This just blows my mind and makes me feel sick to my stomach that such company’s like CMG Local Solutions do this sort of thing even exist! 🤢🤮
Note: I did not want to use the ‘URL’ field in this post to add a direct link to this company as they use a pixel tracker (see post title). I don not recommend you visit it. Instead, I’ll quote them here:
It’s True. Your Devices Are Listening to You. With Active Listening, CMG can now use voice data to target your advertising to the EXACT people you are looking for.
magine This… What could it do for your business, if you were able to target potential clients or customers who are using terms like this in their day to day conversations:
The car lease ends in a month- we need a plan. We need to get serious about planning for retirement. A mini van would be perfect for us. This AC is on it’s last leg! Do I see mold on the ceiling? We need a better mortgage rate.
Active Listening can make that happen for you! We know this sounds like something from the future, but we are there! We can customize your campaign to listen for any keywords/targets relevant to your business. Here is how we do it:
Create Personas We create buyer personas by uploading past client data into the platform.
Identify Keywords We identify top performing keywords relative to the type of customer you are looking for.
Tracking We set up tracking via pixel placed on your site, so we can track your ROI in real time.
Listening Active Listening begins and is analyzed via AI to detect pertinent conversations via smartphones, smart tvs and other devices.
Analysis As qualified consumers are detected, a 360 analysis via AI on past behaviors of each potential customer occurs.
Create a List With the audience information gathered, an encrypted evergreen audience list is created.
Re-targeting We use the list to target your advertising via many different platforms and tactics including:
- Streaming TV/OTT
- Streaming Audio
- Display Ads
- Paid Social Media
- YouTube
- Mobile Precise
- Google/Bing Search (PPC)
Claim Your Exclusive Territory Before Your Competitor Our technology provides a process that makes it possible to know exactly when someone is in the market for your services in real-time, giving you a significant advantage over your competitors. Territories are available in 10 or 20 mile radiuses, but customizations can be made for regional, state and national coverage.
Here’s the best part! 🤥
We know what you are thinking… Is this legal? YES- it is totally legal for phones and devices to listen to you. That’s because consumers usually give consent when accepting terms and conditions of software updates or app downloads
Is it just me or does the world feel more and more everyday like a dystopian nightmare, a bad joke, satire? Ahhhh!
What’s your thoughts on this?
This is BS. It’s a 3rd rate marketing group trying to game SEO for lead gen.
Go ahead and contact them, claiming to be a prospective client with a few hundred (insert niche retail or service here) stores and that you’re interested in their product.
At best they’ll end up revealing they have a SDK or some crap to do the active listening in your own app if you have one.
If this were real, more than this company would be doing it, and you’d see actual case studies around it.
Also, it’s 1000% not legal in half the US states given two party consent wiretapping laws unless the users are agreeing to it in some way, which again brings us back to that at best this is some shoddy SDK (and unlikely even that).
Edit: Looking at it closer and given the way it isn’t linked at all from elsewhere and is a one off mention of the services, I’m actually wondering if this was an April Fool’s page that they just never took down. It’s pretty funny if that, especially given the ridiculousness of a lot of the buzz word heavy language in the bullet points. Like the idea that they are actively listening to the voice data and then having AI analyze the purchase history of the users to then cross attribute ROI using your “tracking pixel” is hilarious.
Even just one of those steps is such a pie in the sky claim even for most billion dollar agencies.
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Also, it’s 1000% not legal in half the US states given two party consent wiretapping laws unless the users are agreeing to it in some way, which again brings us back to that at best this is some shoddy SDK
You are talking about advertising business, you know? They do business as long and as far as it isn’t yet illegal.
At least tracking via ultrasonic is a thing. calculator/game just needs to have the respective library.
Btw, store chains use Wifi/Bt for tracking, just so you know.
Almost every OS nowadays has some form of microphone detection right? So if this was on, you would be aware of it? And to jump ahead, even google is incentivised to prevent this company listening in, as they are direct competitor.
I wonder if this company is just trying to fleece advertisers with a made up tech? The “Claim your exclusive territory before your competitor” feels like the high pressure tactics that other scams use?
I might go disable the microphone in my TV remote anyway :/
OSes have protections built in, yup, but that’s no guarantee. we like hardware switches because there’s physically no way that the mic/cam can be in use: software is always 1 bug or exploit away from not doing what it’s supposed to
Yup, for sure, but while a nation state can risk exploitting a zero day to turn on your microphone, an ad tech company certainly can’t. As soon as it get patched they’d be ruined.
Sadly a lot of hardware switches today are just software switches in disguise.
pinephone!
Except if the biggest advertiser has a set of background services with basically root access on your phone running…
Oh, absolutely. Google/apple/MS definitely could do this. But some no-name company? Not really.
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I’m so skeptical of companies, that I almost instinctively distrust any company which directly advertises to me. I would be doubly so if that ad came soon after discussing a need.
One of the reasons why I like my desktop PC so much is that both webcam and mic sit in a drawer and are only plugged in for when I actually need to use them.
Android at least has the setting in developer options to disable sensors, which includes gyroscope, camera, mic and gps, I believe.
But core system services still have permission to override this setting. Which makes sense, you don’t want your dialer app to break when calling emergency services.
But it does make me think, is Androids’ sandboxing of an app enough to prevent it from abusing this possibility?
I don’t understand where they’re getting their data from and what phones are doing this.
dont run stock android. solved.
My phone is not rootable :( I need a privilege escalation exploit for my Motorola moto z3 android 9 phone
That’s kind of funny, to be honest
I briefly used it a while back and it was nothing but pain. Constant notifications and popups everywhere
notifications and popups as in ‘unwanted ads’ or did you just get a lot of textmessages?
Lots of things prompting me to do things.
like ‘finish setting up your phone’? there should not be many of them and they usualy just pop up once. 😐
Why would I need to “finish setting up my device” I don’t want all the google bloatware. I get my apps off of F-droid.
yeah how do most people even tolerate it? I’d go insane.
Don’t really care. It’s not in the devices I use.
Ah yes, toxic individualism
👌
God forbid someone have a choice on privacy and what tech they use.
Ah yes, blaming other end users for “poor choices” instead of Evil Company obviously and openly doing evil things
Ahh yes, the nameless corporation with a nameless product that can’t be named creeping and spitting in the night.
This shit is just spooky bedtime stories for privacy zealots.
So is it willful ignorance on your part then? Or have you some explanation for not paying attention to the myriad avenues of data collection and exploitation for the last fifteen years?
To use a very old example which pales in comparison to things which are possible now, here’s a story from 2012 wherein Target’s marketing efforts outed a pregnant teenager to her family with targeted coupons. Luckily her family was supportive in this case, however it’s not hard to imagine real harm being done if the circumstances were different.
“[…] we found out that as long as a pregnant woman thinks she hasn’t been spied on, she’ll use the coupons. She just assumes that everyone else on her block got the same mailer for diapers and cribs. As long as we don’t spook her, it works.”
So to bring this to a slightly more relevant topic for 2023: are you really okay with mass surveillance being used to uncover and prosecute women who have been forced to travel out of states with abortion bans to seek lifesaving medical care? Just because you don’t have to worry about it personally?
This is just one of many, many examples of the abuse of data collection in the modern day. Before you try and discard this post as an alleged strawman (or some shit) I encourage you to actually open your eyes and look, because these entities are not nameless, many of them are household names. Your “spooky bedtime stories” argument is an absolute farce and I honestly would prefer you to be trolling than genuinely this ignorant.
Don’t feed the troll.
Eh. Gotta let them dig the hole long enough to eliminate all doubt, plus pushing back on their nonsense is potentially valuable to third party readers later. Thanks for looking out, though.
Holy shit, you pull in a massive edge case from 10+ years ago that has nothing to do with the topic at hand? Thank you for really driving home that you can’t name a consumer device that uses this tech.
Thanks for removing all doubt that you are just here to troll. I wish you luck finding a more productive way to spend your time IRL.
Do you think other people deserve this?
People are capable of making their own choice in privacy and tech. Nobody is forcing any of this in homes.
What if they don’t have time? What if they don’t want to read a 10 page EULA? It is their choice, but they most likely don’t know what they are accepting. You know what this means therefore you have the power to do something against this (if it is reasonable).
And yet, I’ve been able to do such a thing despite not having read a single tos. Not a lot of common technology uses this shit. It’s incredibly easy.
People are capable of making their own choice in privacy and tech.
Frankly, they often really fucking aren’t, which is why consumer protection laws are supposed to exist.
Nobody is forcing any of this in homes.
Note the weasel-words “in homes.” That’s because they are forcing it literally everywhere else.
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