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There is 1 more important piece of information: Your voiceprint. With it, google can identify you by voice, put a mic in a public infopanel, and gues which com

There is 1 more important piece of information: Your voiceprint. With it, google can identify you by voice, put a mic in a public infopanel, and gues which commercial has most impact. If the NSA has access, they can classify public recordings by people at that place, so I assume they are interested. HN has so many conspiracy theorists because we know what is possible with infotech on an industrial scale, the spooks have the money for it, and snowden basically provided the proof they did it.

viraptor 6y ago
> put a mic in a public infopanel, and gues which commercial has most impact There are infopanels (from smaller dodgy companies) with cameras which try to identify viewers behaviours. But actually expecting Google to both identify you and measure response is a bit out there for many reasons. 1. They actually do care about access to data they store - creating a fingerprint database for identification would be beyond what they do. 2. Who actually reacts vocally to an ad in a way that can be captured without environment noise - the assistant can't even set the timer correctly sometimes when I talk to it in perfect conditions. 3. If they did want to do super-shady targeting, your location data crossed with ad location + search/browser history is both better and cheaper than a voice database.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  > 1. They actually do care about access to data they store - creating a fingerprint database for identification would be beyond what they do. Would it? What if it was structured the way they handle other personal data: customers send in "voice telemetry" from their "info"panels, and Google gives them bulk analytics ("#x different people talked in your venue, with following age/demographic split"), as well as using that telemetry to handle ad attribution and ad targeting in the background. This way - just like with regular web telemetry - neither the advertiser not the "info"panel owner get to see the voiceprint data, but it still gets used to uniquely identify individuals and target ads at them.
DEADBEEFC0FFEE 6y ago
I don't really understand why people don't seem to want tailored ads. All ads interupt attention, better that they have a chance if being useful.
- luplex 6y ago
  In today's world, ads are no longer about telling me about solutions to my problems, but they are about creating new needs. I'm fine with my current needs and I don't want smart people pulling my psychological levers to spend money on things I don't already want. As ads get more and more effective, people will be incentivized to put up more and more ads. But there are already way too many ads for my liking.
  - kaonwarb 6y ago
    Spot on - and I don't think this is new. Go back to newspaper ads in the 19th century and many (perhaps most) can be categorized as trying to create new needs. We're just better at it than we used to be.
  - harshitaneja 6y ago
    I am quite happy with buying things I didn't need. I work to buy luxury(and I say this as a nomad who lives out of a single luggage with 6 t-shirts). Most of what we buy today were not available a couple of centuries ago and yet quite a large population would swear that they are "needs". There are too many ads but it is possible to avoid a great percentage of them if inclined. My interaction with ads is pretty minimal and when presented often enjoyable. Using uBlock Origin I don't see ads on most sites. Youtube premium means no ads there as well. Spotify premium, so no ads for music. Video streaming services like netflix don't have ads. My only ad interaction left is reddit(which offers premium) and podcasts or youtube video in-content ads where they are narrated by the creators whose content I am happy to support and in some cases I find the way they switch to ads quite funny.
- osmarks 6y ago
  I don't really want to be manipulated into buying things I would not otherwise want/need.
IshKebab 6y ago
Right I'm sure the NSA has hacked Alexa etc. or if they haven't they're working hard on it. But that is very different from saying that Amazon and Google created them in order to gather data. Amazon was the first to make a voice assistant and their intent was pretty clearly to make money by getting people to buy it and to buy stuff from Amazon through it. To suggest that their true motivation was data collection is pure conspiracy theory. Also voice identification is a relatively recent (and not terribly reliable) feature so it can't have motivated their creation. Hell there's no way it's voice identification is good enough for the fantasy scenario you describe. It's only just about good enough to distinguish between 2-3 people. Who does Google even need to identify my voice? They already know where I am from my phone. This is what I mean about HN conspiracy theories. It's not just that people here know more about what is possible. None of the conspiracy theories make any sense.
leafboi 6y ago
Yeah but do you know the use case of such information? Nobody cares about what you tell alexa on a daily basis. The NSA isn't interested in you period. They just want access to all data so they can hit a specific target. There's technical capabilities and there's technical interest. Your and there analysis fails at the "interest" part.

viraptor 6y ago

> put a mic in a public infopanel, and gues which commercial has most impact There are infopanels (from smaller dodgy companies) with cameras which try to identify viewers behaviours. But actually expecting Google to both identify you and measure response is a bit out there for many reasons. 1. They actually do care about access to data they store - creating a fingerprint database for identification would be beyond what they do. 2. Who actually reacts vocally to an ad in a way that can be captured without environment noise - the assistant can't even set the timer correctly sometimes when I talk to it in perfect conditions. 3. If they did want to do super-shady targeting, your location data crossed with ad location + search/browser history is both better and cheaper than a voice database.

TeMPOraL 6y ago
> 1. They actually do care about access to data they store - creating a fingerprint database for identification would be beyond what they do. Would it? What if it was structured the way they handle other personal data: customers send in "voice telemetry" from their "info"panels, and Google gives them bulk analytics ("#x different people talked in your venue, with following age/demographic split"), as well as using that telemetry to handle ad attribution and ad targeting in the background. This way - just like with regular web telemetry - neither the advertiser not the "info"panel owner get to see the voiceprint data, but it still gets used to uniquely identify individuals and target ads at them.

DEADBEEFC0FFEE 6y ago

I don't really understand why people don't seem to want tailored ads. All ads interupt attention, better that they have a chance if being useful.

luplex 6y ago
In today's world, ads are no longer about telling me about solutions to my problems, but they are about creating new needs. I'm fine with my current needs and I don't want smart people pulling my psychological levers to spend money on things I don't already want. As ads get more and more effective, people will be incentivized to put up more and more ads. But there are already way too many ads for my liking.
- kaonwarb 6y ago
  Spot on - and I don't think this is new. Go back to newspaper ads in the 19th century and many (perhaps most) can be categorized as trying to create new needs. We're just better at it than we used to be.
- harshitaneja 6y ago
  I am quite happy with buying things I didn't need. I work to buy luxury(and I say this as a nomad who lives out of a single luggage with 6 t-shirts). Most of what we buy today were not available a couple of centuries ago and yet quite a large population would swear that they are "needs". There are too many ads but it is possible to avoid a great percentage of them if inclined. My interaction with ads is pretty minimal and when presented often enjoyable. Using uBlock Origin I don't see ads on most sites. Youtube premium means no ads there as well. Spotify premium, so no ads for music. Video streaming services like netflix don't have ads. My only ad interaction left is reddit(which offers premium) and podcasts or youtube video in-content ads where they are narrated by the creators whose content I am happy to support and in some cases I find the way they switch to ads quite funny.
osmarks 6y ago
I don't really want to be manipulated into buying things I would not otherwise want/need.

IshKebab 6y ago

Right I'm sure the NSA has hacked Alexa etc. or if they haven't they're working hard on it. But that is very different from saying that Amazon and Google created them in order to gather data. Amazon was the first to make a voice assistant and their intent was pretty clearly to make money by getting people to buy it and to buy stuff from Amazon through it. To suggest that their true motivation was data collection is pure conspiracy theory. Also voice identification is a relatively recent (and not terribly reliable) feature so it can't have motivated their creation. Hell there's no way it's voice identification is good enough for the fantasy scenario you describe. It's only just about good enough to distinguish between 2-3 people. Who does Google even need to identify my voice? They already know where I am from my phone. This is what I mean about HN conspiracy theories. It's not just that people here know more about what is possible. None of the conspiracy theories make any sense.

leafboi 6y ago

Yeah but do you know the use case of such information? Nobody cares about what you tell alexa on a daily basis. The NSA isn't interested in you period. They just want access to all data so they can hit a specific target. There's technical capabilities and there's technical interest. Your and there analysis fails at the "interest" part.