I changed the title from “Spying” to “Eavesdropping” because the article actually directly supports that it is “spying” on you, just not listening.
I changed the title from “Spying” to “Eavesdropping” because the article actually directly supports that it is “spying” on you, just not listening.
It would cost like $1k for some YouTuber to buy a few burner android phones, slap prepaid sims in them, and then talk to them about their love of Hyundai and protein powder. It would blow the whole lid off whatever conspiracy were all just resigning ourselves to.
Such an easy thing to test and yet there’s zero evidence that it’s happening. At least the way people assume.
How would it even work? You would need to transmit and process mind boggling levels of data, in almost real time according to some of these stories.
Local speech to text has been easy to do for at least a decade and then you’re just firing off a text file to HQ to add keywords to a user file. These days an AI will likely parse the text to find recommendable products, ten years ago you’d have just had a gigantic list of all your partners’ brand names and desired key trigger phrases in a database and run the conversation text against the database and look for matches. Super easy to accomplish. Updating someone’s ad preferences 15-30 minutes after they talk about a product may as well be considered real time.