3 ms·

A year ago I would have said it's impossible for ads companies to listen to everything you say and then base ads on it, because the sheer amount of data and com

A year ago I would have said it's impossible for ads companies to listen to everything you say and then base ads on it, because the sheer amount of data and compute necessary wouldn't be worth it, since 99% of what you say is useless garbage to them. But today there are some pretty good local speech recognition models. I don't know if it's happening today, but I wouldn't be surprised if ad companies start figuring out ways to do local speech processing and only send the most relevant bits for full processing in the near future. We'll have to depend on Apple and Google to protect us.

dumbfounder 3y ago
Yep, if you can think of a feasible way to do it, you know it will be done. Local filtering makes it totally feasible. The real question is whether the OS is preventing this type of passive access to the microphone.
RajT88 3y ago
> We'll have to depend on Apple and Google to protect us. Wellp, we're boned.
ldarby 3y ago
I'm sure it's existed for many years. Ultrasonic tracking apps are from 2015: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-device_tracking#Applications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-device_tracking#Applicat... Let's try to imagine a world where that exists, keyword detection exists as well ("ok google" etc), and keyword detection for targeted ads doesn't exist. Can you? I can't.
- jedberg 3y ago
  I can because I've worked in the space. You have to build a model for every key word that you are looking for. Those models take up space and lots of compute to train. That's why you can't set an arbitrary wake word for your Alexa/Google/Siri and you have to choose from a short list. Because those are the only models they have trained. It would not make sense to train a model for every advertiser and then upload that to the phone. It would only make sense to capture the audio and send it to the cloud for generic speech processing. But that would also not make sense because it takes a bunch of compute to do speech processing, not to mention you'd see all the data being uploaded from your device and the cost of receiving, processing, and storing all that data. I'm 99.9% sure that this is not happening today, but we are on the verge of the tech being good enough to do local speech processing, and then there is no bandwidth limitations, no storage issue, and the consumer pays for compute.
  - ldarby 3y ago
    > It would not make sense to train a model for every advertiser and then upload that to the phone. I was assuming that's what they were doing. Maybe you could combine both ways, with really imprecise models, so the phone captures and upload only words that above average chance of matching (so not that much data), and have heavy servers do the rest? Yes I don't work in this field, but you shouldn't assume that just because you don't know how something can be achieved, then no one else has figured it out either (especially where they're motivated to keep it secret).
  - g-b-r 3y ago
    Only for very reliable recognition you'd need that, rough local speech recognition has existed for decades. Here's a very basic offline app for Android: https://f-droid.org/packages/org.stypox.dicio https://f-droid.org/packages/org.stypox.dicio . It works pretty bad for me, with its tiny not specialized models, but still enough for some purposes. You can use an online model for the confirmation of the recognitions, by the way
g-b-r 3y ago
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/business/media/alphonso-app-tracking.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/business/media/alphonso-a... https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/ftc-android-developers-apps-tv-listening-silverpush/ https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/ftc-android-developers-...

dumbfounder 3y ago

Yep, if you can think of a feasible way to do it, you know it will be done. Local filtering makes it totally feasible. The real question is whether the OS is preventing this type of passive access to the microphone.

RajT88 3y ago

> We'll have to depend on Apple and Google to protect us. Wellp, we're boned.

ldarby 3y ago

I'm sure it's existed for many years. Ultrasonic tracking apps are from 2015: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-device_tracking#Applications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-device_tracking#Applicat... Let's try to imagine a world where that exists, keyword detection exists as well ("ok google" etc), and keyword detection for targeted ads doesn't exist. Can you? I can't.

jedberg 3y ago
I can because I've worked in the space. You have to build a model for every key word that you are looking for. Those models take up space and lots of compute to train. That's why you can't set an arbitrary wake word for your Alexa/Google/Siri and you have to choose from a short list. Because those are the only models they have trained. It would not make sense to train a model for every advertiser and then upload that to the phone. It would only make sense to capture the audio and send it to the cloud for generic speech processing. But that would also not make sense because it takes a bunch of compute to do speech processing, not to mention you'd see all the data being uploaded from your device and the cost of receiving, processing, and storing all that data. I'm 99.9% sure that this is not happening today, but we are on the verge of the tech being good enough to do local speech processing, and then there is no bandwidth limitations, no storage issue, and the consumer pays for compute.
- ldarby 3y ago
  > It would not make sense to train a model for every advertiser and then upload that to the phone. I was assuming that's what they were doing. Maybe you could combine both ways, with really imprecise models, so the phone captures and upload only words that above average chance of matching (so not that much data), and have heavy servers do the rest? Yes I don't work in this field, but you shouldn't assume that just because you don't know how something can be achieved, then no one else has figured it out either (especially where they're motivated to keep it secret).
- g-b-r 3y ago
  Only for very reliable recognition you'd need that, rough local speech recognition has existed for decades. Here's a very basic offline app for Android: https://f-droid.org/packages/org.stypox.dicio https://f-droid.org/packages/org.stypox.dicio . It works pretty bad for me, with its tiny not specialized models, but still enough for some purposes. You can use an online model for the confirmation of the recognitions, by the way

g-b-r 3y ago

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/business/media/alphonso-app-tracking.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/business/media/alphonso-a... https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/ftc-android-developers-apps-tv-listening-silverpush/ https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/ftc-android-developers-...