Your Phone Isn’t Eavesdropping on You to Show You Ads (It’s Worse Than That)

Your phone is showing you ads?
- I don't see ads anywhere anymore. I have ublock origin on my phone and PC browsers, I use alternative apps like Grayjay instead of the official YouTube app, and if I can't block ads on some platform, I just don't use it.
  I understand giving in to ads on some apps if the platform really matters and there's not an alternative, but why not use ublock origin for the rest? Is it still not well known that you can block ads?
  
  I block ads both on DNS blocklists and browser plugin level. Vanadium unfortunately doesn't have uBlock origin so I'll have to improvise something when I start using GrapheneOS on mobile -- I don't get out much.

Tangentially related to the article: To get an idea of how this data helps aggregators, ask ChatGPT to develop a complete psychological profile of yourself.
My usage history consists of requests for basic programming questions, help wording certainty things, scripts, reviewing documentation (eg organization policy), and a couple things goofing off (eg put my cat in a tuxedo). Just based on the types of questions I’m asking, and how I ask questions, and how I redirect it’s output via follow up questions, it was able to put together a profile that was surprisingly accurate.
It had a few things wrong, notably related to how organized or self disciplined I am. But if it had my calendar, by browser history, my biometric data (eg watch info), my location, it would easily be able to fill in the gaps. If the system only existed to help me, it would be tremendously valuable. But since the owners of this tech are all adversaries I am terrified for the future. The idea of the US federal government using it to profile citizens is too much to contemplate.

Downvoted for shitty clickbait headline.
- I respect that.

Article warns that you will be profiled based on interests.
Article then profiles you based on interests. Proceeds to sell you VPN subscriptions.
- Can't say they didn't warn you...
- What fucking clowns

- The other article is why I posted this article. I thought it would be interesting to have both articles in discussion simultaneously. I was surprised to see that article on lemmy when I had read this article earlier that day. :)

I pride myself on not going in for conspiracy theories and always doing due diligence on the facts. But the idea that my phone is listening to me at times when it shouldn't be is one I am not going to give up easily.
- This is why I run GrapheneOS and LineageOS.
- My main point against the idea is that they wouldn't need to hide the fact it was happening. If it were possible with current tech there would already be some AI subscription bullshit that listens and takes notes on everything you do all day.
  Honestly most people I saw outside of the hardcore tech sphere were excited about apple intelligence until it became clear what a shit show it was. I don't see how it was supposed to be any less invasive than windows recall but it got a completely different reaction. You just need a good advertising/propoganda department and people will pay you for the privilege of being spied on.
  
  Microsoft, as bad a company as it may be, is overly maligned about everything due to its behavior 30 years ago. The response is nowhere near proportional, especially compared to the moderate responses to the much much much more evil companies apple and Google.
  
  It is better than Recall along a few axes. It doesn’t send communications off device without specifically requesting it. It computes as required in isolated environments. And most importantly, the goal as far as we can tell is for information and toys, not for logging all the actions taken on your phone.
  I’m not trying to be a fanboi here, but even if Apple Intelligence is bad… Recall is much much worse.

I occasionally do fun little experiments with others and there phones (with contest) where we find a subject we both have absolutely no interest in, and we figure it out without any electronics at all around, like our back and what not, then we agree to not do anything with our electronics about it at all and only talk to each other about it by our phones, and every fucking time we both start to get add recommendations about whatever we was talking about.
Had a past friend who was asexual and aromantic and never really cared or looked into paternity tests and baby stuff (because like why?) and after a few days of randomly talking about it they got tons of adds targeted for pregnant women (they was trans non binary but was afab)
So from my limited tests, it absolutely does spy on us
- I have tried it as well. Speaking in front of my phone about surfing equipment for example. I couldn't care less about surfing so wouldn't accidentally google anything about it but so far I never got any specific ads for that.
  
  Same. My partner and I have heard so much about this that we have over several months randomly brought up topics that are absurd and foreign to us.
  We do it like this: while preparing dinner or so, one of us scribbles a word on a post-it note and we engage on it as though we're making plans or looking to buy something. We have phones, Google Home speakers and Nest devices nearby.
  There are a few challenges:
  Make sure the topic didn't come up from an internet interaction you already had.
  Don't, under any circumstances, search the internet about any of those topics.
  Simply remember that you're running this experiment. We keep track of topics we've raised through handwritten notes.
  I feel that ordinary people are terrible at running these experiments because it's honestly really difficult to be impartial and evaluate the results with statistical significance. As soon as you encounter one match, the pattern matching part of your brain will scream "told you so!" even if the success rate is 1%.
  And guess what? Literally none of the topics appear as targeted ads for either of us.
  
  You fool you just typed it and spoiled your experiment
- Turn microphone permissions off cmon
  
  Does it really matter if the device admin is Google or Apple?
- I cam here just to say: "we know" enough has happened over the years that the people i know ha e some sort of awareness or conviction that it's happening.

Anecdote: (a little background) I don't typically deal with narcissistic people; I'm not troubled by narcissists in my life. My tech life is pretty well locked down, but it could always be better (working on it). And my YouTube suggestions are tightly, carefully curated to topics pertinent to my professional and personal projects.
I had an utter piece of shit contractor working for me on a project; he was a grifting, conniving, manipulative shitbag. When I outright fired his ass, he first got all self-righteous then tried to play the victim, but I wasn't playing any of his games. My phone was sitting on the workbench next to me.
The next day, I opened YouTube because an engineer I know told me he dropped a new video on software we recently discussed. There among my suggestions were a bunch of videos on how to deal with narcissists. So somehow, in only talking with the contractor (he doesn't use email, text, or other electronic communications), YouTube decided I was curious about dealing with narcissism. I'm morbidly curious how YouTube made that decision, and whether it was audio or "we know you're associating with this guy who we identify as a problematic narcissist and here are some resources."
Now, I'm just some douchecanoe on the internet and you should probably dismiss me based on that alone. But GODDAMN, the data points sure do pile up quickly on how deeply we're being surveilled.
- Imagine all the times you've had a conversation with somebody where you didn't identify a pattern match with your YouTube recommendations.
- Phone proximity is used, so if your phone is in proximity to his, the algorythm can note a relationship between his interests and yours- or even the interests of people who also interact with him.
  It's possible his behaviour is learned from a narcissistic parent, or that enough of his customers are involved in learning about narcissism. OR you also mightve been at a Cafe near a clinic for long enough your phone tried to ping the office wifi, and you just noticed it because of your interactions with him.
  Google also uses your relationships, so maybe a person you know is interested, or you watched a video about (blank) and a lot of those viewers also watched narcissism videos. Your brain is asking the connection to the contractor because it's an intuitive logical leap.
  Phones spy on us in a dozen different ways, mostly pattern recognition. They track location without GPS (by recording wifi pings), and track interests without the microphone. So they can claim they're not tracking those specific things while still gathering scary amounts of data.
  
  The relationship correlation data makes a lot of sense if only from a bandwidth perspective.
- This can be as “simple” as your phones being in close proximity to each other for an extended period, and sharing device advertising IDs/other device data via WiFi, Bluetooth. Might be more to it, but it’s a likely factor.
  Devices do this regularly btw, smartphones also scrape for WiFi networks to better geolocate etc.
  
  It sounds like this guy doesn't have a smartphone though
- Not to counter your anecdote with my own. But I have been getting a lot of email spam pushing books and workshops dealing with narcissistic or toxic employees and I don’t even manage anyone so it may just be that firing toxic people is hot right now as far as workplace issues and any trend has people trying to make a buck off it

Article littered with affiliate links.
And it also doesn't make sense.
- I think I get what it's saying? It's saying that while your phone isn't directly listening to your conversations in any meaningful way they collect crazy amounts of other data on basically everyone and can piece it together in such a way that they can make some scary accurate guesses as to the kind of ads to serve you based on what their systems have gathered your interests are and where/with whom you spend your time.
  I'm not entirely sure. They didn't really seem to present much more than speculation on it.
  
  A while back on Reddit I saw a post asking about this stuff. Companies don't need to "listen" anymore, they have much more sophisticated options now. This example will use 3 people: A (wife) B (husband) and C (wife's old friend from school).
  The question: A goes to the store without B, and runs into C, who proceeds to tell A about this cool gaming chair he just got. After the conversation, A puts the interaction aside and never mentions it to B. B later gets ads for the gaming chair. If B never had any interaction whatsoever about the chair, and A never even talked about it to B, how does B get the ads?
  The answer: A goes to the store, and her phone knows this through location data. The algorithm knows A is at the store, and now picks up that C is also at the same store. The algo then finds a connection through social media that A and C know each other, and maybe even knows spending habits and sees A and C buy similar things. The odds are good that A and C will interact at the store.
  C has been searching about this gaming chair for months, has just recently bought it, and talks about it constantly on socials. Odds are good that if A and C interact, C will talk about the chair.
  A has no interest in gaming or tech, but B does. The algo knows A and B are married, and B would be interested in the chair C just bought. There is now a vector to send ads from the interaction of A and C directly to B, even though A never mentioned anything about the chair to B, and B has never even met C.
  
  This is what I’ve been saying for years. You don't need to listen to someone’s microphone to serve eerily relevant ads. I’ve heard people commonly discussing how they talked about something and saw an ad for it later. You’re already being tracked everywhere and a bit of confirmation bias is all you need to focus in on the times it works. It’s like that story of the prenatal vitamins being recommended to that woman who didn’t realize she’s pregnant.
  This isn’t to say that I don’t believe someone can’t possibly turn on the mic in a targeted attack, but few of us are having conversations that are that important. It’s way easier to target you other ways using data that’s much more available.
  
  See, people say that ad companies can use all this information they gather to better serve targeted advertising, but that's just not my anecdotal experience.
  I get served ads all the time in languages I don't speak, for VERY specific job related audiences that I'm not even close to related to, state politics that I've never lived in, services that I'm already actively subscribed to, just the worst targeting ever.
  If I have to get advertised to, I'd so much rather get an ad that could actually be at all relevant to my life, or even some generic ad over the total misses.
  Like, if you're going through the trouble to do all this shady shit to get my data at least be good at it using it...
  
  I mean, what's the point of collecting all that data if there is no use to it. Why offering you a points program that seemingly gives you free stuff for tracking your purchases if there is no benefit to the company. I'd say unless it's a hugely incompetent company, they don't collect so much data on people for no reason whatsoever.
  And its been going on for decades with some people having handed in their info to various companies, many of them maybe even connected at some level the different dots on people, for the entire time. And that's all for nothing so now those companies also need to record you 24/7? Which is an even bigger amount of data to be stored exactly where? Also needs a massive amount of filtering, because really, how meaningful are everyday conversations of people.
- And it's almost 2 years old.
- Which part didn't make sense?

If you get a pihole or related project, you can see what packets are going in and out. It's eye opening what is pulling what.
- Yup. It's disgusting how much your devices send home about you. Unfortunately no one in my household cares. I show them the data and they ask me to whitelist their devices.
- Especially smart TVs. They’re especially chatty, accounting for something like 85% of network calls (all blocked). Edit: I meant 85% of calls on my network. And they bypass upstream DNS trying to be sneaky. It’s insane.

I am not downplaying the phone spying on me, I imagine it is.
But ads are the least of my concerns. I see less ads now than at any other time in my life.
So how do I know if it is happening to me?
- I believe this is how you know:
  Cogito, ergo sum res venalis
  René Descartes

So this article is suspect. It says that we're not being recorded so some distance advertiser can run ads, yet Alphonso was caught doing just that.
Do better "journalists"
- Alphonso is listening for TV sound signatures, which while definitely intrusive and privacy invading, is not the same as 24/7 listening for voice-to-text-to-ad purposes.
  They would only need to listen for a second or so to determine what channel you are on, instead of all the time, so there is a massive difference in scope.
  They are effectively shazaming your TV.
  Still creepy and invasive, but not 24/7 recording invasive.
  
  they are both wrong. one is just as bad
- Unless you are aware of further developments than I am, Alphonso required permissions and provided a consent dialog so it could not be considered spying or eavesdropping.
  
  no, its built into other apps. doesnt ask for anything then, the other apps do, Alphonso just listens in those apps

I stopped reading when it started suggesting VPNs. Your're far more likely to be profiled by a VPN provider than your ISP.
Privacy is not a product you can purchase.
- I live in a country where our ISPs are required by law to keep a record of our internet metadata. When ISPs have been subpoenaed in the past ths answer has often been "we don't keep that data".
  So in that case we're looking at a likelihood of 1 vs less than 1. So you're wrong there.
  Plus, I would love to hear your source on these probabilities you proclaim. Can you share how you know this?
  You said "far more likely", so one assumes you have the numbers.
  
  There are definitely some VPN providers to worry about.
  VPNs are a security tool but they don't protect people as much as they think. They hide DNS traffic your ISP would have received, so that your ISP can't tell everyone which cuckold or affair site you access (except you probably forgot to turn the VPN on one time or another so...)
  ~~Your ISP can still see IP addresses you connect to, they forward all your traffic~~ [I need to proof read before I press post - this is just misinformation]. Good opsec is a nightmare. Ad blocking does more for less cost than getting a VPN will ever do (except for certain human rights circumstances but I'd wager they're actually going to be careful).
  My personal tip is use DNS over HTTPS/TLS where possible, and don't use Cloudflare or Google. Add an ad blocker and it's far easier to setup and way more cost effective than VPN.

- I don't give a damn if I miss out on the coolest thing ever. Spying on us is wrong. That's how we got Donny. By letting the elite do what they want.