Google busted

[Demon]

What prompted the OP was the realisation that this is now going beyond third party cookies and similar tracking analysis, to the point where private verbal conversations are being recorded and analysed.

I've underlined what I consider to be the key word; private. Is a verbal conversation via an App provider even private any more? Was it ever?

I haven't tested whether a normal conversation using the phone itself is being recorded, or even if a conversation is being recorded when the phone is in a bag or pocket. I don't have the inclination to go to that level of investigation but I honestly do wonder where this will end up.

The issue here is it's not so straight forward, the OP mentions sharing images over whatsapp, and can he definitely rule out any internet searches or similar? Most of my targeted advertising comes from web searches, youtube video's I'm watching and online shopping information.

I actually think that realtime image and voice analysis is probably being used a lot by companies such as facebook, this isn't necessarily in breach of their T&C's, for example note the following wording:

Under "Information you and we share":
You share your information as you use and communicate through our Services, and we share your information to help us operate, provide, improve, understand, customize, support, and market our Services.

And later on:
However, your WhatsApp messages will not be shared onto Facebook for others to see. In fact, Facebook will not use your WhatsApp messages for any purpose other than to assist us in operating and providing our Services.

Now a lot of the 'information we share' section tries to sound nebulous but just taking the above, nothing there means they couldn't realtime analyse your voice/photos, pick out keywords and store those against your marketing ID for third parties to consume, they wouldn't be passing on your messages/photo's, they would only be passing on information gleened from it..

I don't see much difference to scanning your search terms, shopping habits on third party sites or analysing any image you upload (I swear google do this) and generating marketing information stored against you and most people seem fine with that, why would realtime voice analysis be radically 'different'??

 

[Dirk Diggler]

I don't see much difference to scanning your search terms, shopping habits on third party sites or analysing any image you upload (I swear google do this) and generating marketing information stored against you and most people seem fine with that, why would realtime voice analysis be radically 'different'??

Because it's a private phone conversation, you could be talking about anything. Would you be happy for Google to analyze photos of your wife's new pubic landing strip that she decided to share with you? Her new boob job? You would surely take steps to ensure those private photos and videos are shared without uploading to Google servers? How can you have the same control over your verbal conversations which are much more likely to randomly enter the realms of privacy, if Google is recording and analysing everything you say into your phone?

 

[mrochester]

Because it's a private phone conversation, you could be talking about anything. Would you be happy for Google to analyze photos of your wife's new pubic landing strip that she decided to share with you? Her new boob job? You would surely take steps to ensure those private photos and videos are shared without uploading to Google servers? How can you have the same control over your verbal conversations which are much more likely to randomly enter the realms of privacy, if Google is recording and analysing everything you say into your phone?

Don't use products or services made by surveillance capitalists!

 

[englishpremier]

I really wish someone would come up with a comprehensive guide to turning off all the tracking crap these apps do.

That would never work as they change them frequently. Often when changing they default to sharing information again. Youtube was always like this. I turn off autoplay and a few other things. Every time Youtube do a bit of an update these things are back on.

Privacy (or the illusion of it) is one area where I find Apple and iOS much better, especially when dealing with 3rd party apps.

 

[james.miller]

I never found facebook to listen in on anything. Prior to android 10, samsung had a permission monitor app that told you how many times an app has requested each permission, not just that but it differentiated between foreground and background activity. Facebook never accessed my mic. So it never listened to me. In fact i never found any dodgy activity from any of my apps, which leads me to believe any information they did gain was gained through information sharing, rather than snooping on my conversations and true enough i only ever saw adds for items i already bought on amazon (useful ) or things i'd been searching on google. Never anything regarding conversations that might have been overheard by our phones or any smart devices. Sadly i dont have the permission monitor in android 10, not sure why, and i've not found any other app that offers that functionality.

 

[Demon]

Because it's a private phone conversation, you could be talking about anything. Would you be happy for Google to analyze photos of your wife's new pubic landing strip that she decided to share with you? Her new boob job? You would surely take steps to ensure those private photos and videos are shared without uploading to Google servers? How can you have the same control over your verbal conversations which are much more likely to randomly enter the realms of privacy, if Google is recording and analysing everything you say into your phone?

I have some expectation that my normal paid mobile service (vodafone) is about as private as it gets, I don't expect for internal or third party reasons that they should analyse anything..

However, all the 'free' services (Apple/Google/Facebook/etc) I do have some expectation that they will analyse any digital content (including voice calls, images, text messages) and build marketing data against me. There is a big caveat to this and a key differentiation, I do not expect them to store or share any of my voice, images or texts with anyone.. If you wife posts you pictures of her boobs on whatsapp then yes, I'm sure your marketing ID will have 'likes boobs' flagged if their algorithms have boobs as a output..
Just reading their T&C's has enough leaway IMO to support the notion that analysis of data flowing through their service to gain marketing data is allowed, but sharing your data (voice/text/images) is not..

I am very careful about what I talk about on these platforms (and even here), I assume nothing is private, even vodafone I would presume have some ability to allow government agencies to eaves drop should a judge agree..

I never found facebook to listen in on anything. Prior to android 10, samsung had a permission monitor app that told you how many times an app has requested each permission, not just that but it differentiated between foreground and background activity. Facebook never accessed my mic. So it never listened to me. In fact i never found any dodgy activity from any of my apps, which leads me to believe any information they did gain was gained through information sharing, rather than snooping on my conversations and true enough i only ever saw adds for items i already bought on amazon (useful ) or things i'd been searching on google. Never anything regarding conversations that might have been overheard by our phones or any smart devices. Sadly i dont have the permission monitor in android 10, not sure why, and i've not found any other app that offers that functionality.

Indeed, I think people do vet the possibility of background recording of voices for analysis and AFAIK google/apple et al do not do this..

I think it smacks you in the face when they do all these helpful things like face recognition, collages, stylised photos to not think that's just piggy backing on their analysis platform which is used to gather marketing data.

 

[mrochester]

I have some expectation that my normal paid mobile service (vodafone) is about as private as it gets, I don't expect for internal or third party reasons that they should analyse anything..

However, all the 'free' services (Apple/Google/Facebook/etc) I do have some expectation that they will analyse any digital content (including voice calls, images, text messages) and build marketing data against me. There is a big caveat to this and a key differentiation, I do not expect them to store or share any of my voice, images or texts with anyone.. If you wife posts you pictures of her boobs on whatsapp then yes, I'm sure your marketing ID will have 'likes boobs' flagged if their algorithms have boobs as a output..
Just reading their T&C's has enough leaway IMO to support the notion that analysis of data flowing through their service to gain marketing data is allowed, but sharing your data (voice/text/images) is not..

I am very careful about what I talk about on these platforms (and even here), I assume nothing is private, even vodafone I would presume have some ability to allow government agencies to eaves drop should a judge agree..


Indeed, I think people do vet the possibility of background recording of voices for analysis and AFAIK google/apple et al do not do this..

I think it smacks you in the face when they do all these helpful things like face recognition, collages, stylised photos to not think that's just piggy backing on their analysis platform which is used to gather marketing data.

Apple’s ‘free’ services are paid for from the margin they generate when they sell a product. They do not engage in surveillance capitalism as a business model the way google and Facebook do.

 

[Demon]

Apple’s ‘free’ services are paid for from the margin they generate when they sell a product. They do not engage in surveillance capitalism as a business model the way google and Facebook do.

They are better in many ways but they very much aide and abet such as selling Safari's search function to google for several $billion..

 

[mrochester]

They are better in many ways but they very much aide and abet such as selling Safari's search function to google for several $billion..

absolutely, but they are ethically held to a higher standard than google or Facebook even if there are areas they need to tighten up on. I always switch the default to DuckDuckGo but it would be better if this was the default out of the box. Or even better still, an Apple search engine with no advertising at all.

 

[Dirk Diggler]

I did a video call on WhatsApp with my wife and daughter a couple of hours ago. Now, I've just hit the search bar in Chrome to type something and I've got two predetermined choices: the movie my daughter was watching during the conversation and the place my wife is going to for dinner tomorrow.

None of these things were manually searched for by me, nor pictures shared. There's no doubt that the verbal conversation is being filtered for keywords. Google's advertising tactics have gone beyond ridiculous now.

 

[krooton]

I did a video call on WhatsApp with my wife and daughter a couple of hours ago. Now, I've just hit the search bar in Chrome to type something and I've got two predetermined choices: the movie my daughter was watching during the conversation and the place my wife is going to for dinner tomorrow.

None of these things were manually searched for by me, nor pictures shared. There's no doubt that the verbal conversation is being filtered for keywords. Google's advertising tactics have gone beyond ridiculous now.

And neither your wife nor daughter did any searches on any devices their end?

 

[Marmot]

I did a video call on WhatsApp with my wife and daughter a couple of hours ago. Now, I've just hit the search bar in Chrome to type something and I've got two predetermined choices: the movie my daughter was watching during the conversation and the place my wife is going to for dinner tomorrow.

None of these things were manually searched for by me, nor pictures shared. There's no doubt that the verbal conversation is being filtered for keywords. Google's advertising tactics have gone beyond ridiculous now.

Sorry but it just doesn't work like that :/

Chrome isn't advertising the restaurant and movie out of the goodness of it's heart - the restaurant and movie distributor are paying to have these ads placed in front of a relevant target audience. In order to place these ad impressions in front of you, the campaign manager responsible for the restaurant/movie distributors ad-spend needs to first select the targeting methodology they wish to use for branding/consumer acquisition. The options are straight forward, typically first-party data (retargeting/CRM), third-party (Google owned cookie or email address data, or other various data resellers you can see present on a typical website through an extension like Ghostery, examples such as Google, Lotame, Exelate, Oracle, many more), or Contextual (we want to serve our ad against Food related content). If there was some sort of audio transcription or visual analysis of your private video-calls, this would be a represented in an audience targeting opportunity within the Google ads platform. There is no such option to select. It would therefore have to be baked into Google's Affinity (third party) or similar audience targeting methodologies. Google are transparent about how this data is gathered. If you are logged in within the Google eco-system then you can watch a debt advice video on YouTube and then receive a credit-card ad at the top of your Gmail 'Promotions' inbox. If you're outside the Google eco-system, then your browsing is mapped to your cookie-ID.

Also, just to exercise some common sense here - would this super-smart, audio transcribing, machine learning algorithm really be showing you ads for a movie you or your family has already watched? Or a restaurant you're already sold on? Far more likely would be other content (competitor or similar by the same company) which you might be interested in.

Digital advertising is a lot more boring than you all think.

 

[krooton]

As above, it's cookies and IDs and linking things together.

My wife has an iPhone and uses her work laptop to browse the internet. I never use either of those devices.
I use my android phone, work laptop and desktop, again devices that she never uses.
They are all connected to our home wifi.

Over the past week, she has started watching a bunch of those 'Youtube exposed' videos where Youtube personalities are being analysed and criticized. That is on her iPhone, logged in to her Youtube account.

Yesterday, I get a Youtube notification on my phone recommending an 'exposed' video in the same vein.

Simple case of our individual Youtube accounts being seen as always using the same internet connection, and cross-linking recommendations.

It's not some clandestine crap about my phone's mic overhearing her videos and transcribing keywords, it is simply the algorithms identifying that our devices and accounts all live in the same household.

As such, I would expect the same thing to be happening with your Chrome, it remembers that you have frequently been connected to the same internet as the devices your wife and daughter use, and it had likely cross-linked their searches.

 

[Dirk Diggler]

Simple case of our individual Youtube accounts being seen as always using the same internet connection, and cross-linking recommendations.

It's not some clandestine crap about my phone's mic overhearing her videos and transcribing keywords, it is simply the algorithms identifying that our devices and accounts all live in the same household.

She's connected to our home WiFi, I'm connected to a subsea fibre in the middle of the North Atlantic.

 

[krooton]

She's connected to our home WiFi, I'm connected to a subsea fibre in the middle of the North Atlantic.

The point is, you have been connected to that same home WiFi in the past, probably enough times for them to make the connection that you as a user or set of devices are linked to it, even when you aren't there right now.

 

[Dirk Diggler]

The point is, you have been connected to that same home WiFi in the past, probably enough times for them to make the connection that you as a user or set of devices are linked to it, even when you aren't there right now.

That makes zero sense.

It seems to be quite the coincidence that I'm seeing ads for things we speak about on WhatsApp when I'm hundreds of miles away, yet I don't see any ads for all the shoes, bags, clothes etc.. that she constantly searches for on all her devices. She's not seeing any ads for GPUs, OLED TVs, games and all the other searches that I input.

Yet, I see an ad for the restaurant she just told me she's going to tomorrow. I get an ad for the Disney movie my daughter was watching during the call.

It doesn't add up.

 

[krooton]

That makes zero sense.

It seems to be quite the coincidence that I'm seeing ads for things we speak about on WhatsApp when I'm hundreds of miles away, yet I don't see any ads for all the shoes, bags, clothes etc.. that she constantly searches for on all her devices. She's not seeing any ads for GPUs, OLED TVs, games and all the other searches that I input.

Yet, I see an ad for the restaurant she just told me she's going to tomorrow. I get an ad for the Disney movie my daughter was watching during the call.

It doesn't add up.

Thinking that Google has the computational power to transcribe every voice/video call made and then run keyword searches for every one of their clients to find matches doesn't add up.

Also, are you trying to say that they were able to ascertain a film playing in the background from audio alone, or did you ask what she was watching?

Occam's Razor would be that said movie was searched for, and that search history was linked back to your accounts by way of shared cookies and IDs, I gave a pretty clear example with my wife and my experience this week with Youtube.

 

[Dirk Diggler]

Thinking that Google has the computational power to transcribe every voice/video call made and then run keyword searches for every one of their clients to find matches doesn't add up.

Of course it adds up; how could they know that you said, "Hey Google", if they didn't analyse every word?

Also, are you trying to say that they were able to ascertain a film playing in the background from audio alone, or did you ask what she was watching?

I asked what she was watching because she was dancing around the living room. I also asked my wife where she was going tonight with her friend for a meal.

 

[Dirk Diggler]

Occam's Razor would be that said movie was searched for, and that search history was linked back to your accounts by way of shared cookies and IDs, I gave a pretty clear example with my wife and my experience this week with Youtube.

I know, and I replied. Why isn't my wife seeing ads for GPUs & OLED TVs? Why am I not seeing adverts for Next & Boots? Why is it only the verbal conversation that's providing this shared ad experience?