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I have no proof of how this works, but I worked building digital marketing and ad targeting for a decent portion of my career and have some theories. First, yo

I have no proof of how this works, but I worked building digital marketing and ad targeting for a decent portion of my career and have some theories. First, you would be amazed by the amount of data that is flying around about you from different sources, and how specific we could get. And as you know Siri and Alexa are always listening to every word so they can respond to the wake word. I believe recently Amazon admitted to storing all these records IIRC (please correct me if I am mis-remembering it). Given that I feel that Apple, Amazon and Google all have deals with a number of key marketing companies where they sell your marketing id based on keywords their devices "hear". So they aren't sharing your conversation with third parties but selling your marketing id based upon what they hear, e.g. you start talking about diapers and they'll sell your marketing id tagging diapers. I have done tests with this in creative ways with a few people and we've been able to trigger ads within a very short time period for things that in no way should be showing up and that none of us ever searched for or typed into the computer/device. I'm all for someone proving me wrong or giving a better explanation but knowing how we dealt with peoples electronic data and what we had available to us I can't imagine they aren't doing this given what we have seen.

mrsmee89 6y ago
Thanks for the detailed answer. That’s fascinating. To be clear , you’re suggesting that there’s a map of labels (diapers, cereal etc) to marketing ids so apple can still say they anonymize your data even though for all intent and purposes, they don’t?
- davismwfl 6y ago
  Correct, this is how some data aggregators sell your purchase data without actually selling your receipts. You will have a number of marketing id's from different aggregators, but people like Amazon, eBay etc will aggregate from multiple sources and can track you across aggregators. And there are re-targeting and re-marketing companies that do this as a service. It lets them say they never sell your data, but they do sell meta-data about you. Probably a little over simplified but you get the idea.
  - mrsmee89 6y ago
    Wow! If you tell someone that you purchased #123 and they know that #123 is shampoo, how is that not the same exact thing as telling them that you bought shampoo? I’m shocked at the sliminess of this.
    - eb0la 6y ago
      You can guess this product affinity with a list of previous purchases. Just take a look at the 'arules' R package (https://github.com/mhahsler/arules https://github.com/mhahsler/arules). You don't need to identify the customer. I did some work with an online supermarket some time ago and I found some interesting associations worth trying like Sliced Brioche Bread + Nutella :-) Sadly I didn't find any association like 'beer and diapers' ;-)
winrid 6y ago
I thought the listening for the wake word was done in hardware for Alexa?
viraptor 6y ago
> And as you know Siri and Alexa are always listening to every word so they can respond to the wake word. I believe recently Amazon admitted to storing all these records IIRC (please correct me if I am mis-remembering it). This is not entirely correct the way I understand it. While they're listening as in, the mic is active, the full text processing is not happening until the trigger word. There's a reason Siri is called Siri (distinctive pattern, easy to pick up before applying a stricter check). The issue with the recording was that the device thought it heard the trigger word and the mismatched sample was still uploaded. What I don't believe is happening is actual background conversation processing by the assistants on purpose. (There are going to be tech slipups) Simply because the moment that's revealed, they'll get a regulatory ban hammer they really do not want. It would also chew through either your data or battery and be easy to notice. I don't put that much faith in TVs though for example...
ryanwaggoner 6y ago
Given that I feel that Apple, Amazon and Google all have deals with a number of key marketing companies where they sell your marketing id based on keywords their devices "hear". Your feelings notwithstanding, there is zero evidence of this that I've seen.

mrsmee89 6y ago

Thanks for the detailed answer. That’s fascinating. To be clear , you’re suggesting that there’s a map of labels (diapers, cereal etc) to marketing ids so apple can still say they anonymize your data even though for all intent and purposes, they don’t?

davismwfl 6y ago
Correct, this is how some data aggregators sell your purchase data without actually selling your receipts. You will have a number of marketing id's from different aggregators, but people like Amazon, eBay etc will aggregate from multiple sources and can track you across aggregators. And there are re-targeting and re-marketing companies that do this as a service. It lets them say they never sell your data, but they do sell meta-data about you. Probably a little over simplified but you get the idea.
- mrsmee89 6y ago
  Wow! If you tell someone that you purchased #123 and they know that #123 is shampoo, how is that not the same exact thing as telling them that you bought shampoo? I’m shocked at the sliminess of this.
  - eb0la 6y ago
    You can guess this product affinity with a list of previous purchases. Just take a look at the 'arules' R package (https://github.com/mhahsler/arules https://github.com/mhahsler/arules). You don't need to identify the customer. I did some work with an online supermarket some time ago and I found some interesting associations worth trying like Sliced Brioche Bread + Nutella :-) Sadly I didn't find any association like 'beer and diapers' ;-)

winrid 6y ago

I thought the listening for the wake word was done in hardware for Alexa?

viraptor 6y ago

> And as you know Siri and Alexa are always listening to every word so they can respond to the wake word. I believe recently Amazon admitted to storing all these records IIRC (please correct me if I am mis-remembering it). This is not entirely correct the way I understand it. While they're listening as in, the mic is active, the full text processing is not happening until the trigger word. There's a reason Siri is called Siri (distinctive pattern, easy to pick up before applying a stricter check). The issue with the recording was that the device thought it heard the trigger word and the mismatched sample was still uploaded. What I don't believe is happening is actual background conversation processing by the assistants on purpose. (There are going to be tech slipups) Simply because the moment that's revealed, they'll get a regulatory ban hammer they really do not want. It would also chew through either your data or battery and be easy to notice. I don't put that much faith in TVs though for example...

ryanwaggoner 6y ago

Given that I feel that Apple, Amazon and Google all have deals with a number of key marketing companies where they sell your marketing id based on keywords their devices "hear". Your feelings notwithstanding, there is zero evidence of this that I've seen.