from Hacker News

Ask HN: Is Google recording our conversations to serve us with relevant ads?

by sarim on 10/18/18, 5:36 PM with 44 comments

• by phillipseamore on 10/18/18, 6:27 PM

  The simplest way to prove it is to show that kind of information flowing from a device to Google (or any other party). No one has ever done that. You wouldn't expect a full audio stream being sent, rather the device would look for triggers, but they would still need to be communicated in someway over the network.

  Google (or any other company) have also never promoted such an ability to advertisers. If it would be a very closely guarded secret you would think that high budget advertisers would be the likeliest to have access to such targeting. However in "tests", like the 'dog toys' video that mikejb mentions and many more, the advertisers are usually no-name companies with cheap products. Most of these proclaimed tests also seem to be YouTube videos trying to get revenue from views. Furthermore, if devices would be looking for trigger words (like mentioned in the first paragraph), it would be even more likely that you would only see this happening for high volume/big budget advertisers.

• by aosaigh on 10/18/18, 9:26 PM

  Everyone is worried that Google and/or Facebook are listening to us. Nobody seems to realise that it's actually worse if they _aren't_ listening to us, as it proves that their targeting is so good that they make you think otherwise.

• by jimrandomh on 10/18/18, 10:15 PM

  Secretly recording audio is illegal in many (but not all) jurisdictions, including California. However, just because Google isn't recording you to target ads doesn't mean no one is.

  A fair number of people are claiming they've been targeted with ads seemingly based on information that could only have been obtained through audio recording. But so far no one technically sophisticated has, and so these claims never seem to involve narrowing it down to a specific device, or checking the devices for malware or suspicious apps.

• by lillesvin on 10/18/18, 6:31 PM

  Anecdote time... So, I was sitting in a car with a colleague who was talking about how he used to live in the UK (we're both Danish but were speaking English because we had a non-Danish colleague in the car with us). My colleague talked about how he'd developed a fondness for cricket while living in the UK, to which I replied that I only really knew cricket from Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy and that it was one of those sports that I'd always been sort of curious about since it gets so little exposure here in Denmark. We agreed that we should maybe watch a game together so he could explain it to me and the conversation naturally changed topic shortly after. But a couple of days later Google Now showed me a notification saying that cricket results were available asking if I wanted to subscribe.

  There's of course always a chance that I've done something that—unbeknownst to me—has led Google to believe I was interested in cricket, but I definitely didn't google "cricket", watch videos about it, mentioned it in emails or some such.

• by dragonwriter on 10/19/18, 2:00 AM

  >I believe we have all been served with ads for products and services that we haven’t even searched for.

  Sure, including ones I've never discussed; simple (not even requiring ML) statistical prediction of likely interest based on interests of people with similarities in search history or other things that Google overtly has in its tracking of profiles could well explain that; with ML applied well, that gets even better.

  Covertly recording conversations for ads seems to be an unnecessary assumption to explain any effect I've seen or heard decribed, so while it's not impossible, I don't see any reason besides paranoia to believe it is true.

• by mikejb on 10/18/18, 6:08 PM

  I'm sceptical, but it's hard to prove or disprove. So many other factors that go into making ad decisions (what did people who are somehow similar to you show interest in? Your friends? What's currently trending in certain areas of the internet, etc.)

  I've only seen one attempt (shown in a video online, the topic was 'dog toys'), where recorded conversations were claimed to influence ads. Lots of people indicated foul play in the video, so I didn't book it in my "that's happening"-bucket.

  I've only tried to reproduce it once, half-hearted, and failed.

• by Alir3z4 on 10/18/18, 7:34 PM

  Here's a live test that may help you to believe https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBnDWSvaQ1I and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmM9ch_oXA4

  In first video, a guy talks about dog toys and then he'll see ads related to what he talked about.

  Worth noting, he doesn't have dogs or searched about it. The ads are even specific to the toy colors he talked about.

• by uptown on 10/19/18, 3:45 PM

  There's a few data-grabbing questions I've always wondering with Google and Facebook and others.

  Does the Facebook app, if granted permission to access photos, upload thumbnails or metadata generated on-device that's descriptive-enough to characterize photos located on devices even if they're not chosen by the user to be uploaded to their service.

  Does Facebook and/or Google send your current clipboard contents to their server? Google Maps seems to do-so since it has the address pre-filled when you launch the app if you've copied it from elsewhere.

  Anybody able to officially answer or speculate on either of these? I've always resorted to assuming they do because they can.

• by neekp on 10/19/18, 11:16 AM

  1. We've discussed this question with сolleagues, and one of them discussed with his wife bout with the gloves for his son, and on the next day he a received ads with bout with the gloves. Аnd it was not like that once. I do not claim that it was google, may be other ads company, but it is a fact.

  2.Once a work colleague said me "Hey, listen my phone (nexus 5x)". From conversational speaker we heard as other people said! nexus 5x was on standby state! According to the conversation, I think that people did not talk on the phone, but offline.

  sorry for my english ).

• by sarim on 10/19/18, 12:33 AM

  Well maybe continuous subconscious exposure to an ad is causing me to discuss a product with my friends and I am acknowledging the presence of the ad only after having talked about it.

• by prepend on 10/18/18, 9:36 PM

  I wish. I don’t get relevant ads from Google.

  Even when searching for specific items “tacos” the ad will be stupid. I can’t recall the last time I used a Google ad productively.

• by earenndil on 10/19/18, 1:54 AM

  It remains unclear. There are reasons to believe they are (it'd really improve their ad targetting, and there are some anecdata to suggest they are), reasons to believe they aren't (they must have some ethics, and if they got caught, the result would be Bad), and reasons to believe they can't (constant audio recording would cause a suspicious drain on battery).

• by RaceWon on 10/18/18, 8:46 PM

  Forget ads, are they selling it to Alphabet Agencies?

• by kasey_junk on 10/19/18, 12:32 AM

  Try to buy an ad served against this data. How do you do it? If you can’t you can reasonably assume it’s not tracked.

• by OliverLassen on 10/18/18, 6:21 PM

  Don't think companies are willing to test if they can go that far. But many small apps are for sure