this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2024
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These companies absolutely do use your microphone to listen.
My wife and I have tested this and you can too.
Have a conversation near your phones about purchasing something offbeat. We used a kitchen garbage disposal in our test. Talk about them for a few minutes, about needing to buy one, different brands, etc.
Almost immediately you'll be served garbage disposal adds.
This has been common knowledge for several years now.
And there have been push back against the idea by naive, trusting people who think the toggles for that do anything. The fact that there's leak conversations now of advertisers admitting they do it will sink any counter argument against it.
Also, if advertisers are doing it, you can bet that the government can too.
I used to work in adtech and the most we could do was track locations. Even that didn't work properly for our purposes because most shops are in malls where several different stores co-exist on the same coordinates. It only worked for outlets in retail parks which were separated from one another.