, that may well exceed the marginal revenue produced by improved tracking[1] are going to be a bit antsier around doing that sort of thing.
[1] How much more money will a $100B ad business make if they improved tracking accuracy by %1? It's some positive number, but significantly less than $1B.
Probably not direct legal risk[1] if they weren't the ones collecting the data, but integrating with all that shit has the incredible risk that your counterparty might just go up in smoke next week, while leaving you with a busted product, and all the reputational damage fallout.
It's picking up pennies in front of a steamroller. You'd have to be a truly desperate PM to consider it.
[1] Still all the legal risks of holding that data, but they are easier to mitigate.
So instead they buy that data from the fly-by-night operators and carry on as usual. That's the key problem here, this data only needs to be collected by one shady operator, "the market" will handle the rest.
That was an official feature of the Facebook app at one point. Like 10 years ago. It's absurd that anyone would deny this. It was right there as a feature! Default off I think. But it was definitely there.
I can’t speak for Android. But exactly how does a mobile app turn on your microphone on iOS without you giving it explicit permission?
I just did a virtual visit with a doctor that used a video conferencing service that work without an app on iOS and just used Safari. I had to give the page explicit permission to use my microphone
The word "just" doesn't belong in that sentence. The ad companies being able to know things about you without actually listening to you is even more scary.
Evil-Ad-Company Neo: "You're telling me I can know things about my customers by secretly listening to them?"
Evil-Ad-Company Morpheus: "No Neo, I'm telling you that with the right license agreements, data sharing partnerships, and algorithms, you wont need to secretly listen to them."