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

  • @[email protected]English
    4•2 days ago

    The speech recognition software used by digital assistants that come with most modern smartphones would make it trivial to process the audio locally and map the output to your ad profile. Much lighter lift than sending audio recordings.

    • @rowinxavierEnglish
      4•2 days ago

      And a much smaller footprint. It could even be binary data for tweaking your algorithmic profile, say the name of a branded product or in the case of a product with few options just the type of item. Audio runs in the megabytes per minute, transcripts in the kilobytes, but reducing to a conclusion of interest in a single specific item is really very small, hard to notice tbh.