• RandomlyAssigned@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    My previous employer - a multi-billion dollar internet search company would secretly listen to people’s conversation via their mobile devices then place ads on the same devices (e.g in the browser search results or at the start of videos) based on keywords from the conversations, this had to be kept hidden of course and this large well-known company shall remain nameless.

    • InvaderDJ@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Can you explain more, because the way this is written I’m not sure how they would do that technically.

      Assuming this is Google, I could maybe see it with things like Gmail. Text is easy to scan and ads in things like Youtube videos are dynamic so they could be doing that. Same with something like Microsoft and Outlook.com.

      But listening to actual conversations (as in phone calls) at a large scale and then using that to put dynamic ads in videos or search results seems impossible to do at scale.

    • shanghaibebop@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      You sure about that? because if it’s Google, that particular method of doing this would be easily discovered.

      Also, the scary part isn’t that they could do this by listening to your phone, the scary part is that they DON’T need to listen to your phone to do exactly that. Much easier to identify multiple devices coming from the same network (both physical and social), and then figuring out query interests, and then send ads down the same pipelines.

    • Cl1nk@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      Is there something I can do to prevent this from happening? I don’t want to ditch my smartphone and use a fliphone tho