Marketer sparks panic with claims it uses smart devices to eavesdrop on people

thehatfox@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 343 points –
Marketer sparks panic with claims it uses smart devices to eavesdrop on people
arstechnica.com
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Just because you don't understand statistics and metadata analysis doesn't make it fake. And of course, since it's real, you can surely point to all the apps whose network traffic was monitored and all the voice data constantly being transmitted that was captured. Because surely in an era where many people pay for data, it'd be impossible to miss the constant audio stream coming from every one of these devices eating up your bandwidth cap.

But nah, "I feel this is true" is all we need. Even when the person who says it, and said it to advertise their product, admits they lied for sales.

Are they tracking you? You bet. If you think they're so unsophisticated that they need to literally listen to your every word instead of the millions of other data points you FREELY give away already, you just don't understand the tech and are fear mongering.

Exactly, their predictive algorithms are entirely too accurate and it's not just clicking on or searching for products that gives them the information. Even how long it took you to scroll past something is used to analyze potential future behavior and deliver you ads.

You take in so much content everyday that you don't even realize. They probably saw plenty of them that OP didn't even realize, I'm sure they gave it away via some other means.

People have tested this before and gotten no additional ads based on their words, it's all anecdotal.

Of course sometimes the predictive algorithms are wildly and hilariously inaccurate too, as we should expect.

Yeah I've gotten weird ads that were specifically targeted but they predicted me incorrectly, of course OP's confirmation bias is showing here as I'm sure he didn't notice all of that.