darkSpyro

Here's something to think about. Because of the recent Mark Zuckerberg discussion on internet privacy, many people in Congress (and pretty much the world) were wondering about whether websites like Facebook and Google are always listening. Zuckerberg said that Facebook doesn't, but he could not speak on Google's behalf.

Now, we all know that of course Google is always listening; it's common sense, considering that it's listening for the command "Okay, Google." The concern is whether Google listens to what we talk about, record that information, and then respond to it?



I found this video addressing the question and doing a live test. Now I have Adblock, so I don't see the direct results this video gets, but I have had advertising on my phone that correlate to things that I enjoy and have talked about. For example, I remember getting advertisements on Facebook for RWBY hoodies, despite never liking the RWBY page on Facebook. Either the software heard me talking about RWBY to one of my friends, or it heard me playing one of the albums from RWBY's soundtrack.

What do you guys think? Is this real? Is this mere coincidence? Should we worry about it?

I absolutely think it's real, just because it would be dumb for them not to be. I'm not saying I agree with it but from a society that's always sell, advertise, market, buy, consume, more, more, more, the best possible way to guarantee you can show people what they want is by listening to the things they discuss when they think they aren't being sold to.

Information is one of the highest valued commodities now, and there's been such a huge push of the Amazon Echo, Google Home, and other similar devices. They're amazing pieces of technology for so ridiculously cheap, and they're being marketed in a way that makes people afraid of falling behind if they don't have one. In such a short amount of time they've become so normal and commonplace, and for the most part anyone that has questioned it has been brushed off as too paranoid, or technophobic.

Targeted advertising and catered search results are absolutely a real thing and have been for a very long time.

At the very least, advertising is always based on your search history and browsing history. I very often get advertisements for, let's say, Sonic the Hedgehog merchandise on websites like Amazon because there have been plenty of times where I have searched for Sonic the Hedgehog products, even if I don't often buy them. Even just searching stuff on Google is enough for retail websites to know what kind of products to recommend to you.

Catered search results and predictions are also based on your search history and browsing history. To give a random example I personally recall - I am a big fan of the character Rosalina, from Super Mario. And I frequented a site called Smashboards for a while, a forum for the competitive Smash community.

Normally, when I wanted to visit Smashboards, I just typed an "s" into the URL bar and that would give me the suggestion for the site's URL, and I'd just hit enter. However, one day, instead of having the site URL come up as the first suggestion, it actually kept giving me the search query "smashboards rosalina" as the first suggestion. Thing is, I never searched up that specific query before then. Other people I knew weren't getting this suggestion IIRC, so this wasn't coming up because of it being a particularly popular query either. This likely started coming up since I would have been spending some time on the Rosalina section of the Smash Wii U/3DS subforum on Smashboards, as well as searching up information, usually in regards to Rosalina merchandise (I've been trying to keep an up to date Rosalina collection going for a while now).

So that was definitely an example of a targeted search prediction.

As for the whole reading your voice thing, I can't say I've noticed this personally. My brother believes in it as he has mentioned obscure subjects IRL in conversation, only to go on Facebook on his phone a few minutes later and get promoted posts on that subject, even though he never subscribed to any pages before. I'm not sure I believe in it, though I don't think people are crazy to believe it. At the very least, I could see it being a real thing, but also flawed in execution, and probably isn't working properly for everyone.

google if your listening

does this sound like shakira

le le le le lo le

I hope not, because, if so, Google has probably heard some weird stuff from me.