Let’s start with an anecdotal story; I had a conversation with a friend of mine. We talked about how people behave on LinkedIn. He shared a story with me which made me remember a LinkedIn post I had seen several months ago. It was an inspirational post about a man, who as a kid was diagnosed with several learning disabilities. In short, after a long detour he managed to graduate as a master at a university in the Netherlands.
I never looked up the specific LinkedIn post or any other related story that day, but a few hours later I received a friend request from the author of that specific post. As you can imagine I was baffled.
I assume everyone has at least heard of a story like this, but how is this possible? Is it just coincidence?
Let’s take the new Amazon Echo. It has seven build in microphones and is designed to carefully listen to everything you say. But what is not specified in the product labels is how it protects your privacy. A spokeswomen of Amazon said: that the data the Amazon Echo generates within users homes will be stored in amazon’s databases. This way Amazon will be able to analyse your data and recognise patterns within your behaviour. As a result, Amazon will be able to start guessing what you like and what you need, which translates into more and more specific targeted advertisements.
Experts argue this is a trade of that has to be made by consumers. Do you want to have the convenience of using products like this. E.g. Siri, Bixby, Alexa and Echo. Or do you value your privacy more important?
I’m personally very cautious with technologies like this, especially considering that companies that offer these kind of products are relying on selling you their products.
I’m wondering on which kind of the spectrum my fellow students are. Do you care that they listen to you and get to know you better, to eventually sell you more products?
Sources:
https://www.cnet.com/news/our-devices-are-listening-to-us-all-the-time-but-do-we-care/
https://www.forbes.com/sites/josephsteinberg/2014/01/27/these-devices-may-be-spying-on-you-even-in-your-own-home/#5baf2458b859
https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/is-your-smartphone-listening-to-your-conversations/
Interesting read Nigel! I have been in situations too where specific ads appeared, related to conversations I had near my phone. Recently, I came acros the below mentioned arcticle stating that security specialists have conducted experiments regarding this phenomenon. The researchers put two phones, one Samsung and one Apple, in an audio room. Next, they played the sound of cat and dog food adverts for 30 minutes. They also put two similar phones in a silent room. The researchers kept apps such as Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Youtube and Amazon open on all phones with full permissions granted in the settings. They checked the phones for ads related to pet food and also checked for battery usage and data consumption during the test phase. They repeated the experiment for three days, but found that the activety seen on the phones in the audio room and the silent room were similar. So according to this research, it seems that the microphones in our mobiles are not listening in on our conversations. My guess is that we get these relatable ads because these companies collect a huge amount of data from us and use powerful algorithms to predicts the things we are interested in before we realize we are actually interested in them. There are a lot of articles on the internet about this but here is the one I read:
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-49585682
Interesting topic Nigel!
I’ve been personally interested in this topic for a long time and even conducted some non-professional experiments with friends on this.
I agree with Jochem in that companies collecting significant amounts of data already know more about us than what we can imagine, even without listening to our conversations…
Reliable studies similar to the one cited by Jochem, in fact, exist in bigger numbers and none of them was able to prove that companies collect and use data from microphones for ad targeting purposes – to my current knowledge.
I would also like to point out one additional reason that might explain why many of us seem to think what you describe in the post: Selection bias, borrowed from psychology. Selection bias is “the tendency to notice something more when something causes us to be more aware of it, such as when we buy a car, we tend to notice similar cars more often than we did before.” They are not suddenly more common – we just are noticing them more. The phenomenon is also called the Observational Selection Bias.
In our case, this simply means that you get ads of cars anyways, but you only notice them more frequently because you are aware that you had just had a conversation about cars with a friend.
Thanks to the input guys!
It looks like you are both aware of the possibilities these new technological advances could have on our lives. Glad that the data supports the hypothesis that our phones not listening to us. I also think the selection bias might play a bigger role than we think. Nevertheless, I’m personally still a bit hesitant towards the new Alexa/Echo devices that are made to listen to us.
If they record and store our data, would you guys rate the utility of such a device higher than the potential loss of privacy?
Hey Nigel, very interesting topic!!
You know I have experiences the same, many times! Last week, during a group project, I was talking about how slow my laptop was and I was joking about quitting school and going on vacation. 5 minutes later when I opened the internet browser I saw two advertisement next to each other. One of the advertisements was about a new laptop and the other was about a suitcase. I have had similar experiences in the past as well.
Just recently I watched this ted talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/marta_peirano_the_surveillance_device_you_carry_around_all_day
This woman talks about how our smartphones constantly sends signal where it tells where you are. She talks about how in this way your data can be used to map out your whole existance. What places you regurlarly visit, where you live, what routes you take, what your favorite restaurant is etc. etc.
She then makes a comparison with how Nazi’s could easily find all Jewish people in The Netherlands, as the Dutch government had good data registrations about all of their citizens. In this way, the Nazi’s had no difficulties finding their targets.
I thin that it is very dangerous that all of these data we publish can be easily used to map out our whole lives. If this one day ends up in the wrong hands, I can only image what kind of nasty things they would do with it!