8 ms·
Think about what this implies. If your phone is listening, it’s listening all the time, right? So like 12-18 hours of continuous audio every day. That’s a lot o
by snowwrestler 2y ago
Think about what this implies. If your phone is listening, it’s listening all the time, right? So like 12-18 hours of continuous audio every day. That’s a lot of ad triggers. Way too many to actually be served with ads during your browsing time, which is a strict subset of your total audible proximity to your phone (plus ad inventory is a strict subset of what you view on your phone).
So how does the phone + ad networks decide which words to prioritize to trigger which ads when?
So for this anecdote to be true, not only would the phone have to be listening, but the targeting algorithm would need to decide to actively exclude all the other audible triggers from that time period, and fill your limited ad impression inventory with the one phrase you were intentionally testing.
How would it do that? Especially if this is indeed an outlier one-off topic of conversation that you cover in a single sentence. There would not be contextual clues (like repetition over time) that might indicate you are actually “in market” for a pool fence.
To me this is the problem with these anecdotal tests. You understood that that was an important phrase in the context of ad targeting. But how did the automated ad system know it should serve you ads on that topic, and not one of the many other advertisable topics you talk about over the course of several days? Or that your phone hears over several days?
- fc417fc802 2y ago[dead]
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 2y agoMy phone can listen all day every day. It listens for "hey google" and it can listen and passively tell you songs that are playing. It's not outside the realm of possibility to do their audio fingerprinting on keywords and what not. The advertising potential makes it extremely juicy
- 7e 2y agoYour phone can listen for “hey Google” because it’s only one phrase and the model can run at very low power on specialized hardware. If you want to add 1000 keywords the battery drain would be intense.
- sixhobbits 2y agoPixel phones run song identification constantly now. They have a local database of the top 1000 (?) most popular songs. It has negligible impact on battery life. Not saying I agree that 'phones are listening to show us ads', but technically we have the capability for that to happen (sampling audio every X intervals and matching against a local database of keywords)
- ahofmann 2y agoAdd at least two zeros to your number. Pixel phones can detect the top 11k songs while being offline (it used to be more). The fingerprint database for this is around 500 MB in size. I think it is very easy to sneak a few (thousand) extra fingerprints in this database and do all kinds of tracking with it. All while the green microphone icon is disabled.
- snowwrestler 2y agoFor argument’s sake, let’s be generous and stipulate your phone is listening for 11k keywords to serve you ads. Why would “pool fencing” take up one of those valuable keyword slots on everyone’s phone? And you’re going to see way less than 11k ads per day. Why would the ad server prioritize serving an ad for pool fencing (a phrase said once) over all the far more common topics a person talks about in a typical day, like movies, TV shows, food and drink, clothes, cars, consumer electronics, music, etc?
- jszymborski 2y agoI dont know if phones listen to us to serve ads, but 11K is a decent vocab. Most adults have a vocab of 20K. Therefore I could imagine it including the words "pool" and "fencing".
- ahofmann 2y agoYour argument plays with the idea that the phone listening stuff is the only source of information for the ad networks. But it would be much more complex. It would be only one of many signals, that are used to serve the consumer the right advertisement in the right moment. So it doesn't need to have the exact phrase "pool fencing" in the database. It just need to detect that something about pools, or swimming, etc. was talked about. Since Google has thousands of signals and statistics (like browsing history, current location, the other smartphones that are near, and those histories etc.) about this person, it can sell the ad space to "pool fencing" and expect a high click through rate. Selling ads is a bit like the current LLMs. It's just a stochastic parrot, that hallucinates stuff. But the stuff is often that advertisement that brings in the most money.
- wakawaka28 2y ago>So how does the phone + ad networks decide which words to prioritize to trigger which ads when? The same way they analyze your email and web searches. Basically, statistics. >To me this is the problem with these anecdotal tests. You understood that that was an important phrase in the context of ad targeting. But how did the automated ad system know it should serve you ads on that topic, and not one of the many other advertisable topics you talk about over the course of several days? Or that your phone hears over several days? Buddy, so many people have witnessed this happening for at least 10 years and even done experiments at this point that it's common knowledge. I know for a fact that one of my friends now has a phone that is especially receptive to hearing me say things around it, because our conversation topics ALWAYS come up in my searches, ads, and feeds shortly after. Think about that. Someone else's phone sends data to a cloud that I never gave permission to. It then puts that together with data from MY phone about where I was (perhaps even the devices chirping at each other!). The aggregation happens within a week then I see relevant ads. I've seen this happen dozens of times. It's no coincidence. As far as the article, I'm not even going to read it. It's got to be stupid. We know from leaks, reverse-engineering, and personal experience that this spying is going on. I question the source of this article, but I suppose we should never underestimate the lengths someone will go to in order to feel that they are smarter than the rest of us with our eyes open.
- Suppafly 2y ago>We know from leaks, reverse-engineering, and personal experience that this spying is going on. No we don't. There isn't any of that. This is flat earthing for technophiles.
- wakawaka28 2y ago[flagged]
- BergAndCo 2y agoExcept they've been literally boasting they can do it? https://www.404media.co/heres-the-pitch-deck-for-active-listening-ad-targeting/ https://www.404media.co/heres-the-pitch-deck-for-active-list...
- binary132 2y agoYou’re so right. We should just trust the computers in our pockets, hands, and nightstands 24/7/365 running proprietary operating systems, firmware, and sensor suites phoning home as much targeting data as they can possibly collect — but not that! What could they possibly gain from harvesting that?
- Breza 2y agoCompanies really are using tons of highly sensitive data to target ads, even when we sleep. But they're not generally using microphones to record audio to do it. Both things can be accurate statements.
- sizzle 2y agoYour voice is unique and can be fingerprinted to ID you (see Alexa devices). Add in things like positive sentiment analysis, changes in vocal inflection/intonation and context surrounding spoken products like purchase inference/intent and you can probably triangulate a threshold for showing products with high likelihood of purchasing intent. Really smart people have been working on these things at Google for decades and that’s barely scratching the surface of this nuanced discussion. CPU/GPU has only gotten faster and smaller with more RAM available and better power management across the board for mobile devices. Anything is possible if there is money to be made and it’s not explicitly illegal or better they can pay the fines after making their 100x ROI.
- _boffin_ 2y agoI guess my question to this is, what are the estimates on energy required to do this on a continuous timeframe?
- addicted 2y agoWhy would they need to listen continuously? Most people don’t speak, and aren’t around people talking to them, for more than a few minutes to hours in a day. You just need to awake every few secs or mins to see if someone is speaking and go back to sleep if they’re not.
- sizzle 2y agoCould even switch on when you detect positive social signals implying you are around another person nearby using wifi, Bluetooth, gps, IP address, etc. to ID another device. They could even pickup or recognize the second voiceprint ID and know it’s your best friend and wake up the audio recognition from ultra power saving mode or whatever. Literally anything is possible to make this is work.
- jononor 2y agoEmbedded Audio ML engineer here (albeit mostly outside of speech). A modern MEMS microphone uses typically 0.8 mA in full performance mode at 1.8V. Doing basic voice activity detection, which is the first step of a continuous listening pipeline, can be done in under 1 mA. Doing basic keyword spotting is likey doable in 10 mA. But this is only done on the part that the voice activity module triggered on. Lets say that is 4 hours per day. Then basic speech recognition, for buying phrases and categorization, would maybe cost 100 mA. But say only 10% of the 4 hours = 0.4 hours have keywords triggered. That would give a total power budget of (1.824)+(104)+(100*0.4) = 123 mAh per day. A typical mobile phone battery is 4000 mAh. People do not expect it to last many days anymore... So I would say that this is a actually in the feasible range. And this is before considering the very latest in low power hardware. Like MEMS mics with 0.3 mA power consumption or lower, MEMS microphones with built-in voice activity detection, or low power neural processing units (NPU) that some microcontrollers now have.
- FrustratedMonky 2y ago"How would it do that? " AI. That is entire premise of 'Nexis' from Yuval Harari. Individualized bot driven surveillance . https://www.theregister.com/2024/09/16/oracle_ai_mass_surveillance_cloud/ https://www.theregister.com/2024/09/16/oracle_ai_mass_survei... ""Ellison declares Oracle all-in on AI mass surveillance, says it'll keep everyone in line Cops to citizens will be 'on their best behavior because we're constantly recording and reporting'""
- simonw 2y agoHow were they doing this in 2017?
- FrustratedMonky 2y agoA lot of things are happening now that happened before. That doesn't mean things don't improve. Increased efficiency is the issue now. In 2017, maybe some simple algorithms, or a person, was intervening to drive ads, now AI is a big step change in better targeting. That was one of the points in the book. in 2017 or before, a surveillance state was limited by the number of people it takes to do the actual surveillance . Now AI increases the efficiency.
- lofaszvanitt 2y agoHarari is a shill.
- FrustratedMonky 2y agoyou make a very convincing argument. /s
- lofaszvanitt 2y agoIsn't it obvious? When someone talks a lot and most of those talks have zero relevant meaning or substance, then it's someone who is a shill.
- marcusverus 2y ago1) App stores the trailing two minutes of speech in memory. 2) If the app detects a consumption-related trigger word, the related conversation is flagged for transmission to the server. 3) Flagged audio block is converted to text. Consumption related verbs ("buy", "purchase", etc) are identified. The syntax of the sentence clearly indicates which noun is the target of a given consumption-related verb ("new car", "pool fencing") 4) Serve related ads
- simonw 2y agoWhere's the proof that this is happening? Lots of people run network traffic sniffers to see what apps are doing. Lots of people decompile apps. Lots of people at companies leak details of bad things they are doing. Why has nobody been able to demonstrate this beyond anecdotes about talking about swimming pools and then getting adverts for swimming pool stuff?
- marcusverus 2y agoThese are fair questions! I'm not convinced that it is happening. Nor am I convinced, as the parent seems to be, that it would be difficult to do. edit: Having re-read my comment, I can see how it could easily be read to say "It's happening and this is how it works", whereas I intended to convey something like "It could easily be done and here's how." I have a bad habit of implying my point rather than stating it outright. I'm working on it!
- stavros 2y agoFWIW, I read it as "here's how it could happen", not as "it's happening". If it were happening, it would kill our battery really quickly, and be easily measurable and obvious in a router trace, so I find it very unlikely.
- darth_avocado 2y agoI have a suspicion it’s not Facebook or Google listening in, but rather other third party apps. In fact it’s not even the third party apps but the libraries/frameworks they use to show ads.
- dr0verride 2y agoThe system knows to serve you ads about the new topic because it's new. You're already getting ads for the stuff you're normally talking about. The new topic stands out easily. It doesn't have to be your phone. Could be your TV or any other device. Most importantly there's just patterns of behavior. Companies are absolutely desperate for every scrap of data they can get on you. Why would they not capture audio from your mic?
- rambojohnson 2y agoIt's not a strict 12-18 hour window. Instead, it depends on the time frame between specific vocal or conversational cues / signal vs. noise.