• OrteilGenou@lemmy.world
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    26 minutes ago

    That might be useful.

    It’s more like, you buy a pair of boots online.

    FB and Chrome for the next week and a half BOOTS!! BOOTS HERE!!

  • GiveOver@feddit.uk
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    7 hours ago

    Stories of these companies listening through everybody’s mics are like modern day ghost stories. It definitely totally happens every single day but nobody ever manages to get a piece of hard evidence. Maybe the algorithms can sense wireshark like ghosts sense cameras

    • Ledivin@lemmy.world
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      48 minutes ago

      It definitely totally happens every single day but nobody ever manages to get a piece of hard evidence.

      Are you just lazy and in denial? There is traffic sent from both Alexa and Google Home every time it detects something that it considers speech, regardless of whether the wake word was detected. This is not debatable, set up your own tests.

    • infinitesunrise@slrpnk.net
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      2 hours ago

      Cox Media Group got kicked off Google’s ad partner program a few years ago when 404 Media scooped that they had a feature called CMG Active Listening which did exactly this. They had a slide deck. Audio spying by advertisers is like doping in pro sports, everybody does it and you only get caught if you’re stupid. Remember back in 2013 a whistleblowing NSA contractor told us to put our phones in the fridge if we wanted to have a secret conversation? He had a slide deck, too. The western world is run by a cult of pedophiles, the fact that our phones listen in on us without our consent is not a stretch.

    • PumaStoleMyBluff@lemmy.world
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      2 hours ago

      Metaphors are just a step too far, eh?

      No, they’re not “listening” to audio, but their servers are definitely listening for all the data we send them.

      • GiveOver@feddit.uk
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        6 hours ago

        Neither of those articles has any evidence of them secretly listening through everybody’s microphone

      • Bazoogle@lemmy.world
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        3 hours ago

        Why would they need to listen? That’s a lot of processing power for information we already give them. They don’t need to listen, honestly. They get more information from us than we verbally communicate.

        • Ledivin@lemmy.world
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          47 minutes ago

          Why would they need to listen? That’s a lot of processing power

          But… why would they care? It’s your energy bill, not theirs.

        • I think about this every time I see a random thing I have never heard of before and go to search for it and autofill has the exact phrase I wanna search after typing only 1 or 2 letters. It either reads text on the screen or listened to me say to myself “what the hell is yadda yadda?” because how else would it know I had a really good chance of searching “what is yadda yadda” after only typing “wh?” The yadda yadda part could have been anything, but it still managed to predict the exact thing I was gonna look for.

          • some_kind_of_guy@lemmy.world
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            7 minutes ago

            I honestly think the way this works is a lot weirder than what we might imagine. We’ve had pretty strong machine learning for a while… we still don’t know exactly how it works. The likes of Google ingest all manner of disparate data points, buying and selling them to each other, responding to the push and pull of markets and trends. We feed these entities continuously with our actions, whether we know it or not, and it gets digested in ways they might not even know about, picking up patterns that humans would never think to look for, and then feeds it back to us.

            These players have a realtime profile on every single person who touches their platform, and users continuously touch that platform with almost everything they do. They can map all the intersections of millions of data points on billions of profiles, the rates of change. They derive trends, interests, motivations. They drive trends as it suits them and, yes, predict.

            they don’t need our microphones.

      • b34k@lemmy.world
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        3 hours ago

        I always just thought it was the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon at work… but who knows, I could be wrong.

  • Noja@sopuli.xyz
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    7 hours ago

    I’ll have two number 9s, a number 9 large, a number 6 with extra dip, a number 7, two number 45s, one with cheese, and a large soda.

  • yermaw@sh.itjust.works
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    9 hours ago

    Mate I’m its even worse than we could possibly imagine by now.

    ~20 years ago, when smartphones were new and super expensive, I arranged to meet my friend using Facebook chat. I did not have a mobile phone at all, I used desktop PC to access it. While I was in his car we were talking about possible careers and I said i would probably enjoy being a teacher. When I got home and logged back in, every single banner ad was for teaching courses, teach English abroad, teachers wanted.

    It definitely used his smartphones microphone to hear that there were 2 people in the car, and used the chat log to figure out it was me, and this was a long time ago.

  • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    8 hours ago

    What is with the trope of using a glass to listen through a wall or door? Surely it doesn’t work, right? Do all of these people have glasses with no bottom?

    It’s like when you see in TV/movies when someone gets tied up and “gagged” by just putting a sock in their mouth with no tape or anything. As if the person couldn’t literally just spit the piece of cloth out.

    Takes me out of it completely, every time.

    • mrgoosmoos@lemmy.ca
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      7 hours ago

      …it having a bottom is how it works.

      the vibrations carry through the glass and into your ear that is pressed against the bottom. it works.

    • Meow@lemmy.world
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      8 hours ago

      Maybe that sox is a warning that if he spits it. He is going to get beaten the shit out of himself.

  • cosmicrookie@lemmy.world
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    19 hours ago

    It might be the other way around too though… You might be thinking of buying something, because Facebook or google have convinced you that you need it

    That said, I had to create an account in FB due to work and studies. I did some research and decided to run it only on a browser and use a seperate browser only for FB. Along with some strict privacy rules.

    My account was flagged within 30 seconds of creation. They asked for a selfie ID that they got and they did a manual assessment but banned the account nonetheless for not following community guidelines

    You can’t even read their community guidelines without accepting their cookie policy

    • Hideakikarate@sh.itjust.works
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      21 hours ago

      We are gathered here today to honor the memory of Remember_the_tooth, who unfortunately committed suicide by shooting themselves 3 times in the back of the head and falling out a locked window.

      • anomnom@sh.itjust.works
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        2 minutes ago

        After a sudden spike in their car insurance, healthcare, and home owners insurance rates.

        Dynamic pricing is already here. If you don’t have the app on your phone dinner costs 25% more than for the tracked.

  • Cevilia (they/she/…)@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    20 hours ago

    I talk about Kendal Mint Cake whenever I think I might be around an open mic.

    I and my wife constantly get adverts for it on Amazon and in other places.

    None of us have ever bought any.

    Hashtag confusion to the enemy, or something

    • Echolynx@lemmy.zip
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      19 hours ago

      Kendal Mint Cake

      I’ve never heard of these, being across the pond and all that. Now I’m tempted to sneak this into conversations and see if the algorithms fall for it…

    • Art3mis@lemmy.world
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      22 hours ago

      Also been doing it for over a decade. Cookies and other data tracking software. The entire mainstream internet relies on google and aws. They are and have been tracking everything and attaching it to your ip and linking it to other devices and accounts like fb. All in the name of advertising and surveillance

    • jafra@slrpnk.net
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      22 hours ago

      Oh, you’re right. The google-guy waltzes right in alongside yourself. Doesn’t bother waiting outside to listen. And to disallow him entry is rocket science mixed with slapstick idiocracy.

      Lucky my do i know how to load a CustomRoms.

      You re right. The depiction of google is a bit off.

      • degenerate_neutron_matter@fedia.io
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        22 hours ago

        It’s your phone, it’s your app store, it’s your browser, it’s your email, it’s your storage, it’s your search, it’s your maps, it’s your music, it’s your news, it’s your credit card, it’s your password manager

        Google is so deeply integrated into most people’s lives that they can’t imagine going without it.

  • abcd@feddit.org
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    19 hours ago

    Sometimes I dream about a nonprofit mega platform (like a web search with social media and a shopping platform included) that clearly communicates it‘s users that it will share all the knowledge with everybody that is interested in it for free in a privacy respecting way. Making this information basically worthless. Just to fuck with google and all the big players in the ad business.

    A platform that is financed by donations and ads that have some sort of fair use pricing where small advertisers are even allowed to advertise for free (but the usage of ads is only allowed to compensate money that is missing to keep everything operational) A platform where small players can sell their stuff for free. A platform with social media, without any algorithms. Fuck it, let‘s even include a video platform and some sort of business platform just to make it complete.

    As I said it must be a nonprofit. So it would basically have no intention to earn more than enough money to keep everything operational, making it the cheapest option for everybody and destroying all the mega corps out there that just can’t get squeezed enough revenue out of it’s users. This way we would be brought back to the golden ages of the internet 10-20 years ago.

    • buddascrayon@lemmy.world
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      5 hours ago

      Any such thing, even if it were to emerge tomorrow, would be swiftly destroyed by all the other platforms that already exist. Because it would be an absolute threat to their business model.