Koolau
Give me a museum and I'll fill it. (Picasso) Give me a forum ...
You are not paranoid.
FB is listening too.
Did you forget a letter?
You are not paranoid.
FB is listening too.
I have to throw out a disclaimer to DW once a week at least. I constantly get advertisements for women's lingerie, but my wife buys her own in person in a retail store, doesn't use my laptop, and we have different email addresses. And we certainly don't talk about underwear, and we leave our cells in a different room/floor at night.
There is a simple explanation.
-ERD50
A few weeks ago I was talking with my son and he mentioned an electronic coffee mug he had (Ember).
I knew he had it, but never knew the name. My PC was on when we talked. I have never searched for it (nor has DW).
The last 2 weeks I have been getting adds for this on all sights that I do not ADBlock.
Since we did a lot of Zoom during Covid, I realized that I left the microphone on (it is off now).
I might be paranoid, but just because I am paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get me
I really don't think there is listening for ads as much as really good data mining of other available info. I get ads for weird stuff after people visit if they use my wifi and thus are affiliated to my IP. Walmart.com shows me purchases made in store going back quite a ways for any credit cards that I've used online and thus associated with my identity/account. While I protect myself some I've given up on anonymity and in general find it convenient... it's nice to have most ads I suffer be somewhat relevant. (as I type this, a "Depends" ad is in the sidebar.... I hope they are not that good at predicting my future needs!)
I'm afraid you are paranoid, Google never has nor never will use anything picked up on a microphone to send you ads.
I'm afraid you are paranoid, Google never has nor never will use anything picked up on a microphone to send you ads.
I'm afraid you are paranoid, Google never has nor never will use anything picked up on a microphone to send you ads.
What impresses me about the Google Home devices is that they can still hear me while they are playing music at a fairly high level.
You would think their own speaker would deafen their microphone. Imagine yourself singing while trying to listen to someone else talking.
Ok, google ain't going away. But they need to step up their game. I find that my ads start coming in AFTER I buy something. Come on g-man, you can do better than that! Once I've bought whatever I'm on to the next thing. Catch up!
OP here. You might be right, but you sound awful certain. How can you possibly know that for sure?
A skeptic that debunks all sorts of stuff did a whole show on it including information provided by Google and phone manufacturers. He even did some field tests and it sounded like very reliable information. Google would have to be flat out lying and they are smarter than that. Skeptoid.com is his web site. He's very fact based.
Since the device is also generating the sound, it should be easy to cancel it out to a high degree with an inverse phase.
Your voice would then stand out as a difference signal. edit/add: Saturating the mic could be an issue, with the music being generated so close to the mic, but that can be accommodated in the design. They probably also use passive noise cancellation - apply the music signal to both the front and back of the mic element. That provides a pretty high degree of cancellation.
-ERD50
A skeptic that debunks all sorts of stuff did a whole show on it including information provided by Google and phone manufacturers. He even did some field tests and it sounded like very reliable information. Google would have to be flat out lying and they are smarter than that. Skeptoid.com is his web site. He's very fact based.
The problem is that the signal received by the microphone is not identical to the signal sent to the speaker.
You have distortion and frequency response of the speaker and microphone to contend with. You have acoustic coupling as well as mechanical coupling, reverberation and a whole lot of hairy stuff. It's not that easily cancelled out.
PS. All this makes me curious. It should not be hard to set up an experiment using nothing more than a PC hardware, a small speaker and a microphone. You can use the PC hardware to send out a sound segment, and use the PC to also sample the microphone to see how close to the original signal you get back.