• Puppy@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    Anyone wants to take one for the team and spoil the article? I don’t click on clickbait article. I’m curious but fuck this practice.

    • EnglishMobster@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      Your phone doesn’t listen to you, but it builds a fingerprint and uses that fingerprint to serve ads.

      It also serves ads for things based on who you’ve been around recently. The example given was the guy’s wife asked for a power drill for her birthday, and then the guy started seeing power drill ads.

      This wasn’t because of the conversation, but because his wife had looked up power drills and opened herself up to ads about them. Because the husband had been around the wife, the ad algorithms thought he might be into the same sort of things she is, and so they started serving him ads based on what they think his wife would like.

      The article takes issue with this and considers it an invasion of privacy. It’s the same sort of story we’ve seen dozens of times before; John Oliver did it better.

      • Puppy@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        You are my favorite kind of person. May you always find the best parking spot right in front of your destination and may your pets always choose to cuddle with you, even when there’s a cozier spot nearby.

    • EnderWi99in@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      They aren’t listening to you speaking because they don’t have to do that. They already know about everything you and your friends do because of all the other shit they track about you and them collectively. The article is fine. Not really new information for most people here or that would probably be reading Lifehacker though, which makes me think they might not buy enough user data…

    • Freeman@lemmy.pub
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      1 year ago

      It has a microphone right there, so why wouldn’t it be sending our voices to Google headquarters or wherever so they can send me an ad? What other explanation is there?

      She made a search on wifi for a cordless dremel. Ad companies saw “this IP is searching for cordless dremels we should give ads there”

      Author joins same wifi network and goes to a page served by said ad company (or company in general like amazon). Gets ad for dremel.

    • kroy@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Who actually sees ads? Between NextDNS or PiHole and ublock origin, I haven’t seen an ad in years.

      • kill_dash_nine@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        People who are not tech savvy and let’s face it, that’s most people. Ask random people on the street if they know what DNS is and you’ll have a lot of people not having a clue. Maybe more will know about ad blockers but my parents, for example, would have no idea if it weren’t for me installing an ad blocker on their systems.

        • kroy@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Sure. But you can install a plug-in if you aren’t tech savvy. You can also run something with ad blocking turned on by default.

          Ad-blocking on the browser level is enough for most people to never see an ad again.

    • JackGreenEarth@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      I’m not sure if you’re trying to make a joke, but the article wasn’t advertising any products. It mentioned 5 VPNs, but it didn’t seem sponsored.

      • linearchaos@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        It was absolutely selling people that don’t know better that they need 24x7 VPN.

        Each of those links bounce through pcmag with referrers, I strongly suspect they get kickbacks from all 5 providers listed.

        They pretend that VPN is going to magically protect you from google and apple tracking your surfing habbits and purchases when your IP isn’t even the most identifiable thing you’re using.

    • HousePanther@lemmy.goblackcat.com
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      1 year ago

      Additionally, you may unknowingly be at the wrong place and at the wrong time or in close proximity to the location of a crime. This could falsely implicate you if authorities wanted blanket cell phone data for a given area.

  • Lemmylaugh@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    Any ad marketing people here can say how they themselves feel when targeted by ads. Do you feel like Ah man that’s a good ad, good job whoever made that or do you feel like the rest of us and can’t stand em all .

  • Lobo6780@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    Yeah they are collecting on Android too but if you have Google Play Services, I like Google apps like Youtube, Gmail, Photos but I like to also minimize data collection using microG and I’m recommending this to anyone having custom vanilla ROM without Play Services.

  • Risus_Nex@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I’m actually trying to be very careful with my data, to the point where I get sidelooks from some people who don’t care at all. Yet I try to still be able to use the services I want to. Like Google Maps. I know that I am selling my data to them. But the service helps me so much in my everyday life that I am willing to pay this price. But also I use AdBlock on all of my devices. So I really don’t care too much about advertising. I’m more concerned about other consequences like, individual pricing, or change of government to a dictatorship which would prosecute me for my beliefs I posted online, or Netflix not fuing finishing the series because they already calculated that they wouldn’t make as much fuing money as they would like to.

  • Z4rK@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    So is MementoMori half bot, half human? I’ve blocked bots because they post so many articles of poor quality, but then you have people like this who also posts a lot of low quality posts without any opening comment, but is not marked as a bot and occasionally write some comments.

  • Mr PoopyButthole@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    This is not only an ad written by a hack, it contributes to widespread gaslighting on what our phones do.

    It’s well documented that our phones are always listening and sending keywords to advertisers.

    Battery life is the single biggest indicator of how invasive our phone are.

    If you’re old enough to remember flip phones, you know they’d last easily days, to a week, or even longer between charges.

    Even as Blackberrys came about with GPS navigation, WiFi, Bluetooth, etc, the battery life stayed about the same. Over time we’ve expanded the ability of those features, but we’ve also made them all significantly more power-efficient.

    Some argue all the “always-on” features for optimizing signal and spontaneous device pairing is responsible, but these can all be turned off.

    Even with all the Android Dev settings optimized for minimum background activity and all apps restricted, an S22 Ultra with 5000 mah battery will burn through most of its capacity in your pocket in a day.

    Worth mentioning how tiny flip-phone batteries were too. A 500-900mah battery would take a flip-phone through a week where a modern smartphone with a 5000mah battery barely lasts a day.

    • Bazoogle@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      It is not well documented that our phones are sending keywords to advertisers from audio. Are phones always listening? Yes. How else would they be activated. And anything you tell it after activating it is going to be stored. But outside that, there is no reason for phones to save what you say. Most of that audio is entirely useless to them. If you have the documentation of them sending audio recordings to advertisers, I’d love to see it.

      • salient_one@lemmy.villa-straylight.social
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        1 year ago

        <conspiracy-mode> Unless they collect voices to then use them for NPCs in their private VR worlds where they will live when they finally destroy the planet! </conspiracy-mode>

    • irkli@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Got facts and sources to back these assertions up? Yeah what they do sucks – but facts are required.

    • Darkncoldbard@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Is that why my phone isn’t always dying now that I’m not on reddit? It used to get mad hot after about 15 minutes. Now being on lemmy my phone is actually pretty cool to the touch…