To be freaked out a little by Amazon?

[GinNeeded]

I'd heard that smart phones listened in to conversations to target advertising but dismissed it as tinfoil hat territory. People must have googled stuff, browsed etc

I popped on Amazon last night and random stuff I had chatted to the kids about in the day was in the 'recommended for you' section.

Including but not limited to:
*Old fashioned fly sticky strip, liked I'd hung in the kitchen (whats that?
isn't that cruel mummy?)

*Bug zapper ( can we get an electronic fly trap, like a tennis bat)

*Chlorine filter (could we put our pet fish in the swimming pool on holiday?)

*Muffin cases (What can I use to make a rosette?)

*Plastic Sapphires (What are those blue jewels on the real plastic gold pirate treasure?)

None of the above was searched for at all.

I understand targeted adverts, I realise that when I actively go online I am leaving a foot print, but chatting crap with the kids?

Now I am concerned about what else it hears and where that information goes!

We don't have an Echo or voice activated thing-a-me bobs either.

AIBU to not have realised this?

Let's not forget the Samsung furore from not so long ago Samsung.

Snippet from current official Samsung privacy policy:

Voice information

such as recordings of your voice that we make (and store on our servers) when you enable this function and use voice commands to control a Service, or when you contact our Customer Services team. (Note that if we work with a third party service provider that provides speech-to-text conversion services on our behalf, this provider may receive and store certain voice commands in accordance with the contract concluded between us and our trusted third party service provider.)

So no, of course none of our devices are listening to us 🙄

when I googled 'do you' the first hit was 'do you flush your contact lenses' which is a bit freaky as earlier this evening my husband said he read an article the other day saying you shouldn't flush contact lenses down the loo.

This is not surprising at all- it’s been on the news lately so (just like your husband) plenty of people will have been thinking about it and googling it, therefore making it a popular search.

Snippet from current official Samsung privacy policy refers to voice activated commands and telephone calls to customer services. I don’t get what the problem is supposed to be? What is this meant to be evidence of?

Friend wants to study child psychology, DS wants to study forensic science. I now have regular FB adverts for these courses.

Very possible DS has searched on a shared device or one of you is logged in to something (fb, google) that the other uses. However I’ll be honest- those ads must be really common, I get them too (always for applied courses like that, which come up a lot in clearing) at this time of year- I’m really not the right demographic but they must be targeting them at a huge number of people. I’m a teacher but wouldn’t surprise me that they’d target at the likely parent demographic too.

The continued refusal of people on this thread to accept perfectly reasonable explanations and instead cling to bizarre and convoluted conspiracy theories is an object lesson in the limitations of human rationality.

It reminds me a lot of the 'Angel of Mons' story that came out during WW1.

For those unfamiliar with it, after the surprising survival of the British Army at the Battle of Mons in the face of overwhelming German forces, an author wrote an openly fictional piece for a London publication that postulated that the British were 'saved' by a company of angels in the guise of english longbowmen from Agincourt.

The story was picked up and re-circulated as 'fact' by those with a religious bent who wanted to believe it until eventually the fictional nature of it became completely lost.

The author of the piece said that the most striking part of the whole thing for him was that years later, people would tell him the story as a factual account. He would then explain that he was the original author and that he made the whole thing up. This didn't affect their belief in the story one bit, and in actual fact often made them more convinced that the story 'must' be true, because it was being denied

I think it tells you something very interesting, but also very depressing about human nature.

I think it tells you something very interesting, but also very depressing about human nature.

There are a lot more very depressing things about human nature other than a disagreement over technology.

The continued refusal of people on this thread to accept perfectly reasonable explanations and instead cling to bizarre and convoluted conspiracy theories is an object lesson in the limitations of human rationality.

The only thing that could be worse is if they could vote ....

Come on PP, regardless of who is right in this debate comparing people's behaviour in 2018 with behaviour of 100 years ago illustrates nothing at all.

The continued refusal of people on this thread to accept perfectly reasonable explanations and instead cling to bizarre and convoluted conspiracy theories is an object lesson in the limitations of human rationality.

I still don't understand your own rather convoluted postings.

It is a fact that if you allow FB access to your phone by accepting their conditions, FB will access your phone. How is that bizarre?

GladAllOver

{sigh} for the third or fourth time in this thread alone...

1. Because FB and all the other apps and services DO access your data, I have never said otherwise, but they specifically don't conduct secret mass audio surveillance on the entire world population, they don't need to, they get more than enough info from us legitimately.

1. Your terms and conditions only give them permission to access your microphones in certain specific scenarios which are all controlled by the user and are listed.

1. Even if they were doing it and lying about it, it is trivially easy to see exactly what data your devices are sending onto the network. A GCSE Computer Science student can do it.

1. Like many people with even a passing interest in computers, I routinely monitor my home network using packet analyzing software (mainly to see if the neighbours are using it) and funnily enough have never once observed mass audio data from my phone/Google Home/tablet being streamed back to 'Big Brother'

1. For anyone who thinks they have spoken about a product and then it has 'appeared' in their targeted adverts, I have listed ad nauseum the reasons for this to happen further down this thread, but I'll simply repeat (again) the most compelling one...

Think about all the hundreds of products and services you talk about around your devices every day of the week, and then think about how many of them are not appearing on your phone.

Because FB and all the other apps and services DO access your data, I have never said otherwise, but they specificallydon'tconduct secret mass audio surveillance on the entire world population, they don't need to, they get more than enough info from us legitimately.

I don't recall reading any such suggestion in this thread. The only person making such wild exaggerations seems to be yourself, just so that you can deny them :)

We have Alexa in our house, she turns herself on and creepily laughs at odd hours in the night sometimes, I googled it and it seems to be a re occurring thing! majorly creepy.

There was a couple who decided to do an experiment on this by talking about cat food for a few days in ear shot of their Alexa and mobile phones, none of them had ever had a cat before and didn't speak of them during general day to day conversation before - sure enough they started seeing relentless adds for cat food pop up on FB and amazon

Horrordouevres - my DC did exactly the same.

Well my kids have started asking Alexa to perform all sorts of interesting functions. Their favourite seems to be “Alexa play Desposito” even though they both hate the song. If only we actually HAD an Alexa she would be very busy.

Waiting to see if anything Justin Bieber related will pop up on my Amazon now!

Can anyone explain this one? The other day we were in a small garden centre. I looked at a glass vase where the glass was poured over a lump of wood. Very unusual and I said as much to dh. Tonight... facebook gives me this. There's no earthly way it's a coincidence. I didn't search for them or anything

Ooh I thought this was tinfoil hat stuff, but I should add many suggestions have been odd perhaps.

Can anyone explain this one? The other day we were in a small garden centre. I looked at a glass vase where the glass was poured over a lump of wood. Very unusual and I said as much to dh. Tonight... facebook gives me this. There's no earthly way it's a coincidence. I didn't search for them or anything

Did you have the Facebook app running on your phone when you discussed it?
That's your answer.

Yes I believe it's listening and targeting but had been mocked by posters on here before who told me I was paranoid and it's all a coincidence

Of course it's listening. You have given it permission to access everything on your phone.

I was chatting to a friend about the side effects of Metaformin in the pub. Picked my phone up to google and wrote side and it Pre filled the rest of the search”side ..... effects of metaformin”. I’d never googled metaformin before.

I was with my DD and a couple of her friends yesterday and a local, small, independent fast food place came up in conversation. None of us have ever been there or shown any real interest in it. Within a couple of hours an advert popped up on one of the friends' phones. Freaky!

Same answer as above.

GladAllOver

Of course it's listening. You have given it permission to access everything on your phone

Why are you persisting in giving people false information? You know full well (and have had it explained to you several times) that you have NOT given any company permission to activate the microphone on your phone any time they want to, without you knowing, in order to conduct audio surveillance for the purpose of targeted advertising.

The fact you keep saying this, in the face of all the perfectly reasonable evidence to the contrary, is starting to make you look like a flat-earther or a 9/11 conspiracy theorist.

Its not a good look.

Patriarchy, I'm not going to engage with your nonsense.
People can observe for themselves what is happening.

Can anyone explain this one? The other day we were in a small garden centre. I looked at a glass vase where the glass was poured over a lump of wood. Very unusual and I said as much to dh. Tonight... facebook gives me this. There's no earthly way it's a coincidence. I didn't search for them or anything

Yes. You’re the kind of person that finds this type of product interesting. You’ve said that yourself as you talked about it. You get served stuff you like.

Rest assured your phone did not pick up a random conversation aboht a piece of glass and wood sculpture and then match that to an Etsy targeting strategy to serve an ad.......