[jere]

My experience working at one of the companies that gets accused of this a lot is that many colleagues wish we were as evil as claimed because it would be so much easier do their jobs that way than struggling through the reality of it which is endless red tape over the tiniest issues that have even the slightest proximity to privacy. So I've been a bit skeptical too.

[efitz]

Exactly. The big companies are scared of lawsuits and trying to get approval for something like that would be a nonstarter. As a matter of fact the device folks at the same company would be working hard to kill such an idea in its infancy because it’s already an uphill battle to sell always-listening or always-watching devices to consumers because of the creepiness factor.

And people also are terrible at math. Modern ML (regression & neural nets) are ridiculously good at predicting stuff you might be interested in, particularly when rich data sources like browsing and e-commerce histories are available; the decision to show the ad to you at some point almost certainly was made long before any audio-to-marketing pipeline could act on it.

[Ancalagon]

Aren’t TikTok and Huawei easy counterpoints to this?

[efitz]

Neither is a US company. TikTok is on their last appeal to the Supreme Court to avoid being banned in the US. Huawei is banned by the US government for many uses, e.g 5G infrastructure. Neither is a good example.

[danillonunes]

After shadow profiles, cambridge analytica, prism, etc, I don't think those companies are all that scared of privacy violation lawsuits.

[bbor]

Yup - having worked at Google Display Ads (arguably the epicenter of such talk), I personally only ever witnessed people walking the walk, privacy-wise. The threats to our privacy are quite public and not at all illegal; IMO data brokers and 3P browser trackers are at the top of the list, but all of Google’s known ills are there too (location tracking, exchange monopolization, allowing predatory advertisers, gestures broadly at chrome, etc etc etc).

They don’t need to be listening to us, and wouldn’t know how to even begin hiding it if they were. Something like that would require tons of compute and thousands of conspirators risking massive backlash, all to prop up a relatively tiny part of their business.

> Convincing people of this is basically impossible

Absolutely correct IME, btw. This is one of those things a smart engineer learns not to argue online, or at the Christmas dinner table for that matter. People tend to stand their ground on this one and move quickly to accusations of bias and naïveté…

[jgalt212]

I'm not trying to change your mind, but this response (from another user) was flagged, so I'm providing a pull quote.

> A marketing firm called Cox Media Group has recently revealed that it is listening to user conversations via their smartphones through its so-called "Active Listening" Software. With this, the company will push advertisements that users will see on certain platforms based on the heard conversations as unveiled by a report.

https://www.techtimes.com/articles/307372/20240904/cox-media...

Is techtimes.com junk?

[jcrawfordor]

This story was widely reported, but it's a little questionable. The slides are genuine, but they seem more like a prospectus for something Cox wants to do than something that they're actually doing. The presentation also never claims the "always listening" that people are concerned about, and instead just refers to "a data trail based on their conversations and online behavior" from "smart devices." The idea that this is smartphones listening to you pervasively is entirely something people have read into it, not something the slides say or even really suggest. I think most readers in the industry find it far more likely that they are describing reanalysis of consumer interactions with voice assistants (probably not even of the audio but of the transcript). That would presumably be the one in the cable boxes their parent company distributes, because access to that kind of data from other voice assistants seems difficult to negotiate and they do not claim to have it.

If you review the actual presentation (https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/25051283-cmg-pitch-d...), none of the claims in it are that remarkable. The whole kerfuffle seems to have come from a combination of the presentation actually being incredibly vague (probably intentionally to allow them to overstate the capability---this is a presentation for sales pitches) and some confirmation bias on the part of 404 Media, reading into it what they were looking for. But there's also a healthy amount of "news laundering," a lot of the articles cribbing off of 404 (like this techtimes one) actually make stronger claims than the original 404 piece does. It has a fair amount of weaseling that it's not clear how the slide deck should be interpreted, whether it's a real or speculative capability, etc.

If you've ever worked in enterprise software sales, you would be extremely wary of interpreting the slide deck the way a lot of these articles do. It reads like a lot of bluster.

[brookst]

I mean if you’ve ever bought enterprise software, you know that much of the sales pitch is for aspirational features. Ugh.

[Suppafly]

>I mean if you’ve ever bought enterprise software, you know that much of the sales pitch is for aspirational features. Ugh.

The company I work for has had to cancel contracts and claw back money a few different times from vendors that have promised features that were mandatory in our industry that weren't actually available in the software. One I recall was a pricey leave of absence tracking platform that didn't actually consider hipaa compliance to be important.

[geoduck14]

>I mean if you’ve ever bought enterprise software, you know that much of the sales pitch is for aspirational features. Ugh

Yup. Or if you've ever built enterprise software - after a sales engineer sold a featuee that doesn't exist l. Ugh

[yencabulator]

Sales not understanding their own product is a long-running joke. My favorite anecdote of it was our sales person demonstrating a highly-available system by removing power cables from all nodes. That's going to be a tough feature to provide by next quarter.

[jsnell]

I've never heard of them, so can't say if they're junk. But they're certainly gullible.

It's a small media company whose primary business is operating a handful of local newspapers and TV stations. They have no privileged access to mobile operating systems. If they really had implemented this scheme in actual apps (rather than just write it into a pitch deck), those apps would need to be asking for microphone permissions.

Note how there never was any follow-up showing that this really was happening. The story was only ever about that pitch deck. Compare that to e.g. the currently ongoing story about the dodgy things done by the Honey browser extension.

[Tagbert]

Discussed last year when they made their announcement. No one gave a believable mechanism for them being able to do this. The consensus was that they were blowing smoke.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/12/no-a-marketing-firm-...

[bbor]

Ahh this one. Thanks for sharing, important point!

Basically this is just a random small-ish company trying to get new clients with a flashy feature. Ultimately they have to use the same data as everyone else, which I’m 99.99% sure doesn’t involve any intentional (much less “active”) recording by Google, Apple, or Meta. Maybe they have their own hardware partners that have networked microphones, maybe they’re really using incidental recordings from their “407 data partners”, or maybe it’s an empty promise - I sadly can’t read the original(ish) article https://www.404media.co/heres-the-pitch-deck-for-active-list...

It’s perhaps noteworthy that the intermediary source is the NYPost, which is most certainly junk! This story isn’t fake news, but it also isn’t presented in a honest way, IMHO

[jcrawfordor]

Cox Media Group is attached to Cox Enterprises which owns Cox Communications, one of the largest US cable providers. They distribute set-top boxes with an integrated voice assistant. So, I would wager that is at least one source, and I would actually put down money that it is the only source. Cox Media Group doesn't make any claims about where they get the data or how much they have, and it seems like it would be very difficult to negotiate to get that data from the other major voice assistants.

[gruez]

>They distribute set-top boxes with an integrated voice assistant. So, I would wager that is at least one source, and I would actually put down money that it is the only source. Cox Media Group doesn't make any claims about where they get the data or how much they have, and it seems like it would be very difficult to negotiate to get that data from the other major voice assistants.

There was a class action lawsuit back in 2019 alleging that Apple accidentally recording people's conversations with siri counted as wiretapping. If no enterprising lawyers has tried this lawsuit with cox, and no news articles has come out criticizing their broad ToS, it's probably safe to assume cox isn't doing it.

[xethos]

I think it's weird how, on a site filled to the brim with engineers and comp-sci people that laugh at (or drink to) management believing the sales team, we all take the pitch deck from a sales team at face value.

If marketing or sales can twist a feature such that it's not presented perfectly honestly, but makes them look incredible and all but guarantees a sale? I think they'll twist meanings for that bonus. Certainly not every member of sales and marketing, but often enough that the pitch deck of a sales team shouldn't have nearly this much sway, IMO.

[drewcoo]

CMG isn't small or little-known. It's just apparently not your industry.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cox_Enterprises

[simonw]

I had an argument about that exact story on lobste.rs a few months ago: https://lobste.rs/s/mf7guc/leak_facebook_partner_brags_about...

(I wouldn't exactly rate techtimes.com up there with NYT/Washington Post/etc.)

[Breza]

Well said. I've worked in adtech and this aligns with my experience. Alphabet probably wouldn't even make that much more money compared to its current ad program. There's no shortage of supply in display advertising.

[bbor]

Exactly. Overall the idea of selling more people its ad targeting service is peanuts compared to search ads, or more relevantly, selling people the ability participate in the Display Ads market at all in the first place (through the aforementioned exchange monopolization).