Comment by jprete
1 year ago
> ...they would need to be feeding those snippets in almost real time into a system which forwards them onto advertising partners who then feed that information into targeting networks...
I think this is totally mistaken. An ad seller which also wants to respect privacy keeps this data in-house and does the ad targeting themselves. The advertiser never needs to see personal information for this kind of market to give people ads related to overheard conversations.
We're specifically talking about Apple here, based on Siri wake words. Do you think Apple are running this kind ad of targeting?
My post is limited to pointing out what I think is a flaw in the reasoning. I am not taking a stance on the larger question.
why are you limiting your argument to wake words? It's comparatively trivial to serve ads based upon what's spoken after the wake word.
And as we know from the lawsuit, it seems that there's been a lot of data gathered accidentally too.
The story here is about Apple paying a settlement because Siri was sending audio snippets surrounding invalid wake word activations back to their servers without users realizing it.
In the story, there was an implication that these audio snippets had been used for targeted ads. This is very clearly not true.
A separate issue is whether Apple take audio from opt-in full hey Siri sessions and sell that advertisers for targeting.
I very much doubt they do that, but even if they did that shouldn't be part of the "your phone is secretly spying on you through your microphone" conspiracy theory because of course your phone is listening to you if you just said "hey Siri" and started talking to it.
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Also, couldn't a lot of it be done on device? Say, have a set of key phrases to listen for, and if the device hears them, then mark that the user should be targeted by certain kinds of ads.
I don't have any evidence either way that that happens, but it seems like a more practical way to accomplish it.
I mean, many advertisers go through the Google display network without having Google target their ads (AKA run their bidding algorithms). Typically they go through other middlemen agencies, who indeed would need at least some of this data to make use of it, tho perhaps in some derivative form.
Still, you’re right that Google could be keeping it all for themselves and feeding it to their black box targeting services. I really strongly doubt that’s happening with incidental assistant snippets much less intentionally-eavesdropped recordings, but it is more plausible than this makes it seem.