[jere]

My experience working at one of the companies that gets accused of this a lot is that many colleagues wish we were as evil as claimed because it would be so much easier do their jobs that way than struggling through the reality of it which is endless red tape over the tiniest issues that have even the slightest proximity to privacy. So I've been a bit skeptical too.

[efitz]

Exactly. The big companies are scared of lawsuits and trying to get approval for something like that would be a nonstarter. As a matter of fact the device folks at the same company would be working hard to kill such an idea in its infancy because it’s already an uphill battle to sell always-listening or always-watching devices to consumers because of the creepiness factor.

And people also are terrible at math. Modern ML (regression & neural nets) are ridiculously good at predicting stuff you might be interested in, particularly when rich data sources like browsing and e-commerce histories are available; the decision to show the ad to you at some point almost certainly was made long before any audio-to-marketing pipeline could act on it.

[Ancalagon]

Aren’t TikTok and Huawei easy counterpoints to this?

[danillonunes]

After shadow profiles, cambridge analytica, prism, etc, I don't think those companies are all that scared of privacy violation lawsuits.

[bbor]

Yup - having worked at Google Display Ads (arguably the epicenter of such talk), I personally only ever witnessed people walking the walk, privacy-wise. The threats to our privacy are quite public and not at all illegal; IMO data brokers and 3P browser trackers are at the top of the list, but all of Google’s known ills are there too (location tracking, exchange monopolization, allowing predatory advertisers, gestures broadly at chrome, etc etc etc).

They don’t need to be listening to us, and wouldn’t know how to even begin hiding it if they were. Something like that would require tons of compute and thousands of conspirators risking massive backlash, all to prop up a relatively tiny part of their business.

> Convincing people of this is basically impossible

Absolutely correct IME, btw. This is one of those things a smart engineer learns not to argue online, or at the Christmas dinner table for that matter. People tend to stand their ground on this one and move quickly to accusations of bias and naïveté…

[jgalt212]

I'm not trying to change your mind, but this response (from another user) was flagged, so I'm providing a pull quote.

> A marketing firm called Cox Media Group has recently revealed that it is listening to user conversations via their smartphones through its so-called "Active Listening" Software. With this, the company will push advertisements that users will see on certain platforms based on the heard conversations as unveiled by a report.

https://www.techtimes.com/articles/307372/20240904/cox-media...

Is techtimes.com junk?

[Breza]

Well said. I've worked in adtech and this aligns with my experience. Alphabet probably wouldn't even make that much more money compared to its current ad program. There's no shortage of supply in display advertising.

[alex1138]

Citation for Apple?