• lud@lemm.eeEnglish
    293·
    3 months ago

    Just take this in mind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_correlation

    People usually don’t think about the times that the ads haven’t matched up.

    For example a person I know got an ad for a specific ice cream she was talking about earlier. What she didn’t think about is that it was summer and ice cream ads are incredibly common in summer and so is talking about ice cream.

    She likely got many similar ads the days before and after, but she didn’t think about them because they didn’t match her theory that phones (specifically Facebook in her case) are listening.

    I personally think it’s extremely unlikely that phones are listening anywhere close to that degree. At absolutely worst they might try and gauge your mood or something, but that feels unlikely too.

    First of all there would be a lot of actual evidence (like with network sniffing) of it happening if it were happening and the public and legal fallout that would come after someone figured it out would be enormous

    • GiveOver@feddit.ukEnglish
      171·
      3 months ago

      On top of this, there’s lots of ways that they would get the data without secretly listening to microphones, which people may not be aware of in all these anecdotes. In the one above, maybe just one party member googled lab grown diamonds, or perhaps messaged a friend on Facebook messenger about their trick. Not sure if that gets analysed for ads but it’s more plausible than mics. Anyway if they’re all on the same WiFi then they’ll probably be on the same IP and could easily be shown the same ads, making all party members now ripe for a diamond ad.

      There’s a well known video of a guy saying “cat food” around his phone, and then his phone shows Google ads for cat food. He concluded that it was secretly listening to him, because there was no other way for Google to get that info other than to shadily tap into his mic. He performs this experiment on a live streamed YouTube video