Are they listening to phone calls now?
Recently I had an interesting experience that made me think about what capabilities are currently being utilised for targeted advertising. I have a friend who works at Toyota and I called him to ask for advise regarding my parents next car. In the end he suggested the RAV4.
At home we use a streaming service that sometimes serves ads for other things but mostly just for their own shows. The day after the phone call it was for the Toyota RAV4. I never searched for it and my only visit to the Toyota webpage, weeks before, focused on the Hilux, Aygo and Auris.
Is this just a coincidence? Or did they listen to the call and then correlate my friends contact information for me with the accounts used on my HTPC (which also is the only system we don't have ad blocking on)?
I should probably add that the reason I suspect that any leak probably comes from my friends side is that I try to somewhat limit the ways that my personal data can be mined and before this event seem to have been relatively successful.
Many of the ads I've seen over the last couple of years have been for dating services with Chinese or Russian ladies, often mature. I have no such fetish, don't speak any of those languages, and am since many years living happily together with a woman from a country that has a strained relationship with both those countries. Her phone and computer configuration is similar to mine, with ad and script blocking in the browsers, custom ROMs on the phones, limited app privileges and so on.
Posted Jan 27, 2018, 2:02 PM UTC
If you have an "app" on your phone that has microphone permissions, it is technically possible to correlate the data to ads on your streaming account. Especially if you are referring to NetFlix or Hulu on both the phone and the stream box.
In order to test the theory you can mess up the algorithm by talking about babies or some totally random medical condition (not a real one that you have for privacy purposes) and see if you get targeted ads.
No such permissions for any streaming apps on the phone. Except for a few apps those are all locked up properly and web access is also restricted with a firewall for things that shouldn't need it. I can only think of one app that actually has both microphone and network access.
We often talk about stuff we want to buy, medical stuff, well basically anything, in the presence of or over our phones. So you could say that we've already been running that experiment continuously. The only times obviously targeted ads have showed up so far have been when it's something we've searched for from the TV, like specific computer parts or kitchen stuff. Things that we've talked quite a bit about but never searched for, like a certain location we're considering moving to, the very specific birthday present we're thinking about getting for my father, or baby related stuff, have never appeared.
I guess one possible experiment format would be to pick two different groups of fake subjects and then talk with the spouse about one of them and about the other with my Toyota friend.