Are Google earwigging?

Kittyfrisk

^ Yeah, I have a keystroke logger on him.
I love old school, heh, heh, heh  

Axe_meister

Wish I could comment as I work for Google.

Kittyfrisk

^ Well, nobody's perfect 

beed84

It’s unlikely they’re listening but rather they’ve gleaned enough information to make predictions on what you might (or might not) want. 

+1 DuckDuckGo

Installing Ghostery also enables you to block trackers, annoying ads etc.

Axe_meister

One thing I will say given I am immersed in the Google culture, is I have a lot more trust in them than any other corporate (having worked for quite a few).

monquixote

Octafish said:

monquixote said:

I'm fairly sure they aren't

1 The backlash when they got caught (and they would) would put them out of business

2 if you have the audio subsystem on a phone running constantly it kills the battery.

You probably saw the adverts every day before then but didn't register them.

I really don't mean this in an abusive way, but that's pretty naive take on it. The backlash would be pretty minimal and most would just shrug their shoulders and utter the complacent "well, I've got nothing to hide" trope. How many times have we heard business' claim "we'd never knowingly rip the customer off, it would put us out business" and yet it happens and more often than not, doesn't put anyone out of business. Witness the car emissions scandal....

No, it's not a naive take on it. It's the take of someone who has some knowledge of this subject given that I am the head of engineering at a company that makes audio software for mobile devices and have actually talked to senior people at Apple on this very subject.

It's very easy to reverse engineer an Android or IOS application and see exactly what it's doing Apple do this every time you submit an app to the app store. It's also not that hard to put a device through a compromised router or VPN and spoof the certificates so you can look at all the traffic that it's producing.

Cambridge Analytica no longer exist, Volkswagen's share price dropped by 15.6B€ as a result of the emissions scandal, Facebook dropped 36B$ as a result of Cambridge Analytica.

La Liga got fined for recording when they shouldn't be even though it's in their T&C that they do it.

Apple have kicked apps made by Facebook and Google from the store before as a result of abusing privacy rules.

This whole myth of phones constantly recording everything you say (with the exception of scanning for wake words which is a thing) is because people don't understand the power of sophisticated tracking cookies, people linking data across services and machine learning.

There are instances of people receiving adverts for baby products before they even knew they were pregnant. That's the power of a modern recommendation engine at work.

monquixote

Snags said:

darthed1981 said:

As you say, doesn't matter anyhow, other means.

Principally IP addresses, you log onto public wi-fi, or a friend's wifi, then you have published your location to the world.

Hrm. Hrrmmmmm. HRRRRMMMMMM!!

That's not strictly true, is it Ed (and I know you know this). Publicly accessible geographic information about a specific public IP address is often wildly inaccurate due to how blocks are registered, re-sold, sub-let and so on amongst ISPs. Generally speaking you're only really revealing the device's location to the ISP, with a small chance it might be broadly accurate on a general search if you then log into a service that logs the accessing public IP and bothers do such a search.

And of course if you fire up a VPN to somewhere else, then all bets are off (unless you can't trust your VPN provider).

It really pisses me off the lazy cop show tech stuff about "I've got his IP, I'm sending you the location now, it's the third bedroom down the corridor on the 7th floor when you get out of the elevators at the right-hand end of the building" because it's such total and utter bollocks.

Except that one of the reasons people don't realise for the Google maps cars is that they sniff your Wifi SSID and use it to improve the location tracking.

Axe_meister

Who needs an IP address, the Mac address is all you need which I advertised to every 4G and WiFi hotspot.

Mickeyji

This is an interesting and somewhat scary watch:
https://youtu.be/TbKxUYl3WSE

Grunfeld

beed84 said:

...Installing Ghostery also enables you to block trackers, annoying ads etc.

Thank you!

I used to use this then it stopped working as Firefox made some changes and I forgot its name.

Really useful Add On.

Yearofthegoat

Sassafras said:

When I got Alexa I played my guitar in the same room. The next day I got loads of adverts for drums.

I did a re-setup on my old ('92 Jap ) Squier on Friday. Yesterday next door's Alexa gave them ads for ear plugs.

In all seriousness, yes of course Google is listening. Not so long ago they were prosecuted in the States for reading Gmail emails and spamming the senders off the content.

HHwarner

Iv had it a few times. I was once talking about a job in Santorini where one of my Gears had failed and we were sending a service engineer. Next day, adds for holidays in Santorini. Id never even heard of the place prior to this. Last week me and the Mrs were discussing taking the dog to the vets to sort his teeth. Next thing we both have ads for Dog Tooth brushes and dog tooth paste. Seems too much of a coincidence to me

carlos

roundthebend said:

It's feasible I suppose. But there is a thing, might be some kind of Cognitive Bias, which suggests that these things were always there and happening but you weren't tuned into them until you heard the radio show or had the chat with a colleague, and then when you see it again you think it's a crazy coincidence but it really isn't.

Pretty sure you mean confirmation bias, although I guess that's one sort of cognitive bias.

BigMonka

The funniest thing about this thread for me is that the day before it was posted I had the same conversation with my wife! So I can only conclude that Google is listening and also has accounts on forums - @spark240 are you an AI?!

Fiftyshadesofjay

I'm absolutely not one for conspiracy theories like this but I think they definitely are listening. I get the whole thing that there's tons of info out there but there's been so many examples of random stuff popping up.

For example having a joke conversation with my fiance about getting new teeth and getting ads for dental surgery a few moments later. 
Having a conversation with someone I haven't seen in ages and them mentioning to me they recorded a band on an old 16 track recorder. Ads suddenly pop up for 16 track digital recorders etc.

All these are random conversations, I've never googled anything like that before or mentioned it online.

crunchman

Fiftyshadesofjay said:

I'm absolutely not one for conspiracy theories like this but I think they definitely are listening. I get the whole thing that there's tons of info out there but there's been so many examples of random stuff popping up.

For example having a joke conversation with my fiance about getting new teeth and getting ads for dental surgery a few moments later. 
Having a conversation with someone I haven't seen in ages and them mentioning to me they recorded a band on an old 16 track recorder. Ads suddenly pop up for 16 track digital recorders etc.

All these are random conversations, I've never googled anything like that before or mentioned it online.

The only problem with that is that I'm not convinced that they are that good at understanding speech.  It was quite funny watching my daughters asking Alexa to find them something on Youtube.  It never understood them.  They have given up now, and just search the more old fashioned way.

Edit:  Those automated phone lines never seem to understand when you say "I want to talk to a human" 

midlifecrisis

did some advertising on facebook last year. was amazed by how targeted you could get. ie where people shopped, what they purchased, interests,  stuff people dont know that they have volunteered. Also if you have 100 or so clients that have a certain profile , facebook can then match this with 1000s more. 

brooom

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jul/11/google-home-assistant-listen-recordings-users-privacy

spark240

BigMonka said:

The funniest thing about this thread for me is that the day before it was posted I had the same conversation with my wife! So I can only conclude that Google is listening and also has accounts on forums - @spark240 are you an AI?!

I knew you were going to say that ...;-)

digitalscream

brooom said:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jul/11/google-home-assistant-listen-recordings-users-privacy

The key is in the detail - it only records after it's heard the trigger phrase. It's self-evident that the audio following that is sent to Google's servers, and that humans are required to transcribe when the algorithm fails.

The fact that it sometimes wakes up incorrectly is also not surprising - but it doesn't do it surreptitiously, because there's an audible (and visual, if the device has a screen) prompt.