4 ms·

Not surprised. I was a die-hard android user, but I kept having stuff like this happen to me, over and over again: http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/2

Not surprised. I was a die-hard android user, but I kept having stuff like this happen to me, over and over again: http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/2kwbl2/im_convinced_my_android_phone_listens_to_me_and/ http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/2kwbl2/im_convin... It also happens to my android-using friends. I've become convinced that Android phones are listening all the time so that they can figure out what we're about to search for and what to advertise to us. Given that this has been my (admittedly anecdotal) experience with Android, I wouldn't be surprised at all if Google was trying to take this type of thing to the desktop with Chrome. I love Google and have historically just not cared about my privacy as far as they're concerned, but I'm getting more creeped out as this kind of stuff becomes more pervasive.

Oletros 11y ago
Can you provide any proof of that? No, Android phones are not listening all the time
- jonstokes 11y ago
  Nope, I have no proof, and of course I'd be happy to learn that they aren't listening. I just hypothesize that they are based on my experience, but I've not tried to test it in any systematic way.
  - Oletros 11y ago
    Listening all the time and sending the audio to Google would kill an smartphone in a moment. Apaty of the bandwith used
    - runjake 11y ago
      <tinfoil> That's presuming it just doesn't cue up a text or audio[1] log on the device and upload it to Google the next time it's on wi-fi and plugged into a charger. </tinfoil> 1. 4khz mono audio is sufficient for human voice recognition and tiny in terms of storage.
      - bduerst 11y ago
        Pretty sure someone would detect that with packet inspection, even if compressed.
      - Oletros 11y ago
        You still have the problem of battery consumption by the mic listening 24/7
fixermark 11y ago
Targeted advertising is actually quite good at separating you the person from you your marketing footprint. Unfortunately, the ways it does this are hard to explain, but let me give an example. A friend of mine was convinced that Google was data-mining his Gmail because it recommended a flight on a related search atop the dates he was considering visiting a friend (if I recall correctly, he looked up driving directions and Google suggested "You could get there faster if you took <FLIGHT> on <EXACT DATE HE AND HIS FRIEND HAD BEEN TALKING ABOUT FLYING>"). I punched in the same directions as him in an incognito browser session and... Got the same flight suggestion. Then I looked at the nearby flights and found that the suggested one was really just the cheapest one that week. Turns out his friend and he were planning to meet on a day they happened to be free... Because it was near a holiday, so a lot of people were free, so airlines factored that into their pricing model, so Google recommended a flight because it was a popular flight that a lot of people wanted to take between those two destination points. It's far, far more likely that targeted advertising is working because we are not the special snowflakes we believe ourselves to be. The correlation algorithms can guess a lot from a few data points when they have billions of correlations to sort through.
Too 11y ago
You might not have entered your old friends in your computer ever but they might have entered you. Just "invert" this relation and its quite reasonable to assume you know them also. Still spooky though.

Oletros 11y ago

Can you provide any proof of that? No, Android phones are not listening all the time

jonstokes 11y ago
Nope, I have no proof, and of course I'd be happy to learn that they aren't listening. I just hypothesize that they are based on my experience, but I've not tried to test it in any systematic way.
- Oletros 11y ago
  Listening all the time and sending the audio to Google would kill an smartphone in a moment. Apaty of the bandwith used
  - runjake 11y ago
    <tinfoil> That's presuming it just doesn't cue up a text or audio[1] log on the device and upload it to Google the next time it's on wi-fi and plugged into a charger. </tinfoil> 1. 4khz mono audio is sufficient for human voice recognition and tiny in terms of storage.
    - bduerst 11y ago
      Pretty sure someone would detect that with packet inspection, even if compressed.
    - Oletros 11y ago
      You still have the problem of battery consumption by the mic listening 24/7

fixermark 11y ago

Targeted advertising is actually quite good at separating you the person from you your marketing footprint. Unfortunately, the ways it does this are hard to explain, but let me give an example. A friend of mine was convinced that Google was data-mining his Gmail because it recommended a flight on a related search atop the dates he was considering visiting a friend (if I recall correctly, he looked up driving directions and Google suggested "You could get there faster if you took <FLIGHT> on <EXACT DATE HE AND HIS FRIEND HAD BEEN TALKING ABOUT FLYING>"). I punched in the same directions as him in an incognito browser session and... Got the same flight suggestion. Then I looked at the nearby flights and found that the suggested one was really just the cheapest one that week. Turns out his friend and he were planning to meet on a day they happened to be free... Because it was near a holiday, so a lot of people were free, so airlines factored that into their pricing model, so Google recommended a flight because it was a popular flight that a lot of people wanted to take between those two destination points. It's far, far more likely that targeted advertising is working because we are not the special snowflakes we believe ourselves to be. The correlation algorithms can guess a lot from a few data points when they have billions of correlations to sort through.

Too 11y ago

You might not have entered your old friends in your computer ever but they might have entered you. Just "invert" this relation and its quite reasonable to assume you know them also. Still spooky though.