alt Hacker NewsThe myth is that the devices are streaming audio back to be ingested into ad/recommendation algorithms, which is testable and generally not true.
I really wish these conversations would shift to the scarier truth: companies collect so much metadata on everyone that they can make pretty good guesses without processing what you're saying.
If you think "oh hey I was just talking about socks, how did they know to show me an ad for socks" it's likely because they accurately predicted based on your behaviors that you are highly likely to be in the market for socks right now.
Replies
genearlly not true except LG just got caught making it true
Facebook/Google have a history of abusing hidden iOS APIs and exploiting weaknesses in the app isolation. It's plausible they found a way to read the output stream of the text-to-speech module from their apps, until Apple was forced to fix it.
None of the companies would have an incentive to report it.
> If you think "oh hey I was just talking about socks, how did they know to show me an ad for socks"
Or you’re talking about socks because of the previous ad for socks you saw. I suspect ads drive our collective behaviour more than we realize.