Here’s the fun part, they don’t need to listen to you. You are far more predictable than you realize. They already know everything about you, what you search, what apps you use, what kinds of exercise you do and when, what you eat, what articles you read, movies and podcasts you consume, music you listen to, what you buy, where you go, who you hang out with, and everything about the people you hang out with. Every minute of your life is meticulously tracked and analyzed and compared to the hundred thousand people who are just like you in terms of interests and patterns. They can predict to a scary degree what your thinking before you might even realize it yourself. They know you better than you know yourself. Why waste the resources sifting through hours of recordings when they already know everything going on in your head from the million data points you voluntarily transmit to them everyday?
The other part of this to keep in mind is that you are bombarded with ads all day most of which you ignore. It’s just that those few times where they manage to hit a straight bullseye, showing you an add for something you were just talking about or even just thinking about, those are the ones that will stick in your memory.
Please, please, please, can people just understand this?! It’s infuriating hearing all these conspiracies when in reality, it’s so much simpler to just use the data we already know they collect.
It’s also frankly scarier that they can predict our thoughts, patterns, movements etc. without the need to listen to us at all. That scares the shit out of me.
If you an average male into video games it’s going to shill you popular video games. That’s an assumption given your gender and age and probably location and most of the time it’s a correct choice. It’s not as advanced as you think it is.
It’s not really all that crazy to think though. We create categories for people in our own heads and predict their behavior all the time. Often times we get it right because people are at least somewhat predictable. Look no further than starter pack memes.
Nah, none of this explains the Lemonbalm Tea incident.
I assure you, the Lemonbalm Tea incident does not require further explanation than “whatever many steps you think is the answer, you can add plus 2 to it and still come up short”.
I cannot replicate any of these claims no matter how hard I try. I ran out of contact solution this weekend and I spent a good 20 minutes repeating the words “contact solution” “contact solution delivery” “1-800-contacts” "I need contact solution " with Facebook open, directly into the microphone. All I get are vaguely relevant ads for shit I obviously would want (bike parts and bikes because, spoiler alert, I use FB almost exclusively to keep up with local mountain bike events) and absolutely nothing about contacts or contact solution.
But guess what? This still doesn’t prove anything because, like your example, it’s an anecdote. And a single anecdote counts for fuck all in terms of evidence. I find it exceedingly unlikely that any of the tech giants are wasting time and resources listening in on our conversations simply to target us with advertisements when they already have sufficient data based on past search history, app usage statistics, our friend groups, location data, demographic data, …
This stupid conspiracy is just as illogical as the vaccine tracking chip conspiracy. Hello, you are voluntarily carrying a tracking device you bought with your own money and keep charged with your own power, and you willingly expose even more data to it like private messages and photos. There’s absolutely no reason to invent GPS tracking nano technology to solve an already solved problem.
And I by no means am saying that these big tech companies are innocent or that they don’t abuse the data they collect. There’s a 100% chance they do. But you are ascribing a level of sophistication they don’t really need to “read your mind” or listen in on your private conversations. You are human, and they have a few billion other examples of humans they can use to analyze behavior. We’re pretty predictable, it turns out.
There is no “lemon balm incident” that even bears worth putting on the Internet after a quick google search. You’re talking out your ass so can it.
And yet they can’t recommend a song that I would actually like.
then how do you explain facebook giving people ads for stuff they say
eg. this youtuber made an experiment where he wasn’t getting ads for oven and when he started saying oven multiple times, he got ads for oven https://youtu.be/-nkiPEGU_lYHere is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/-nkiPEGU_lY
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Or Facebook recommending people that I’ve talked to by text and never met irl (met on dating app, moved to text, fizzled out) when it’s not supposed to have access to my contacts.
Yeah but Facebook probably has access to the other person’s contacts where your name and phone number were stored
That’s a good point. She popped up after she changed my contact info to my new name, which I updated on FB a few weeks ago.
Though it did happen with another girl I was talking to last year and haven’t talked to since.
Assuming this isn’t because the person you’re contacting has lax privacy set up in their FB account, have you ever played “6 degrees of Kevin Bacon”? You (I assume) probably live near this person, are probably approximately the same age, single, you may even have some obscure friends in common. Or friends of friends. And what you don’t remember are the countless recommendations that are totally off base. For every “uncanny” friend recommendation I get, there are dozens of people I don’t know.
Dumb take is dumb
This is such a fucking dumb comment lol.
Google offers free voice to text engine APIs and constantly listens on your phone for “hello google” or however their phrase goes. So if it is constantly listenning to you anyways, why not also filter for other keywords like “buy” “like” “want” ?
These are two companies.
We are lucky to still have 2 choices
Why are some of you STILL not using ad, tracker, and script blockers in 2023? This is basic internet shit. Wear protection and stop rawdogging it.
Even with all that disabled there are still ghost profiles of you built. If you shop online at all you are building a fingerprint without the need of trackers.
Even then, you should use adblockers to stop giving them money. Modern day social media is just targeted advertising, that is why they profile you. If you don’t see ads, that information is useless to them.
that’s why i do everything that’s transactional in an incognito window. i have plenty of non-incognito tabs but they’re nearly all sites i log into on the regular such as lemmy. combine that with firefox’s built-in privacy protections and ublock origin, which is a combo that absolutely wrecks a lot of tracking and browser fingerprinting scripts to begin with (i have actually done contract work for marketing communications people and it was crazy how many layers of defense i needed to peel back just to debug their shit) and most of that tracking becomes disjointed cookies that only span a single session each and are hella hard to correlate.
Incognito window doesn’t do what you think it does. Also it doesn’t stop browser fingerprinting, even tor itself doesn’t really take a win there.
yeah, the thing that stops browser fingerprinting on the threat level of ad companies is firefox’s built-in protections (which are in fact stronger in incognito) and ublock origin; and umatrix, full script blocking, and probably prayers on tor’s level.
what incognito does is it breaks apart your chain of regular cookies. those can still slip through a lot of these tools, especially when they’re first-party, but they’re also kinda low-tech because of being first party most of the time (while the third party ones are easily blocked by other tools). that way the trace you leave behind is not one long thing, but many small ones that are hard to connect.
incognito is just one layer of defense but it’s an important one
I periodically say random product names or search for things id have no use for just to see how far and wide it goes…it’s bad.
