One of my weirder hobbies is trying to convince people that the idea that companies are listening to you through your phone’s microphone and serving you targeted ads is a …

Not my title! I do think we are being listened to. And location tracked. And it’s being passed on to advertisers. Is it apple though? Probably not is my take away from this article, but I don’t trust plenty of others, and apple still does

  • @abysmalpoptartEnglish
    2•2 days ago

    While i understand and agree with the premise, i think it’s lacking context. It is quite disturbing to have an obscure conversation (you know, we’ve never been to tahiti), and suddenly you’re getting banner ads or sponsored results about trips to tahiti.

    This is absolutely a thing that happens. It happens to my wife frequently (the amount of times i hear giggling, i was just talking about that! Now I’ve got an ad! What a coincidence!), but i disabled all my google permissions (outside of location for maps), so it doesn’t seem to happen to me at all.

    I don’t think every company does this, but some do. I also had to uninstall WhatsApp because my microphone usage was up while i was sleeping. That was quite concerning to discover. Whatsapp claims it’s a bug, but I’m not sure about that.

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40348711

    https://www.ghacks.net/2024/09/04/report-alleges-that-microphones-on-devices-are-used-for-active-listening-to-deliver-targeted-ads/