I think all these anecdotes about targeted ads after conversations are mistakes or coincidences, either you or someone using your same IP/account did search it at some point in those 24 hours and forgot or it’s just the fact that you see ads for things all the time and occasionally they will be things you discussed in the last day without searching.
There’s too much reputational and legal risk to warrant a tech company like Google or Apple listening to hundreds of millions of people continuously without consent when they can harvest tonnes of relevant data legally and with your willing participation.
But if you happen to regularly use a voice assistant and clicked through a terms of use page or privacy policy, you probably deserve being listened to for marketing purposes =)
If you’re willing to believe that they are listening 24/7, then it’s just as easy for Microsoft to have installed a keylogger in your OS and have literally everything there too.
We are all at the mercy of big tech, you don’t need conspiracy theories for it to be terrifying.
There is continuous on-device listening for the assistant prompt. It doesn’t record. When you say ‘Hey Google’, what you say after that is recorded and sent to Google servers. Google says that this information is private and not shared.
However, when your voice assistant prompt results in ‘web or app activity’ that information might be shared, using the pre-existing privacy controls, and your consent, that your web or app already uses. For example, you may have already allowed Chrome (by default) to share your web activity with Google so that you get personalized recommendations.
There’s a big difference between 1) saying “hey Google, where can I buy a vacuum cleaner” and getting a vacuum ad served to you later that day, and 2) telling your wife in private that you think your daughter is depressed, and Google sending that information to Amazon. The latter doesn’t really happen.
That said, the status of cookies and cross-domain information sharing, is all hard to keep up with. Google is sensitive to not give Apple too much of a selling point when it comes to Chrome vs Safari or Pixel vs iPhone. Also Apple vs Google is sort of a false comparison anyway as they’re different business models.
I think we have web developers here that know a lot more than me? Good topic and I agree with the header.
