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Amazon workers are listening to what you tell Alexa

Parliament

By Parliament
in Daily Texan

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BrickHorn

BrickHorn 18237

Posted
Posted
19 minutes ago, BurntEyes said:

Why is this coconsidered news? Do people exist that thought this was not happening?

Yes.  I have family that thought it was crazy when I said I didn’t want an Alexa because it was spying.  That was a couple years ago.  It’s since come out that Amazon, Facebook, and other companies are listening.  Which should have been obvious to anyone who pays attention to those companies’s business models.

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Deej

Deej 76797

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Posted

They are all listening. I was at a friends house looking after their dogs. Watched a couple of movies on their Netflix account. Got home, went to Netflix, and got the "because you watched..." for the movies I watched there. I assume it was pinging back to the app on my phone, but WTF?

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wild_turkey

wild_turkey 3159

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Posted

Don’t have an Alexa or Google Home for exactly this reason.

I also randomly google things that I have no interest in, just to add some chatter to whatever file Google has on me. Now that I think about it, I’m overdue to shop for hockey equipment and baby clothes on Amazon. Might need to do a little browsing before bed.

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Grippe

Grippe 310

Posted
Posted
7 hours ago, wild_turkey said:

Don’t have an Alexa or Google Home for exactly this reason.

I also randomly google things that I have no interest in, just to add some chatter to whatever file Google has on me. Now that I think about it, I’m overdue to shop for hockey equipment and baby clothes on Amazon. Might need to do a little browsing before bed.

They're listening thru any smart device - do you already own a phone, tablet or smart TV?

My wife and I finally said fugget and got Alexa because they already have our info - there's simply no way to avoid them unless you go full hermit.

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NorthLoop

NorthLoop 14208

Posted
Posted
29 minutes ago, Grippe said:

They're listening thru any smart device - do you already own a phone, tablet or smart TV?

My wife and I finally said fugget and got Alexa because they already have our info - there's simply no way to avoid them unless you go full hermit.

Yeah at this point I don't care if people are recording my wife and I argue about who should put the ketchup back in the fridge. 

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Nice Guy Eddie

Nice Guy Eddie 13512

Posted
Posted
10 hours ago, Kyle said:

A month ago I was listening to the Ticket. They did a segment on VR and the NBA. I've barely thought about VR in my life much less shopped for it. Next time I got on FB, I had VR ads.

I know it’s amazing.  I was shopping online for a specific car.  Next thing I knew I saw everyone driving it around town. Spooky.

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Kyle

Kyle 207

Posted
Posted
9 minutes ago, Nice Guy Eddie said:

I know it’s amazing.  I was shopping online for a specific car.  Next thing I knew I saw everyone driving it around town. Spooky.

You know you can hack the porn filters your parents installed on your computer so you can surf for dick pics, right?

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RollLeft

RollLeft 5045

Posted
Posted (edited)
10 hours ago, NorthLoop said:

Wife showed me a pic of some chick on her fb feed from her phone. I said "that bitch has some yellow ass teeth." 

 

10 seconds later I'm scrolling on my phone and a teeth whitening ad pops up. 

 

Burn it down. 

AI needs still needs work.  Would have expected asian bitches as an option for purchase.

Edited by RollLeft
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utee94

utee94 15824

Posted
Posted
12 hours ago, BurntEyes said:

Unless you are really unplugged, the machine knows more about you than you know about yourself.

Everything  is being collected and meta data AI is getting better and better.

At some point there will be buttons

A) Order food

B) Take a vacation

C) Buy a car

D) Get laid

They won't need to ask any additional questions.

I dream of this day.

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bolverk

bolverk 29683

Posted
Posted
13 hours ago, Kyle said:

A month ago I was listening to the Ticket. They did a segment on VR and the NBA. I've barely thought about VR in my life much less shopped for it. Next time I got on FB, I had VR ads.

 

12 hours ago, NorthLoop said:

Wife showed me a pic of some chick on her fb feed from her phone. I said "that bitch has some yellow ass teeth." 

 

10 seconds later I'm scrolling on my phone and a teeth whitening ad pops up. 

 

Burn it down. 

I totally believe it. I noticed this very same phenomenon, specifically with Facebook ads. A coworker and I will talk about something and then I'll see ads for it. One example is cereal. I mentioned a specific brand in passing during a conversation. Then, for the next week, I started seeing Cap'n Crunch ads in my feed.

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wild_turkey

wild_turkey 3159

Posted
Posted
They're listening thru any smart device - do you already own a phone, tablet or smart TV?


Call me naive, but I don’t think my iPhone or iPad are inherently set to mine my audio data through the device microphone. I know Apple and Google both log my location data and web browsing, but that feels slightly less intrusive to me than having unlimited access to every conversation I have.

I also think it’s entirely possible that certain apps collect audio, but I don’t use Facebook and I don’t leave the Amazon app open when I’m not actively using that. Maybe other apps are doing it and I just don’t realize it.

Regardless of all of that, it’s one thing for tech companies to secretly mine data. It’s quite another thing for me to pay them for a high quality microphone that I put in a prime spot in my house for them to listen continuously. I can check the weather and sports scores on my own without going down that path.
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Trey3216

Trey3216 15346

Posted
Posted
21 minutes ago, wild_turkey said:

 


Call me naive, but I don’t think my iPhone or iPad are inherently set to mine my audio data through the device microphone. I know Apple and Google both log my location data and web browsing, but that feels slightly less intrusive to me than having unlimited access to every conversation I have.

I also think it’s entirely possible that certain apps collect audio, but I don’t use Facebook and I don’t leave the Amazon app open when I’m not actively using that. Maybe other apps are doing it and I just don’t realize it.

Regardless of all of that, it’s one thing for tech companies to secretly mine data. It’s quite another thing for me to pay them for a high quality microphone that I put in a prime spot in my house for them to listen continuously. I can check the weather and sports scores on my own without going down that path.

 

You’re naive 

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Pescado_Rojo

Pescado_Rojo 19416

Posted
Posted
22 minutes ago, bolverk said:

 

I totally believe it. I noticed this very same phenomenon, specifically with Facebook ads. A coworker and I will talk about something and then I'll see ads for it. One example is cereal. I mentioned a specific brand in passing during a conversation. Then, for the next week, I started seeing Cap'n Crunch ads in my feed.

Same here. Driving to the airport one day, I was talking to my wife and hit a big bump on the toll road and almost launched my truck. I mentioned as we were talking that I really needed new shocks on the truck, and the next time I opened facebook the first ad I saw was for shocks for F150s. So not only did I get a shock ad, but I got a shock ad FOR MY SPECIFIC VEHICLE. 

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utee94

utee94 15824

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25 minutes ago, Pescado_Rojo said:

Same here. Driving to the airport one day, I was talking to my wife and hit a big bump on the toll road and almost launched my truck. I mentioned as we were talking that I really needed new shocks on the truck, and the next time I opened facebook the first ad I saw was for shocks for F150s. So not only did I get a shock ad, but I got a shock ad FOR MY SPECIFIC VEHICLE. 

Perfect.  You had a need, and were given an opportunity to satisfy that need.

Why's everyone complaining about this?

It'll be even better when we all have microchips implanted in our heads and all we have to do is think about a pizza, and it's delivered to our home by drone within 3 minutes.

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Brisketexan

Brisketexan 105147

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Posted
1 minute ago, utee94 said:

Perfect.  You had a need, and were given an opportunity to satisfy that need.

Why's everyone complaining about this?

It'll be even better when we all have microchips implanted in our heads and all we have to do is think about a pizza, and it's delivered to our home by drone within 3 minutes.

What's going to be awkward is when the 3 midgets (one of them with a prosthetic leg) show up at your house saying "we're ready for the gangbang."  Be careful what you think about, dude.

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Reagan1k

Reagan1k 3024

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24 minutes ago, Pescado_Rojo said:

Same here. Driving to the airport one day, I was talking to my wife and hit a big bump on the toll road and almost launched my truck. I mentioned as we were talking that I really needed new shocks on the truck, and the next time I opened facebook the first ad I saw was for shocks for F150s. So not only did I get a shock ad, but I got a shock ad FOR MY SPECIFIC VEHICLE. 

Oh yeah - Its real and not unexpected.

Last weekend my wife and  I were talking about the pros and cons of a very specific investment in a real estate venture.  The next morning when she opened Facebook, the 1st ad she saw was about the exact thing we were discussing.  She has zero search history anywhere for anything investment related - that's my department... and she had never heard of what we were talking about before I brought it up.  She was playing around on facebook while we were talking though.

Years from now we'll all laugh at how naive people were during this period of social media and AI convergence.

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wild_turkey

wild_turkey 3159

Posted
Posted (edited)
1 hour ago, Trey3216 said:

You’re naive 

Most of the stories I hear about this, including many in this thread, involve Facebook ads. I don't use Facebook and I don't recall ever having one of these moments when a topic of conversation manifested as an ad on my phone or computer. I've even spent time trying to make it happen by talking very openly about wanting to buy a random object, hoping it would somehow show up. It just doesn't happen for me.

So maybe I am naive, but I also think a lot of it is connected to each person's online habits and Facebook seems to be a major culprit. That Reply All episode from above did not reach the conclusion that Facebook is listening to us, but they did determine that Facebook aggressively mines data using plugins that run in the background on a high percentage of mainstream website. Basically, when you are on espn.com or cnn.com, Facebook has the ability to monitor your usage and all that data feeds into your Facebook user profile, which then gets used for targeted ads. I'm not sure if these methods work if you aren't a Facebook user or if you aren't logged in on that particular device.

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Brisketexan

Brisketexan 105147

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57 minutes ago, Reagan1k said:

Oh yeah - Its real and not unexpected.

Last weekend my wife and  I were talking about the pros and cons of a very specific investment in a real estate venture.  The next morning when she opened Facebook, the 1st ad she saw was about the exact thing we were discussing.  She has zero search history anywhere for anything investment related - that's my department... and she had never heard of what we were talking about before I brought it up.  She was playing around on facebook while we were talking though.

Years from now we'll all laugh at how naive people were during this period of social media and AI convergence.

What I don't get is.....how does this (the example of my iPhone picking up my conversations and sharing that with various apps) NOT a violation of various wiretap laws?

My suspicion is that it's somewhere in the 976 pages of "terms and conditions" that no human has ever read, only clicked on.

I also have a strong policy argument that "terms and conditions" that, as a practical matter, are not reasonably able to be read by 99% of people, should be void.  It's the functional equivalent of hiding a serious product warning in fine print, on a panel inside the machine that you can only read if you remove 5 screws using three different types of screwdrivers.

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Vic Mackey

Vic Mackey 47041

Posted
Posted
15 hours ago, Deej said:

They are all listening. I was at a friends house looking after their dogs. Watched a couple of movies on their Netflix account. Got home, went to Netflix, and got the "because you watched..." for the movies I watched there. I assume it was pinging back to the app on my phone, but WTF?

All our devices are listening and watching us. I was talking to my girlfriend on the phone about random topics and then see ads for that on various social media platforms. Hell I have just been thinking about items or whatever in my head and then randomly see ads about it. Could have been a coincidence but it was still weird. Many people have encountered this.

But I don't see why anyone is shocked about these Alexa type devices. Of course they are listening and they are paying people to do so. Some can debate what this information is for but it's happening. Supposedly you can turn off this option in the settings to share your information that is spoken into the device or any background conversations. 

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Texas_Rocks

Texas_Rocks 346

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Posted

I always put my iPhone in soundproof bag before I talk to anyone in person. But seriously, just knowing that the hardware is already built in is a bit freaky. We’re all setting ourselves up for something bad in the future, I just don’t have any idea what that “something” might be. We are some trusting mofos when pressing that “I agree” button for TOS while on the run. No way I’m ever living life without a smartphone though. Technology owns me.

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FondrenRoad

FondrenRoad 4378

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14 minutes ago, Texas_Rocks said:

I always put my iPhone in soundproof bag before I talk to anyone in person. But seriously, just knowing that the hardware is already built in is a bit freaky. We’re all setting ourselves up for something bad in the future, I just don’t have any idea what that “something” might be. We are some trusting mofos when pressing that “I agree” button for TOS while on the run. No way I’m ever living life without a smartphone though. Technology owns me.

The bad future will come when tech company employees stop reviewing any of the data.  That will mean the AI learning technology is practically perfected, and it doesn't sign an NDA or give a shit about you from a "human" perspective.  It will just put you on blast or send a terminator over to your house.

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SDG

SDG 3319

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Posted

Targeted adds creep me out so I switched all my search engine on all of my devices to DuckDuckGo and most, if not all, of it went away.  I’m not very concerned about any of the other surveillance stuff but have zero need for an “electric assistant.” 

 

 

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RDCanecutter

RDCanecutter 26446

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Posted

I blame this naivete on the post-WW2 nuclear family, styrene plastic model-airplane kits and their requisite glue, as well as Malibu Barbie (who actually should have been good at math class, seeing as how she was modeled after a German prostitute.)

Prior to WW2, people either lived in pestilential tenements/almost-touching shotgun shacks, and possibly spied on each other, or they were well enough off to have servants, who definitely spied. Our great-great-grandparents had sense enough to keep their yaps shut. We must relearn that.

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