this post was submitted on 28 Apr 2025
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301
Your Phone Isn’t Eavesdropping on You to Show You Ads (It’s Worse Than That) (lifehacker.com)
submitted 2 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
63 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

I changed the title from "Spying" to "Eavesdropping" because the article actually directly supports that it is "spying" on you, just not listening.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 day ago

Same. My partner and I have heard so much about this that we have over several months randomly brought up topics that are absurd and foreign to us.

We do it like this: while preparing dinner or so, one of us scribbles a word on a post-it note and we engage on it as though we're making plans or looking to buy something. We have phones, Google Home speakers and Nest devices nearby.

There are a few challenges:

  1. Make sure the topic didn't come up from an internet interaction you already had.
  2. Don't, under any circumstances, search the internet about any of those topics.
  3. Simply remember that you're running this experiment. We keep track of topics we've raised through handwritten notes.

I feel that ordinary people are terrible at running these experiments because it's honestly really difficult to be impartial and evaluate the results with statistical significance. As soon as you encounter one match, the pattern matching part of your brain will scream "told you so!" even if the success rate is 1%.

And guess what? Literally none of the topics appear as targeted ads for either of us.