Are your devices listening to you?

Kinda inspired by the “we think you’ll like this” thread…

I don’t have any “listening” devices in my house. Well, not intentionally.

So how is it that now and again, my devices will suddenly start advertising stuff that has only been talked about physically? Not searched for online.

Recent example would be yoga lessons!

Or am I just paranoid?

Mobiles will be listening all the time, for ‘hey siri/alexa/whatever the windows version is’

We have certainly noticed on several occasions that adverts for ‘a thing’ that we have discussed verbally, will appear shortly after on both our devices.

I think the algorithm is smarter than simply listening…
Phones use GPS to realise you’re near a friend with similar interests..maybe they looked something up online.
The ‘system’ figures you and your friend are similar, and YOU might be interested in what they’ve been looking at.
Therefore, it advertises THEIR interest to you…

DrP

Conversely, it’s probably fair to add:
Several years ago, i repeatedly got an advert popping up that said “welcome back to the voodoo lounge”
Anyone who knows me reasonably well would be able to tell you, categorically, i would never, under any circumstances, and regardless of what that website is actually about, visit a website with that name.
So it could just be random utter shite.

Adverts for yoga go unnoticed until interest in yoga develops shocker?

It’s been tested. People have monitored these devices all day and found they don’t send any data until you say the wake word.

They do however employ all sorts of tactics to advertise stuff to you that may appear like they’re listening. For example, if someone else in your house had searched for yoga it might show you stuff on your devices. Or, if you were perhaps talking about yoga because you saw someone walking down the street dressed in yoga gear and subconsciously recognised it, or you work with someone who has been searching yoga and it assumes you might be talking to them about it, etc etc.

It could have been triggered by those things and the fact you were also talking about it made you think it was listening, but it’s just a coincidence. Consider all the things you discussed this week and didn’t see adverts for, and you didn’t think twice because there was never an advert.

hey siri/alexa/whatever the windows version is

Cortana, and for Android it’s hey Google. And Samsung have their own thing that absolutely no-one uses.

Two words: propensity modelling

I do a fair amount of work in this field, and with datasets the size of Meta/Amazon/Google etc, its very easy to predict to a high level of accuracy what you’re likely to engage with based on similar behavioural groups across the dataset.

It’s a couple of years old now, but The Great Hack explains the tech really well, and since Cambridge Analytica went, many of the data scientists have gone on to set up behavioural modelling ad tech businesses. It’s scary but pretty amazing stuff.

We have a number of Alexas. None of them seem to listen to me though, as they all seem to play random bits of music I haven’t actually asked for.

I wish I could get a device to listen to me though – I’d bore it s**less with a discourse on the shortcomings of British tank design in the years 1941 to 45.

IT related, I spent a day talking to customers about IT systems integrating and real time monitoring of errors. Later that day, Facebook started advertising Splunk to me. Pretty sure I’d not been googling that before.

Our dog found some abandoned kittens and so was a topic of conversation for a few days. We had to phone the Vets and Cat Protection to get them sorted out.

My Facebook and Instagram feeds were suddenly full of cat pictures and adverts for cat food for a few weeks.

I challenged cybersecurity expert Ken Munro and his colleague David Lodge from Pen Test Partners to see whether it was physically possible for an app to snoop in this way.
Could something “listen in” at will without it being obvious?
“I wasn’t convinced at first, it all seemed a bit anecdotal,” admitted Mr Munro.

However, to our collective surprise, the answer was a resounding yes.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-35639549

For example, if someone else in your house had searched for yoga it might show you stuff on your devices.

Asking for a friend, is this yoga specifically or anything that someone in the house may search for.?

@grum there’s no doubt such a system is possible. Of course it is.

The question is, are Facebook/Google &co doing it?

This might explain why FB marketplace decided to send me lots of ads for RSJs a couple of weeks ago. My lunchtime discussions had included a friend trying to find out what to do with a couple of spares.

Sitting with a 6 month old baby who was hitting a toy drum, almost instantly FB Marketplace is trying to tell me about real drum kits for sale. Never searched for before, doubtful even discussed.

Anything via text is a definite. Conversation recently about certain cars had said brand and model popping up very soon after

Calling Cougar to the forum.

(Let’s see if it works…)

Our dog found some abandoned kittens and so was a topic of conversation for a few days.We had to phone the Vets and Cat Protection to get them sorted out.

How did you find their phone numbers?

My mate keeps getting adverts the following day for whatever it was we were talking about the day before.
Not on the same WiFi.

The week before last it was composting toilets. This week composting toilets.

Whether his phone being some cheapo amazon job has anything to do with it, I don’t know.

Very odd as his is the only phone that seems to pick up on whatever happened to be the topic of the day.

Two words: propensity modelling

I do a fair amount of work in this field …

Doing it for targeted advertising seems to me like a huge waste of bright minds. What brings the satisfaction? Or is it just a case of being interesting and paying well?

timbog160

I wish I could get a device to listen to me though – I’d bore it s**less with a discourse on the shortcomings of British tank design in the years 1941 to 45.

Well that’s a subject that I would listen to 🙂

This happened to me a few years ago.

I was at work talking to colleague who’d cycled the length of Wales on one of those sportives. That evening I was chatting to my brother in law about it and how’d I’d planned to do the English coast to coast in a day a few years back but had given up on it because the logistics were too difficult. I hadn’t thought about it or searched on line about it for five years. After he left the first thing in my Facebook feed was an add for the supported coast to coast in a day. That’s too much of a co-incidence. This was prior to house been full of Google homes so it must have been Facebook listening to our conversation.

Calling Cougar to the forum.

Hiya!

(Let’s see if it works…)

Ah. Shit.

I challenged cybersecurity expert Ken Munro and his colleague David Lodge from Pen Test Partners to see whether it was physically possible for an app to snoop in this way.
Could something “listen in” at will without it being obvious?

The key word here is “could.”

Molgrips is on the ball here. Could it? sure. But is it?

All (many) other things aside, if this were the case then they’d have been busted by now. It really is that simple. I would expect apprentice-level engineers to notice this sort of network traffic, let alone industry experts.

Ken Munro, incidentally, is a leading cybersecurity authority in the field of teledildonics. I’ll leave that to your googling but it’s exactly what it sounds like and it’s frankly terrifying.

Well, it would appear that I’m not paranoid!

Only one response victim blaming out of 20. Am I in the running for totw? 🤣🤣🤣🤣

@Cougar

What I have you been told about coming here with your logic and your reasoning?

Pfffffft!

🤣🤣🤣🤣

That evening I was chatting to my brother in law about
…
it must have been Facebook listening to our conversation.

Or your brother in law looking it up on his phone and Facebook figuring that you might have common interests.

This stuff makes me laugh.  I get called paranoid for blocking cookies, running adblocks and not having bluetooth and location on.  But the result is i see very few ads and none of them are directed like this.  I don’t use anything google either

Synchronicity is a concept first introduced by analytical psychologist Carl G. Jung “to describe circumstances that appear meaningfully related yet lack a causal connection.

cybersecurity authority in the field of teledildonics

🤣

I presume Myfreecams are getting a Daley Thompson style upgrade?

More seriously it would appear he’s actually more interested in the wider IoT field though the articles on that site regrading, er, teledildonics are quite interesting.

@mrovershoot – in which case I’m surprised your phone hasn’t suggested the ‘we have ways of making you talk’ podcast. Listen to it, and then you too will be able to bore your Alexa with reasons why the Matilda II was the BEST tank of the Second World War 😆

Adding in… if it is possible to deliver adverts to people who you can ascertain will be be interested/susceptible to them before they express any direct interest themselves (it is), then it stands to reason that the timing of that ad delivery is sometimes going to synchronise with them talking about it for the first time with someone.

My wife has pondered this a few times. She thinks it happens to her, but it doesn’t happen to me. She uses Facebook regularly, while I’ve never had a Facebook account (although I do Instagram and very occasionally Whatsapp).
She also searched google logged in to her account, and I don’t and also block third party cookies and regularly clear my history.
If they were listening then surely I’d get the same targeting?
IMO it comes down to is algorithms designed to target data are scarily unnoticeable at what they do.

But the result is i see very few ads and none of them are directed like this.

That’s because your phone has heard you say that adverts don’t work on you, so it doesn’t bother.

However they connect up the dots it’s pretty blatant they are monitoring activities somehow.

After watching an episode of Great British bake off, and having never done anything online regarding baking, I start getting adverts for baking stuff….🤔

Lols at Drac 😂

After watching an episode of Great British bake off, and having never done anything online regarding baking, I start getting adverts for baking stuff…

You have always had adverts for baking stuff, but you get a lot of adverts so you didn’t really take any notice of them until you watched GBBO and then your brain applied an association to disconnected events.

Probably helped by advertisers of baking goods prime time for advertising being when GBBO is broadcast and the few hours after.

What you’re missing there is that the viewing figures for GBBO is not “one.”

All this secretive dark arts technology and the best they are using it for is to advertise, yoga, cycling, bit of metal and something related to a hugely popular TV show that’s inspired millions of people to take up baking… Just imagine what will happen when evil corporations find out about this, they’ll be having a field day advertising suppression of the population.

As people have said above, technology is far cleverer than most people understand.

We’re looking at replacing my OH’s car shortly and we just now we were talking about credit ratings. Literally mid-conversation I got an email alert from Credit Karma. They must be spying on us!

Or, it’s a monthly subscription email and a complete coincidence, as evidenced by the tens of thousands of other times I’ve been talking about something and it hasn’t happened.

Makes you think.