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.
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.
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.