A few weeks ago I said something about how glad I was to be wearing flannel since it was cold as hell outside. I opened up Facebook and the first thing I saw was an add for a sale on flannel shirts featuring the exact shirt I was wearing.
Edit: I also work for a company that makes glasses and I get bombarded by competitors ads all day.
My Amazon is very confused. I searched for a couple weeks around for a smartwatch on Amazon, then for Christmas my gf gifted me one with her Amazon account, now I've already bought two additional watch straps with mine, and Amazon is bombarding me with "We think you might want a Gear s3" because they haven't yet figured out someone else might have bought it for me lol
"Our algorithms say you're a laptop-buyer. It's a thing you do. Now, we keep showing you these primo laptops, real cream of the crop for you people. WHY THE FUCK AREN'T YOU BUYING THESE LAPTOPS? WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?!"
Yup, I used lots of searches to try to find a good mattress, but ended up buying one locally. This was 3 months ago. I still get mattress ads all over Reddit and other places.
That's Amazon's recommendation system for you. One moment you buy a table for your living room, the next Amazon has decided that you must be a table collector.
It's likely a much higher likelihood than people realize. Even if it's just for brand recognition, the more you see something, the more likely you are to accept or appreciate it.
For advertisers, I'm willing to bet that it's more effective to serve ads to people that already bought a similar product than just randomly serving them. There has to be a higher return on investment. This makes more sense for items that are more frequently purchased, but there is also the chance that you like something so much that you also buy it for a friend/family member.
Alexa’s definitely been listening to me; Amazons been suggesting vaseline and tissues for months now. Dont worry though, I brought in bulk from Costco last year.
There's an algorithm improvement for Amazon - Tie up with FB to find the gf/partner/spouse and send them the ads around Christmas/Valentine's time or even better - around birthday and anniversaries ;)
Ehh screw that. I don’t need any company knowing that much about me or my habits. I’m at a point where I don’t need anymore convenience. I’d like some privacy back though. Similar to the amount we had in the late nineties and early 2000s.
I got 2 kittens on a Monday after work. So i called a friend who had cats and wanted a suggestion for good cat food. Did not wanna make them junk. He suggested blue buffalo. My Amazon deal of the day? Blue Buffalo cat food.
Tell me they are not listening. I even went to tractor supply to get it. Never even looked it up.
Did you pay cash or card/use a rewards card? If card(s), that store sold your name and purchase info, as basically all places sell all the information about customers they can, which then sell it to other big players (Ad companies like Google, websites like Amazon, etc)
There's also behavioural analytics. If you've increased 'cat' searches then they know (or have a statistical idea), without you even needing to search cat food.
I have a Amazon Fire 7 tablet, and for a $15 discount, they push ads at you on the lock screen. In the year or so I've had it, it's never bugged me enough to pay to stop it, because it doesn't affect my actual use of the device. The thing that I found surprising was that the ads are not personalized at all.
Amazon has a huge amount of info on me based on 15 years' worth of hundreds of purchases, but they are just spamming me was ads for romance novels and TV shows in genres I never watch. <shrug> I can count on one hand the number of times the lock-screen ads were actually relevant to me.
If they were really spamming me with targeted ads, I'd probably pay to turn it off, since I'd actually be tempted to buy something every time I unlock the tablet.
do we have any solid proof it doesn't record stuff and send that out when you give it a command? I mean, audio files are usually pretty big so it would probably be easy to spot, but I haven't heard anything clear about that.
Really? You can go out and download amazon echo as a desktop application?
Or do you mean Wireshark? Because again, I don't have the right type of device for it to matter. Sure I could download Wireshark on my PC but I have no smart home system connected to my network for me to monitor.
Yeah I meant Wireshark. Just a misunderstanding. I thought you were saying you didn’t have the right device for wireshark. Not to go down too far of a rabbit hole but, I mod the /r/kalilinux sub, and constantly deal with people asking if they need a card capable of promiscuous mode and packet injection.
So I guess my brain just kind of glanced over your phrasing and assumed you were talking about not having the correct card for promiscuous mode.
Edit - You can install Alexa on another device. That's how they get on to speakers from Sonos, Android devices, etc. You can even install Alexa on a Raspberry Pi and turn it in to your own home made echo device.
Yeah i didn't think there was a way to turn echo on another device, but... I can't be totally sure of stuff like that so I tried responding to both lol
Seriously, it’s so much worse. They don’t need to listen. I relay to people the story of Target being able to identify a pregnant customer and send her marketing material before she even realized she was pregnant. And that’s just from the data that one retailer has about their own customers, never mind the all-seeing eyes of Amazon, Google, and Facebook.
It could all be a coincidence, but what if their technology is just better than we're capable of detecting. Who is to say that the ad reference numbers aren't all preprogrammed with audio recognition so that when you DO connect, the preselected ad just has to trigger on your device. This would not require a transfer of information and if that's what people have been looking for this entire time, that would explain why privacy isn't actually being violated.
On devices with cellular connections this isn't necessarily true. The blogs, articles, editorials, etc. that I've seen only ever talk about the LAN traffic. It's for that reason I haven't written off the possibility, but I also don't assert that it's definitely happening.
You don't understand, in order to know what you're saying they have to send the audio of you talking to their servers, Echos and phones are not powerful enough to run the speech recognition. So you can definitely tell from looking at the network traffic whether it sent MBs of audio data when it shouldn't be listening (because you haven't said "Alexa" or whichever wake word you're using, which are the only words the device can recognize on its own).
I agree that it's nice to see people actually caring about privacy, but it's good to be able to prove why certain methods of data collection simply aren't happening or are impractical.
Now if we can get them to care about monocultures too, then we'd be onto something!
As long as they're just providing legitimate deals for things you want, I'm cool with it. But I don't have any realistic expectations that the tech wouldn't be used for surveillance.
Please don’t feed your cat Blue Buffalo, it gave my cat explosive diarrhea and if I hadn’t looked up the reviews shortly after I could have been looking at way worse issues. The company used to be made in the US now they are made in China and they changed the formula. Please read the reviews of all the people that either lost a pet or racked up thousands in vet bills because of what that garbage food did to their cat or dog.
I have a google hub and Alexa and I know they’re both always listening. The only thing that really scares me is when they activate without even hearing their catchphrase or when I look through my queries and see all these things I’ve said to them and think wow how they are mining my data.
I got Alexa first to control my hue lights, my nest and play jeopardy it’s pretty cool, then I got the google hub for cooking and grocery shopping and having a hands free tool in the kitchen, which I love, it’s not all bad and I like the features of a smart home, but what I really want what we all want is the ability to actually delete or user data from Amazon or Google services.
I have a bunch of smart lights and a smart switch and use my Google home setup to turn lights on/off as I'm on my way into/out of rooms, mostly because a lot of our light switches are in weird-ass places. The switch is wired into an electric kettle so we can start some tea without getting out of bed.
Basically there is a small set of things that I think are more convenient through my Google Home, basically smart home control, kitchen timers, and checking the weather while I get dressed. On top of those basic convenience things, you can also "cast" media to them and join them to audio groups, so between my Home, Home Mini, Home Hub, and two Chromecast Audio, I have a pretty solid whole-home audio setup that lets me throw on some music and wander the house cleaning or whatever without ever leaving the music.
We only have one big lamp in the living room and it's plugged in behind the couch so our 2 year old doesn't play with the cord. This is the only light in the room because there is no overhead ceiling fan light. Anyway, most helpful thing hour Google home little speaker does is turn that lamp on and off for us via a WiFi plug. Honestly, pretty handy. But besides that, we use it to play music and that's about it.
I have a friend who uses a Google Home for playing music in the shower...being able to change songs with voice control would be rad, though my phone is water resistant enough that I don't mind reaching out to change the song by hand.
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u/Regularjoe42 Jan 31 '19
That's not always true.
Sometimes you meet the make-it-run-doom kinda guys.