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Comment by zwtaylor | Hacker News Reader

Dozens of times in the past few years I've been served relevant ads on some topic instantly after discussing it in person in proximity to a smartphone. I've encountered countless other anecdotal stories from friends. When this happens I feel an acute sense of violation and vulnerability. It's hard to imagine a less sinister explanation for this phenomena.

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Coincidence is a less sinister explanation. You never take note of the adverts if they weren’t immediately relevant.

This seems like something that could be settled via some kind of study, like playing audio to the phone and recording what ads get shown and doing it to a population of phones and social media accounts.

You can also monitor the network traffic, audio takes up a decent chunk of data.

You can decompile the app and see what it does.

But that's so much less entertaining to speculate about! Why should obvious truth get in the way of our fun?

> It's hard to imagine a less sinister explanation for this phenomena.

You just forget all the other signal you've giving. Funnily enough, last week somebody was trying to convince me that Facebook was recording their every word.

"I was telling a friend about a recent trip to Thailand", they said, "and I immediately saw an ad for Thai Tea". I asked if he'd used Facebook when he was in Thailand. He had.

Which is more likely: Facebook is recording every conversation of every user on their app and mini them for ads or the advertiser in question just targeted people who had recently been to Thailand.

You can't imagine a less sinister explanation other than Facebook or some other entity is secretly recording your voice and the voices of millions of people, in violation of numerous state and federal laws, through their smartphone microphones, uploading it to their servers surreptitiously, performing voice analysis on it to determine who is speaking out of 350,000,000 possible cases (presumably they've already cataloged everyone in the country somehow?), and then use that to serve you more targeted advertising?!

I mean, really?

True, it seems far-fetched at first. We should keep in mind that a even few short years ago theorizing about the US Government operating a widespread domestic electronic surveillance dragnet was still the realm of delusional conspiracy theorists.

I remember the days when we thought archiving Usenet was technically impossible... Then DejaNews announced they'd been doing it for years already...

I don't see how that matters. Besides, people have been discussing widespread, domestic electronic surveillance for decades far outside conspiracy fringes. The Clipper chip, as just one example, was a big deal at the time and received widespread, mainstream coverage.

I mean, they did break iOS platform rules and pulled some tricks to keep the app open in the background all of the time by sending an empty audio beffer to the phone for "playback."

So yes, really.

Not sure if it is so far fetched to do some lightweight voice analysis (client side) and store significant terms in the same way that you would store search history.

I can add to that anecdote... I was discussing which podcast app was best for Android with a friend, and in the presence of her Android phone. The next day, she started getting served ads for podcast apps all over the place.

Keep in mind, this was someone who would have been completely new to podcasting and have never searched for podcasts or podcast apps before.

Made both of us highly suspicious.

I was using google navigation and someone in the back asked "what do you mean one-size fits all"... then my phone which was only running navigator chimed in "one-size fits all means blah blah blah" was definitely creepy.

Google Maps navigation feature listens for verbal input (although it's supposed to be triggered by the wake word) to do things like add stops and such without touching it

Read up on the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon

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