> And it couldn't be secret, because the point of gathering all that data is to target ads, so advertisers would have to know about it. Not necessarily. They d

> And it couldn't be secret, because the point of gathering all that data is to target ads, so advertisers would have to know about it. Not necessarily. They don’t need to tell the advertisers “target people who are talking about X on their phone’s microphones”, they can just tell “target people who is interested in X”, and they will still be profiting because advertisers will figure whatever their black box algorithm for targeting is doing, it’s doing better than the competition.