this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2024
156 points (99.4% liked)

technology

23308 readers
292 users here now

On the road to fully automated luxury gay space communism.

Spreading Linux propaganda since 2020

Rules:

founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Camdat@hexbear.net 50 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (25 children)

This is maybe my biggest pet peeve. These companies are not listening to you in any meaningful way.

You can trivially confirm this by hooking up your home network to Wireshark and filtering packets.

Other reasons:

  1. They can get all of this information elsewhere: searches, ad pixels, location capturing etc.
  2. Processing audio data is basically impossible on-device in a useful way, and the network infrastructure to support mass transcriptions on the cloud would be on the order of billions.
  3. It would be a massive endeavor to cover up the millions of hours of audio data that would need to be analyzed by the lowest paid and most unhappy workers in the industry (content labelers and moderators)

Now I'm sure this is some marketers wet dream, but the logistical and PR nightmare this would create dissuades all but the dumbest ad agencies. This is mostly just terrible tech journalism.

[–] RyanGosling@hexbear.net 22 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Not to mention cross site trackers owned by Google and Facebook.

[–] Camdat@hexbear.net 23 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

I think people greatly underestimate (or misunderstand) the pervasiveness of ad tracking pixels.

Basically any website that has ads or tries to sell you something has a tracking pixel. These pixels create profiles of devices and track almost everything you do while interacting with those sites.

These pixels don't require any actual "information" about you, they're only interested in what you (via the device you're browsing on) will buy. They also don't use cookies anymore, it's usually a combination of user agent, IP address, and coarse location. As you said, companies will generally share these profiles.

load more comments (23 replies)