Idk man, I'm a skeptic that they're not listening in some weird way. Not to mention both of my wife restrict which apps get camera and microphone access. It's uncanny that things we talk about but never google / look up wind up as ads within a day if not hours.
Another fun one was the time a friend was telling me about a niche ramen, by brand name on Discord. I pop open Facebook, what do I see? The EXACT ramen brand is the very next ad. If they aren't watching us for ad revenue I'm going to go crazy with all these insane coincidences.
Surely this is easy to test? Come up with a list of 100 topics. Of those, randomly choose 50. Work them into your conversations, and collect all the ads you've seen. Note down how ads you get for the 50 topics you've chosen compared to the topics you haven't chosen. Better yet, give your phone to your friend and have him say the ads, so you don't get confirmation bias.
This is all very easy to do, and the conspiracy that facebook/google/whatever is secretly listening to you isn't exactly fringe either. Yet, I'm not of any rigorous testing that proves it's real. While absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence, it's a good reason to be skeptical.
It's the ads I'm seeing, but aren't registering on a conscious level that concern me. I think we see far more ads than we are aware of.
The other wild thing is I was severely out of town, the ad was very local but way too uncomfortably relevant.
It is not difficult to believe that if it is available to Google itself, it will be available to whomever that pays for it. That is their business model, after all.
The relevant settings are part of your Google account[0], and as of 7 months ago (which is the last time I checked) KB said:
> Web & App Activity saves your searches and activity from other Google services in your Google Account. You may get more personalized experiences…
> When Web & App Activity is on, you can include audio recordings from your interactions with Google Search, Assistant, and Maps as part of your activity.
Speaking in presence of a phone with relevant settings turned on certainly strikes me as something that can qualify as “interaction with Google Assistant”.
The KB article does not mention ads, but I would not be surprised if more uses of your voice activity were hidden somewhere in ToS.
[0] https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/54068?hl=en&co=G...
That's hardly a conclusive experiment when there wasn't a control group, and sample size was 1. That's the issue with the "facebook/google/whatever is secretly listening to you" conspiracy theories: plenty of anecdotes, zero rigorous testing.
"and activity from other Google services" and "audio recordings from your interactions with Google" is hardly conclusive, especially when google has services that involve consensual audio recordings.
The wording is also unambiguous about what you say being “activity”.
The part where it says that this activity is saved as part of your Google account is also pretty conclusive.
I can’t see how you can infer from that KB that the device would not be listening or that the recordings do not become part of your Google account history. What you could claim is that they are scrupulous as to when exactly your words become “activity”, or what exactly activity they save and share for the purposes of ad personalisation, which is your right to believe.
After all, that’s what they want me to do. Well, their first preference would be for me to buy another one.
Even if I were to put some kind of open source thing on it, I don’t want visitors to my house to see Nest hardware and for Google to get that slight amount of free advertising.
tencentshill•2mo ago
Even claiming it's for academic research datasets would be a better excuse.
gruez•2mo ago