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czx4f4bd | 2 years ago

And yet there's still zero remotely plausible evidence for it.

Nobody has caught continuous audio feeds being transmitted from smart devices to the cloud (which would be noticeable due to increased network traffic and bandwidth usage) nor identified any secret speech recognition code on the client (which would be noticeable due to severely shortened battery life). Nobody who's worked in adtech has come forward to blow the whistle or admit that they shipped this feature for a big tech company.

I get why it's an appealing conspiracy from a gut instinct perspective, but it really makes no sense. When you're observing the behavior of billions of people and using machine learning algorithms trained to get the best results possible, some uncanny shit will naturally result. Look at how effective LLMs like ChatGPT have gotten without an obvious route to profitability, then think about how much more money has been invested into ad targeting algorithms just in the last couple decades alone.

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majormajor|2 years ago

If I was going to do it... I'd definitely hook in through non-battery-powered IOT devices. Something like a smart TV or various other home security stuff. The TV seems ideal, you have non-trivial compute there so you could do some local speech-to-text and keyword matching, then just periodically phone home with tiny bandwidth usage; that's enough to associate IPs to interests, and then that dataset doesn't even have to look that creepy at the surface-level (you wouldn't tell many people where you got it exactly) when you sell it on to ad networks...

Sneaky apps would be another source, obviously the phone OS/computer vendors wouldn't want this, but I imagine there's some cat and mouse. It's just a new version of browser toolbars, not something hard to imagine some unscrupulous 3rd party data collection company building.

I definitely wouldn't expect Facebook or Google to be doing it directly.