this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2023
72 points (98.6% liked)

Ask Lemmy

26831 readers
2228 users here now

A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions

Please don't post about US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world


Rules: (interactive)


1) Be nice and; have funDoxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them


2) All posts must end with a '?'This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?


3) No spamPlease do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.


4) NSFW is okay, within reasonJust remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com. NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].


5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions. If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.


Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.

Partnered Communities:

Tech Support

No Stupid Questions

You Should Know

Reddit

Jokes

Ask Ouija


Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] RandomlyAssigned@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago (5 children)

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 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] RandomlyAssigned@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

I can't explain more because I just made the whole thing up. That's right, I told a lie on the internet

[–] shanghaibebop@lemmy.world 1 points 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.

[–] cantevencode@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Can I Google their name?

[–] beta_particle@lemm.ee 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] ruck_feddit@lemmy.ml 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It could also rhyme with Blamazon

[–] RandomlyAssigned@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It could also rhyme with 'my cock soft'

[–] krustymeathead@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

i think calling bing a search engine is an insult to the term search engine.

[–] TWeaK@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago

Depends, if you're looking for porn it's quite good. Or so I've heard.

[–] Cl1nk@sh.itjust.works 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] ModdedPhones@lemmy.ml 16 points 1 year ago

grapheneOS.org