Your Phone Isn’t Spying on You to Show You Ads (It’s Worse Than That)
lifehacker.com
Your iPhone is not eavesdropping on your conversations to sell you things. It’s actually much worse.

I changed the title from “Spying” to “Eavesdropping” because the article actually directly supports that it is “spying” on you, just not listening.

  • JayleneSlide@lemmy.worldEnglish
    21·
    2 days ago

    Anecdote: (a little background) I don’t typically deal with narcissistic people; I’m not troubled by narcissists in my life. My tech life is pretty well locked down, but it could always be better (working on it). And my YouTube suggestions are tightly, carefully curated to topics pertinent to my professional and personal projects.

    I had an utter piece of shit contractor working for me on a project; he was a grifting, conniving, manipulative shitbag. When I outright fired his ass, he first got all self-righteous then tried to play the victim, but I wasn’t playing any of his games. My phone was sitting on the workbench next to me.

    The next day, I opened YouTube because an engineer I know told me he dropped a new video on software we recently discussed. There among my suggestions were a bunch of videos on how to deal with narcissists. So somehow, in only talking with the contractor (he doesn’t use email, text, or other electronic communications), YouTube decided I was curious about dealing with narcissism. I’m morbidly curious how YouTube made that decision, and whether it was audio or “we know you’re associating with this guy who we identify as a problematic narcissist and here are some resources.”

    Now, I’m just some douchecanoe on the internet and you should probably dismiss me based on that alone. But GODDAMN, the data points sure do pile up quickly on how deeply we’re being surveilled.

    • Manticore@lemmy.nzEnglish
      4·
      1 day ago

      Phone proximity is used, so if your phone is in proximity to his, the algorythm can note a relationship between his interests and yours- or even the interests of people who also interact with him.

      It’s possible his behaviour is learned from a narcissistic parent, or that enough of his customers are involved in learning about narcissism. OR you also mightve been at a Cafe near a clinic for long enough your phone tried to ping the office wifi, and you just noticed it because of your interactions with him.

      Google also uses your relationships, so maybe a person you know is interested, or you watched a video about (blank) and a lot of those viewers also watched narcissism videos. Your brain is asking the connection to the contractor because it’s an intuitive logical leap.

      Phones spy on us in a dozen different ways, mostly pattern recognition. They track location without GPS (by recording wifi pings), and track interests without the microphone. So they can claim they’re not tracking those specific things while still gathering scary amounts of data.

    • poopkins@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      1 day ago

      Imagine all the times you’ve had a conversation with somebody where you didn’t identify a pattern match with your YouTube recommendations.

    • Marty_Man_X@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      2 days ago

      This can be as “simple” as your phones being in close proximity to each other for an extended period, and sharing device advertising IDs/other device data via WiFi, Bluetooth. Might be more to it, but it’s a likely factor.

      Devices do this regularly btw, smartphones also scrape for WiFi networks to better geolocate etc.