That would be because they're selling the data.
That would be because they're selling the data.
I switched my phone's search engine to DuckDuckGo, and that seems to have cut down on some of the more intrusive-seeming ads. Some of the oddly targeted ads can be pretty funny, though. This one had been following me around for months. What page did I click on to make the advertising companies think I need a free ebook on how to protect my spaceship from radiation?
To be fair, that actually does sound like I might find it useful even if I don't have any spaceships. And I have a few guesses about what pages might have triggered the ad even if it is a bit off target.
This one, though, I still can't explain.
My leading theory is that GLaDoS briefly took over Facebook and was trying to goad my wife into murdering me.
Facebook insists they're not listening, and so far all the black-box analysis of their apps backs that up...mind you that doesn't mean it's impossible that they ARE listening. It's a closed-source app, if they were doing speech-to-text in the background and exfiltrating any interesting bits in text form via encrypted connections back to their site, that would be damn near impossible to catch, you'd have to analyze the memory of the program as it's running (and hope that they didn't use any obfuscation techniques), and AFAIK nobody's done that yet.
A possible explanation for all the freaky anecdotes: Nobody mentions every time they see some random ad that has no relevance to them, but they DO talk about that time the random thing was similar to a random thing they were talking about IRL.
Also, this reminds me of something interesting found in the TOS for an Xbox-related thing, which effectively can advertise to you based on what you're talking about near it, but doesn't technically send anything you said outside. For example it might hear you talking about pizza and then the machine, based on that, might show you an ad about pizza. It won't send any audio or details about your pizza conversation anywhere, but fetching an ad for pizza at least suggests to outside observers that you were talking about pizza.
That said, I don't use any voice assistants other than some self-hosted open-source ones I've been testing out.
Also, a possible cause for Adrian's phone sending this woman's contact to everyone: Was there any active voice assistant on the phone that might've been accidentally activated, and in listening to this conversation, misinterpreted the conversation involving this woman's name as a series of voice commands to send her contact to all Facebook friends?
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