22 ms·
Researchers fear a scenario in which smart speakers feed sleepers subliminal ads
- Animats 5y agoFnord!
- kalado 5y agoLightspeed briefs! As seen in your dreams! It takes a long duration of stimulus to influence our dreams and even after the influence, the dream can be in any shape. They had people play tetris for three days straight and only 60% dreamed of it. They plan on target specific sleep states specifically but that means that something has access to my brain waves and is allowed to make sound while I am sleeping? I am all for more research into dreams but advertisers? Even if they get something there is no way to actually roll it out to consumers...why then?
- mPReDiToR 5y agoThat's not so hard to do when we have pulse meters connected to our wrist and sleep monitoring programs on our phones to improve oyr bedtime habits. I use Sleep As Android. It has a "lullaby" feature. It has "lucid dreaming" prompting. It has (allegedly) good REM detection. Add those features and one large donation from an ad company... Wait, I see a lynch mob heading towards me.
- fogihujy 5y agoAnother data point confirming that the advertising industry is actively hostile towards consumers.
- jacquesm 5y agoDid it need any more data points? It's fairly incredible that it is legal that we are being bombarded 16 out of 24 hours per day with sponsored messages in one form or another. The only medium that is still inviolate is books.
- hutzlibu 5y ago"The only medium that is still inviolate is books." Mostly. I actually have some very old books lying around - with advertisement for various, non existent products in them. But gladly I have not seen any open advertisment in any modern book.
- tudorw 5y agoShush, you'll give them ideas ;)
- endominus 5y agoNot so inviolate. There are a number of companies (usually high end designer brands; think Prada and jewelry) that commission authors to make books featuring their products. This has been going on for years, but I don't know the efficacy. Then again, no one really knows the efficacy of any kind of advertising.
- GekkePrutser 5y agoEven Ian Fleming did a lot of product placement in his books. Though not sure if he was paid for it.
- jacquesm 5y agoUgh, that never even crossed my mind. I'll be on the lookout for it.
- vkk8 5y agoIsn't it what it's supposed to be? I mean, their purpose is to persuade me do something that I otherwise wouldn't want to do (usually, to buy some product). How is this not hostile to begin with?
- namenotrequired 5y agoIn a perfect world, the purpose might be something like, to inform us about things we would already want if only we knew about them.
- amelius 5y agoThe human mind is more subtle. It's like why most people in real life don't say "hey, I'm open to sexual intercourse, just in case you were wondering". Some kinds of information are simply not desired at all times.
- ThalesX 5y agoI'm a big critic of marketing, but marketing is supposed to do a lot of stuff. Perhaps persuasion of the form you have experienced is the worst they could do. First of all it should understand a market in order to help build a fitting product, and afterwards it should educate people that might stand to benefit from it, about the existence of said product and the benefits. Somewhere along the line I think marketing people found themselves singing to the choir of intrusive ads, just as devs find ourselves singing to the choir of Agile (with a capital A) and whatever else might fancy those on top.
- asdff 5y agoAdvertising used to be benign things like alerting farmers to an improved plowing technology in a trade magazine. Then companies realized they could get away with selling an unneeded/worse/disposable product if they just outright lied about it, and took advantage of the goodwill the public had towards advertisements to reap profit.
- JohnWhigham 5y agoNah, it's worse than that. Bringing morality into it would actually be better; it'd be easier to understand and rally against if companies were doing this because they were "evil". But they aren't, they're just greedy and want money.
- pm90 5y agoAdvertisers will absolutely do this if they can. Its fascinating how the entire industry is built around demand generation and the competitive nature of the industry has made it so that advertisers have had to dig deep into human psychology to understand what makes people want things.
- jacquesm 5y agoIt's an outright war with our conscious attention as the spoils and our brains as the battlefield.
- julianpye 5y agoEvery morning I ask my three-year old if she dreamt something nice. "No", she said a few weeks ago, "just ads".
- pjerem 5y agoNot sure if you are making a pretty fun joke, or telling us an horrible truth.
- julianpye 5y agoI think it is both. We laughed a lot, but also realized that what our dreams show us are sometimes just 'ads' for a life that society expects us to live.
- ericol 5y agoI have an 8 yo that _really_ wants to do videos. Just this morning, she helped her mother cook the meal, but she wanted to roleplay as if she was recording a YT video like the ones she watches. It was honestly hilarious - I was HW just across a door - but at the same time frightening when you think about how much this new media permeates our society. P.S.: Having already lost the war with my daughters from a previous marriage, we are fighting tooth and nail with this one regarding technology access. But boy, even for 2 grown ups it is really hard to fight a kid in this war.
- DocTomoe 5y agoKids want to emulate what they see, especially in "fun" entertainment. My grandfather wanted to become a circus clown. My dad talked about western-style indigenous Americans. My He-Man/GI-Joe-drenched childhood was filled with dreams of becoming a warrior/soldier. And today the heroes of "fun" entertainment are YouTubers and Twitch streamers. The permeation you experience has been happening for a long time, only now you notice it, because the world she wants to emulate is borderline alien to you. Don't worry, most of the times, it is a phase.
- 5y ago
- sydthrowaway 5y agoHas anyone noticed 2-3 ads per YouTube video (especially midstream)? It’s getting ridiculous. There’s got to be a stop to this madness.
- BrianB 5y agoFor $15/mo I don't see any YouTube ads
- kamray23 5y agoAlso works as opposed to donating to individual Patreons and such. I still don't like a cut being taken by YT because I disagree with their business practices though. Sponsorships are the future of online media creation, I guess. The YT ads are obviously dealt with through an adblocker.
- seaman1921 5y agoAha disagree with business practices, but happy to use their infrastructure to consume content, and still complaining about watching ads - ok
- kamray23 5y agoYes, exactly. They don't make you pay for it, they offer it for free. So I choose not to pay for it. Besides I don't complain about their ads, I simply don't watch them.
- galuggus 5y agoI made fuckOff.yt to make people feel better about this. Ublock or pihole are better solutions though
- L_226 5y agoFWIW I have a pihole running on my local, but my Samsung TV still shows YT ads because I cannot disable cdn.samsung.com or the TV will not work, and I think the ads are being served via this domain to my TV....
- Red_Tarsius 5y agoThey are kind of doing it already e.g. I hate when ads exploit classical music for trivial purposes. Whenever I hear Libiamo ne' lieti calici now my mind instantly fills with pizza ads. And once an association is made, it doesn't go away. Ads attach themselves to positive memories like parasites. Whenever you think back to your first kiss, a nice family moment, a cherished memory of going out with friends – here they are.
- johnchristopher 5y agoThis is something that I had been venting about for years to anybody I met. There's that (Coca-Cola I think) ad that ends up with teenagers watching the sunrise after a party night, they sit on a roof in what I remember could be suburban California. The ad was in the style of All I need from Air. These are very delicate and precious moments when you are a teenager. But now it's Coca-cola telling people how to feel. For a whole lot of people now sitting on that roof, that communion moment with your friends, has been stolen by Coca-Cola. That's not something spontaneous and personal and intimate anymore, they stole that moment, branded it and spat it back on screens and minds. They are feeding on our souls. It's more subtle and devilish than https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlpZRK2Yfd0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlpZRK2Yfd0 which just tells you how to have fun (just a manual to fabricated happy times: be young, muscled, on a beach with one of those air canons that makes you levitate) or association to songs. It's tied to a moment in space and time, to an experience.
- tchalla 5y agoA movie scene played out repeatedly- “A person dying and his last moments aka for a cigarette”. There are so many of these that go back to manufacturing consent. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_on_Public_Information https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_on_Public_Informat...
- hypertele-Xii 5y agoThat is so scary, I never made that connection until now.
- IvyMike 5y agoLeela : Didn't you have ads in the 21st century? Fry : Well sure, but not in our dreams. Only on TV and radio, and in magazines, and movies, and at ball games... and on buses and milk cartons and t-shirts, and bananas and written on the sky. But not in dreams, no siree.
- beebeepka 5y agoWe all had commercials in our dreams, but you don't see us running off to buy brand-name merchandise at low, low prices.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Milner08 5y agoThis is exactly what came to mind when I read the title. Now I need to go and watch Futurama again..
- naoru 5y agoSeems like it was a subliminal ad for Futurama then.
- accountofme 5y agonah, that was the hypnotoad....
- azekai 5y agoThe hypnotoad isn't subliminal, it obvious and total mental domination. All hail the hypnotoad!
- hangonhn 5y agoI never appreciated Futurama when I was younger. At the time it felt like worse Simpsons but in the future. But later on I realized it’s a really good critique of our contemporary society disguised as the future looking back on us with Fry standing in for the audience. Some of the jokes are funny because they’re so biting.
- oytis 5y agoAnd in full accordance with Betteridge's law the answer is "no" (jump to the last paragraph to save your time). Sounds a lot like "25th frame effect".
- WediBlino 5y agoJohn Carpenter was a prophet. They Live and Prince of Darkness have merged.
- mangecoeur 5y agoFor sure if they could, they would.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- scoutt 5y agoAll this plus "coaxing knowledge into dream"... Brave New World's hypnopaedia comes to my mind...
- pmlnr 5y agoBrave New World is set 400 years after the Ford T-Model. A 100 passed since; 1/4th of that book has already become true. The interesting bit is that if you're part of Brave New World's society, it's not a bad place... it's just stuck in time. There's an original series Star Trek episode where they ask the question: can they disturb a society which hasn't progressed for centuries; their answer was yes. I have mixed feelings about that, but I certainly wouldn't like to see humanity to stop evolving, dreaming, building, and if we keep this up, we might just will.
- acuozzo 5y agoFor what it's worth, I think of the Eloi whenever I think of the ends of unbounded "progress".
- dumb1224 5y agoHaha I've just been reading Brave New World and this jumps up.
- floren 5y agoWe've already got Fahrenheit 451's "Seashells" in the form of the AirPod--your constant companion, even when you sleep! Your average person reads a dystopian novel and finds it frightening because they can follow the author's extrapolation from the present to the fictional setting. Advertisers and other immoral beings read a dystopian novel (well, they probably read the Cliff's Notes) and think, wow, he's right, I bet people would put up with that sort of thing if we pitched it right!
- filchermcurr 5y agoOn the bright side, smart speakers aren't even a little bit essential, so it's easy enough to just not buy them if this starts happening. I don't think the value proposition of an always-on device connected to a vast advertising network is very high to begin with. Throw in subliminal advertising and you'd have to be very... dedicated... to want such a device. If it succeeds even a little, though, they'll bake it into our TVs and phones that are plugged in at night. Those are much harder for people to give up. Maybe somebody will jump in with pod beds that hide us from our devices at night. Like a giant active noise cancelling headphone cup to sleep in. Smart enough to let us hear little things like fire alarms or panicked screams, of course.
- Magodo 5y ago> I don't think the value proposition of an always-on device connected to a vast advertising network is very high to begin with This is more of a hacker perspective though. All my non technical friends have been seduced by offers of either Alexa or Google Home. Because in my region, they are commonly sold at a huge price discount with almost any medium to large purchase. EX: Buy a laptop - Google Home at 50% off > If it succeeds even a little, though, they'll bake it into our TVs My mom LOVES being able to search for content using Alexa on the Firestick remote, so this is the most terrifying and likely possibility by far
- 5y ago
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- newsbinator 5y agoIs there an amount of money I can pay monthly, which gets put into a pot and distributed to various companies? That way they get my money without needing to advertise to me and without needing to produce any products or pay salaries, and I get to live a calmer life.
- foxes 5y agoThat is a shocking solution. If they can't survive without intrusive manipulative ads then no one is worse off for it.
- foobar33333 5y agoSure, but then that becomes the baseline and one company will advertise anyway to make even more money
- teddyh 5y ago“It's a gigantic social phenomenon. People find ways of getting money by impeding society. Once they can impede society, they can be paid to leave people alone.” — Richard Stallman, 1986 https://www.gnu.org/gnu/byte-interview https://www.gnu.org/gnu/byte-interview “But we’ve proved it again and again, that if once you have paid him the Dane-geld, you never get rid of the Dane.” — Rudyard Kipling, 1911, Dane-geld
- foxes 5y agoHorrific. If anyone on HN uses or works with adtech you should think about the consequences of what you are building. It's only ever gotten worse. You have a social obligation to stop.
- enigami 5y agoAren't we all part of some problem one way or the other. You could make the same point to a Programmer in the Banking Industry who is unaware that he is literally creating a predatory interest calculation for a debt scheme by writing code.
- diydsp 5y agoOur contributions are not equal-weighted. We can pivot away from what we discover doesn't express our personal values.
- amelius 5y agoThe difference is that the banking industry programmer is still unaware about their wrong-doings. The article is there to raise awareness about the problems in the advertising industry, and one effect is that no one can claim they didn't know.
- avs733 5y agoYes. We should all consider the consequences of what we work on shouldn't we? The fact that other people don't isn't a counter argument...
- dash2 5y agoCalm down, Adam Curtis. I see zero evidence here that researchers can in fact implant anything in someone's dreams. Well, except by playing 3 hours of Tetris. The video "documenting" Coors' effort is a joke ad by Coors bemoaning the fact they can't get into the Superbowl. This is just a bunch of shady researchers trying to gin up some publicity for the !!!!terrifying power!!!! of their work (p = 0.048, one-tailed).
- Cthulhu_ 5y agoI think they can, but it's not directed as such yet. I mean how often have you had a catchy ad tune or catchphrase stuck in your head? like the McD's whistle / catchphrase, or EA Sports, or the really catchy sex phone line tune, or 0118 999 88199 9119 725... 3
- mycologos 5y agoYeah, the article and letter seem to make a huge jump from companies throwing together tongue-in-cheek advertising campaigns about dreams --- the Burger King "nightmare burger" ad campaign was literally just a burger with a green bun that got them media coverage? --- to smart speakers playing subliminal messages. I guess it's their field, and maybe it's very jarring to them to see advertising even approach it from a distance, but this is almost a parody of the "open letter signed by scientists" trope.
- JohnWhigham 5y agoThere were people like you 20 years ago that dismissed how absurd it would be that people would willingly buy company microphones connected to the Internet and put them in their houses.
- dash2 5y ago"They laughed at Einstein. They laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the clown."
- thethethethe 5y agoSure it sounds ridiculous if you frame it like that. A prediction from 2000 that, by 2020, you will be able to control your house with your voice and can ask your computer assistant about the weather doesn't seem so absurd. People have been talking about this type of home automation since the 50s. The hot mics connected to the internet are just an implementation detail, people actually care about capability.
- ptha 5y agoAlso linked in the article, scientists have experimented on communicating with Lucid dreamers (low-tech version of Inception), asking yes/no and simple maths questions. The researchers asked 158 questions of the lucid dreamers, who responded correctly 18.6% of the time, the researchers report today in Current Biology. The dreamers gave the wrong answer to only 3.2% of the questions; 17.7% of their answers were not clear and 60.8% of the questions got no response. The researchers say these numbers show the communication, even if difficult, is possible The scientists questions were incorporated into the lucid dreamers dreams: One dreamer reported math problems coming out of a car radio. Another was at a party when he heard the researcher interrupting his dream, like a narrator in a movie, to ask him whether he spoke Spanish. https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/02/scientists-entered-peoples-dreams-and-got-them-talking https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/02/scientists-entered-p...
- wombatmobile 5y agoAds can increase but consumers disposable income is finite. This inevitably means the effectiveness of ads will fall on a unit basis.
- streamofdigits 5y agoWe have gotten to the point where the simple (and arguably essential) task of individuals learning about what the economy is producing is degenerating into a societal gangrene. No, this is not all the handywork of Zuck and the "don't be evil" company. All the conditions for their "success" have been engineered in the previous decades of the adoption and scaling of TV tech: The captive population of couch potato, oversized "consumers", the behind the scene rat races of "brands", the ever so inventive and smart adtech people (you always need talented and willing accomplishers to dehumanize a situation). It goes deeper: why is forced consumption such an existential need that must be serviced at all costs? Because without the promise of a consumerist bliss always around the corner all the internal frictions, deep dissatisfaction and social fracture lines come to the fore... One can only hope that digital information systems will at some point switch from being part of the problem to being part of the solution...
- aerique 5y ago"Economic growth is not the solution: it is the problem." -- one single political party in the Netherlands that does not get enough votes
- aloisdg 5y agoWhich one?
- tgv 5y agoPartij voor de Dieren. It's a simplistic slogan, probably not meant to be taken too seriously.
- southerntofu 5y agoWhy would you say that? It sounds like classical ecologist rhetoric. Stop producing shit, stop trying to measure what cannot be measure. Just make sure everyone is housed and fed and suddenly things are better. Sounds like a better and more serious political program to me than any other political party i've heard lately. But hey i'm an anarchist so "fuck capitalism" has always been my program, it's just not what we hear from political parties usually ;) See anti-productivism, anti-extractivism, anti-capitalism... Or as some writer once said, approximately, "Progress is the myth that says full ahead is always the right direction, ecology is the discipline that teaches us it's a complete disaster"
- the-dude 5y agoBe sure to drink your Ovaltine : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdA__2tKoIU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdA__2tKoIU
- aussieguy1234 5y agoThis sounds like the plot of a Black Mirror episode
- helsinkiandrew 5y agoThis sounds like a click bait article intended to make people start complaining about 'big advertising' - with no real substance. Yes subliminal suggestion works and smart speakers could be used to do it but subliminal advertising is illegal in most of the world (in the UK since the 1950s) and although there isn't direct legislation in the US it is effectively banned by precedent. https://smallbusiness.chron.com/laws-subliminal-marketing-69892.html https://smallbusiness.chron.com/laws-subliminal-marketing-69...
- onion2k 5y agoThis isn't technically subliminal advertising though. Subliminal ads are just brief flashes that you're unaware of consciously, but still register on a subconscious level. If the consumer was awake presumably they'd be acutely aware of an advert playing because they'd hear it. The 'trick' is that the ad is played at when the person is asleep - other than that it's a normal (although presumably quiet) advert. It seems current laws would stop that.
- helsinkiandrew 5y agosubliminal ads are anything that your´ perceive (hear/see) but are not conscious of, hearing adverts while you are asleep - when you are not conscious are the same. Subliminal: 1. inadequate to produce a sensation or a perception. 2 : existing or functioning below the threshold of consciousness
- hairofadog 5y agoLikely apocryphal, but I once heard that subliminal advertising was effective on exactly one audience, which was the advertisers.
- klik99 5y agoI wish these researchers would stop giving our future overlords ideas - unless it’s a Machiavelli situation where they’re angling for a job in the new world order, in which case, well played researchers
- whalesalad 5y agoYet another thing to add to the long list of reasons why I’ll never have a smart speaker in my home.
- rchaud 5y agoYou won't have to. Eventually these speakers will have long-range parabolic microphones so one set up on a neighbour's patio will pick up sounds from your house.
- robg 5y agoSubliminal advertising has never been shown to work.
- emsy 5y agoIf this would work we‘d all have speakers on while we sleep to learn languages, quit smoking etc. it doesn’t though so the scenario is just fearmongering.
- wuddadid 5y agoJust install the uBlock Origin brain interface extension
- briandear 5y agoThis title is wrong.
- Metacelsus 5y agoI previously submitted the same article 4 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27483457 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27483457
- wly_cdgr 5y agoThis kind of shit is just another example of why OSH is so important. Anyone who thinks we can convince people not to adopt a technology like this at scale is absolutely kidding themselves...we MUST develop functionally equivalent, affordable, and sexually appealing open alternatives that make privacy the easy, automatic default
- rchaud 5y agoUnfortunately, this won't happen. People aren't buying smart speakers because they're necessities. They are responding to the constant badgering from Amazon, Google and Apple to buy them. They'll use gimmicks like "Alexa, look up [trending event]" and convince people it's the only acceptable way to search for information about something. A privacy-focused equivalent wouldn't do nearly as well because it wouldn't be pulling any of these tricks.
- d883kd8 5y agoIf I feared sleep ads I would simply not put an internet-connected speaker running untrusted code in my bedroom.
- swiley 5y agoI think people underestimate the degree to which the general population is susceptible to mass manipulation following the recent death of personal computing.
- rchaud 5y agoHow recent are we talking? 15 years ago I was working at my college's IT helpdesk. The majority of students that brought in their machines told me they didn't use their computers for anything besides MS Word, AIM, Flash games and DVDs. Of course there were the art students with Adobe troubleshooting issues, or Econ students with STATA questions, but 90% of the time the computer was an entertainment-centric device.
- swiley 5y ago>...AIM, Flash games 15 years ago Microsoft wasn't dictating moderation rules and content for these.
- rchaud 5y agoI don't see how that's related to 'general computing'. Microsoft does not have a monopoly on the distribution of software.
- swiley 5y agoThat's exactly my point. They didn't in the past, but modern OS vendors do.
- rchaud 5y agoHow so? Google only reviews apps published on their store. You can upload an APK anywhere, for anyone to download and use on their own device. iOS is obviously more locked down, but globally, Android has greater market share. And that is just native apps. You can publish whatever app or game you want on your website, and the server for that site can be a simple Raspberry Pi in your home.
- userb8a 5y agoThey've been trying to do that with learning for literally more than a hundred years now. I'm totally cynical about it. Furthermore, it's not like we're not already bombarded by ads every day.
- idownvoted 5y agoBut! Could this be used for good? Like e.g. nurturing positivity or in-sleep NLP?
- slowhand09 5y agoYears ago I attended a seminar by Wilson Bryan Key about Subliminal Advertising. I purchased 2 of his paperbacks and read them. Things that people laughed off as "overly active imagination" and "you're seeing things that aren't there" now seem to be a common fear. If you don't recognize when you are being manipulated, or you don't believe you can be manipulated, IMHO - you are a prime target. Ref: Media Sexploitation: Key, Wilson Bryan, also Subliminal Seduction: Key, Wilson Bryan.
- mindcrime 5y agoIs anybody else reminded of blipverts[1]? [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blipvert https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blipvert
- roody15 5y agoSeriously no smart speakers in my house (unless count my smart phone). Devices are creepy and honestly not really innovative. Honestly I am shocked when I find households with them in multiple rooms .. each to their own I guess.
- superkuh 5y agoI've been listening to books while I go to sleep for 20 years. Not intentionally, really, it's just that I put books on text to speech to help me get to sleep and then they play all night. Sure, a rare sometimes the vague themes of a story might get integrated into my dreams and I'll remember it when I get up, but it's a very rare rare.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- nick238 5y agoInvestigating spooky claims: "Facebook is always listening to you!": I assume that many researchers have attempted to figure this out by snooping traffic from the app. It takes a bit of technical skill to do this. If there was any strong sign of this, I assume it would have come out by now. Maybe there's a super secret bit of code that bypasses Android's microphone controls, does speech-to-text and intent processing so efficiently it doesn't cause much battery drain, then holds the data and transmits it back to Facebook using steganographic techniques? "Smart speakers are playing messages while I'm asleep": Anyone could buy a $30 audio recorder and just let it run all night. Also, anyone might be a light sleeper or wake up at the wrong time and discover this. How would this even be possible to hide?
- floxy 5y ago>Also, anyone might be a light sleeper or wake up at the wrong time and discover this. Besides the sleep staging link in the article, what about monitoring your fitbit to know your current sleep phase, and would turn off the ad when it sensed you waking up.
- r0rshrk 5y agoSomeone could just walk in and hear the speaker playing ads.
- parentheses 5y agoAdvertising and marketing are more helpful to well oiled large companies because they are capable of paying to simply saturate their competition out. Until we’re able to disable lobbying in politics ads will always be an issue. This is just another bastion to be invaded by this.
- ajsnigrutin 5y agoHonestly, with the amount of ads we see, i really want the shit to hit the fan, and have someone hack the huge ad providers. I'm talking about literally dumping their whole databases, with all the private data, from "John Smith, interested in bibles and butt plugs", "jane doe, cookbooks and 20inch dildos", "bobby bobberson, marriage help books and a gold necklace" (that his wife didn't get)... Only then will some people get aware that having ad providers stockpile all that personal data is bad, and blindly clicking "i accept the terms and conditions" should be something regulated and not just uninformed consent. With speakers it's even simpler.. just hack them to play some heavy metal at 3am, and you're done.
- oh_sigh 5y agoIs there any context here beyond a fever dream of privacy advocates and sleep researchers? Has Amazon/Goog ever even said they wanted their smart speaker to feed ads to people while they were sleeping?
- annoyingnoob 5y ago'Smart Speaker' is such a misnomer, which is why I don't have one.
- thethethethe 5y agoThis is so absurd. Does anyone seriously think that these companies would get away with advertising to you in your sleep without your consent? Even if it's opt-in, what possible reason would they use justify it that would get people to give their consent? If they have a good enough reason to get people to sing on, who cares? This just seems like academic mania fueled by media-driven mistrust of BigTech and has no basis in the reality of business-customer relationships
- fuzzythinker 5y ago@dang The horizontal scroll is broken on this page. Maybe one comment formatting broke it?
- petercooper 5y agoI listen to podcasts every night while I'm asleep and haven't noticed any residual effects of this despite what's been playing. Although I do own a Simba mattress, use Audible, and have a VPN account...
- jimrandomh 5y agoIf any electronic device tried to do this to me, I would sue. I would be furious, and I would not settle for a small amount. I'm definitely not the only one who would react this way; I expect this reaction would be fairly common. This means that no company with a sensible legal department would try this. However, a fly-by-night startup might try to do it in a way that's hard to trace back to them. In that case, I'd be suing the advertisers, rather than the hard-to-find software company. And I'd be adding CFAA claims.
- quijoteuniv 5y agoWhy external speakers? Is easier to play them back in the phone! I tell you how it will start. A company finds out the way subliminal message can help people to be better. They release an app, it works! They promise it will always be free. After a few years they sell it for 100 million to Facecook, Facecook keeps it free for a few years untill they find a way to make money. Voila!
- floxy 5y agoBesides paid advertisements, what other uses are there? Like propaganda? Let's say your totalitarian regime wanted everyone to love the dear leader even more. What are you going to do about it when you accidentally discover that the smart speaker is subversive? Or maybe a group of hackers wants to convince millions of people that buying the latest bitcoin fad/WSB meme/NFT is a sound financial decision? Are we one vulnerability in Alexa away from this?
- heavyset_go 5y agoIf you leave YouTube running at night on your Roku or Chromecast, and fall asleep, it will show 15-30+ minute ads all night.