Like, we all know they’re listening , but can we provide proof?
My friend was complaining about all the new super surveillance that will be government required in cars after 2027, and I said to him dude you have a stock android, you use every AI slop feature, you use a smart TV on your unsecured network, and uses x every day. They have everything they could possibly need on him. Oh and he posts questionable things to fb daily under his real name.
Okay, so here is my story:
I was on holiday with my friends and we were playing a TTRPG. In the RPG our group needed charol tablets. I have never in my life googled or needed something like that.
After the session, I opened up Amazon to buy something I forget to pack and voilà: Amazon suggested me to buy charol tablets.
My smartphone must have listened in and given that data to Amazon.
No Alexa or similar products were in the vacation home.
Who in your group didn’t know what charol tablets were and looked them up?
There’s no need for uploading a constant audio feed or transcript (something that would be easy for researchers to detect in the network logs) to show you an advertisement like that.
Your phone knows all the things you wrote in the post, namely: your location, that you are physically with those friends, the wifi network, the search history of everyone there. Because of all that metadata, advertisers probably know you were playing a TTRPG, maybe even the specific one
I normally have GPS and Bluetooth disabled, so my position would have to be guessed based on cell towers. We were not even on the same WLAN (because the WLAN was down in the vacation home, much to our dissatisfaction).
While I can’t rule out somebody in our group stealthily googling the tablets, phones while playing is generally frowned upon.
So yeah, being on the same cell tower as someone I know who might have searched for it might be the only other explanation.
The adventure itself didn’t have anything to do with the tablets, that was just our group doing strange stuff, like always.
I and everyone I know have similar stories. They are listening
Conformation bias. You think of something and you see more of it. You don’t realize the 1000’s of other times you have seen that. Do you honestly remember every add you ever see? No but when you have thought about something you are more likely to see more of it. Or do people purchase more or your colour or type of car after you get it? Or is the fact you see more of them more likely because you are now “looking” for them.
Exactly, you see thousands of irrelevant ads every day and think nothing of it, then when 1 time an ad gets lucky, you will use it as proof “they are listening” forever after.
I had the same thing happen with billboards. I learned about some new thing I have never heard about before, and wouldn’t you know it shortly after I saw a billboard selling it. The ad companies must be on top of their game, they are nor only listening to everything I say, they can print and install a whole billboard on the side of a building within minutes just before I go here.
Just think about the scale of the surveillance: every smartphone user is being monitored 24/7 in hope to find something to sell them.
If you hate AI because it wastes so much energy, think about the cost for the this: Energy, water, battery life, bandwidth, … And in contrast to AI the ‘users’ don’t get anything in return.
Just another reason they want to build even more data centers!
I worry that you’re making AI out as the good option, but really they are both awful, AI is simply less mature. There hasn’t yet been time to inject ads into generated responses (but it’s coming), and the users don’t yet feel the surveillance of each of their prompts.
And are you saying users don’t get any functionality from their smartphones? I find my smartphone more helpful than an LLM that spits out statistically likely responses while destroying our water, air, and electricity prices; stealing intellectual property from small artists who can’t fight back; and removing the humanity in peoples’ interactions.
No, I am not a AI fanboy. I just compared bad to worse.
Of course users get something from their smartphones, but not from the spyware on it. The spyware is not an integral function of a smartphone.
AI capacity isn’t being built to serve users. It’s being used to profile their histories, to unmask their anonymity online so their profiles can be made more accurate.
Why do you think they want everything stored in the cloud? For convenience?