Comment by The_President
13 hours ago
These devices actively listen. First gen LG OLED - Went over to buddy's house with a new one. As an experiment I spoke spanish in front of the TV and the next ad to play on YouTube was in spanish language. We're talking two english speakers in a household environment that would have zero use of spanish outside of what I did.
I visited a week later and he had reset the TV because he started getting spanish ads. On my way out the door that time, I randomly said something like "I can't hold it in anymore, I need diapers!" and my friend was like "dude don't do that."
Sure enough, not a day later... It really just Depends.
I've had random Spanish YouTube commercials too. Except no one ever speaks Spanish around my devices.
Geotargeting. I live in a semi rural area. My town has 1.1% of kids who are classified as ESL. There’s a much larger town near us that has 32% ESL and 70+% of Hispanic descent.
We get podcast and very infrequent YouTube ads in Spanish. So does everyone else we’ve talked to. When you use IP address databases it almost always says our IP addresses are in the other town.
I looked up the stats and apparently my metro area (Detroit) is about 4.5 million people, with 7-10% of them speaking Spanish or having Spanish ancestry.
I do think it makes sense their ad algo messes up once in awhile.
People keep saying their TV does this. Can anyone recommend some Benn Jordan or Technology Connections style YT videos that conclusively replicate this?
I haven't seen an actual experiment that replicates anecdotal evidence but this discussion comes to mind
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42580659
from memory, the logical explanation is that by connecting to the same wifi the new tracked profile is being used. For example, the grand parent could have been learning Spanish, their profile gets picked up.
Another explanation is observation bias. Spanish ads were shown previously, but were ignored. Now you're on the lookout for them, so they're more noticeable.
No telling how to actually test this but this anecdote is true, and there was absolutely no spanish involved in that household prior. Nobody in that household speaks that language, not even the cuss words.