Privacy

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Partner started receiving ads in foreign language they don't speak (infosec.pub)

submitted 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) by aviation_hydrated@infosec.pub to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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I'm learning a language, I speak it in public to other people who do. I don't research the language, because I have some old text books on it. My partner doesn't speak it and doesn't research it on their devices. I don't normally have my phone on me in public, but my partner does. It took about 4 months of publicly speaking in the language before they got ads

What do you think this means?

::edit::

It was a Reddit ad and my city has embraced those AI smart cameras, so I assume some of those are Google owned which makes sense with Reddit and Google's recent alliance. This is assuming our devices aren't listening to us without our permission and AI cameras are mining data on passersby

Other theories are that since cellphones are involved it doesn't matter if I nor my partner ever searched for the language, at some point my phone or partner's phone was near someone who spoke that language and the data brokers/ad sellers inferred from there

Seems like the consensus is that I must have posted in the language on some social media or used Google to research it or made some new friends who speak the language and that's why

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[–] aviation_hydrated@infosec.pub 13 points 4 months ago (3 children)

Any sources on this? We don't use voice activated AI bots like Alexa

[–] RmDebArc_5@sh.itjust.works 5 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Do you use a non degoogled android phone?

[–] aviation_hydrated@infosec.pub 5 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Yes. Partner does not

[–] RmDebArc_5@sh.itjust.works 0 points 4 months ago

Then it could be from google assistant listening in the background or speach to text. I would do google takeout if you are really curious, you get a copy of all the data that they have on you. You can find all sorts of stuff depending on your account settings like transcripts of your conversations, locations you visit, …

[–] minibyte@sh.itjust.works 4 points 4 months ago (2 children)

This was years ago, but I left my phone at home with the Spanish channel on. I planned to do this for a few days, but after 9 hours my Twitter and Facebook feed ads were both in Spanish. I’d be surprised if they stopped scraping that data.

[–] BakedCatboy@lemmy.ml 11 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

What kind of TV service / set top box did you have at the time? I remember a lot of talk about providers pushing set top boxes both because it lets them use newer broadcast tech with customers using old TV tuners, but crucially it allows them to have their own software running on the box that you use to switch channels, which let them use out of band communication over the cable network to report what channels you watched, when, and how long, which I don't doubt gets sold and aggregated by ad targeting firms.

It's pretty common for smart TVs to do a similar thing to collect streaming app watch data when using the TVs built in apps.

[–] aviation_hydrated@infosec.pub 7 points 4 months ago

Wild, I'll have to try that

[–] GolfNovemberUniform@lemmy.ml -3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

The sources I know are in Russian so they won't be useful for you but generally gapps have this feature and idk if it can be fully disabled without degoogling.

[–] aviation_hydrated@infosec.pub 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I can translate Russian, I'd love to see their research

[–] GolfNovemberUniform@lemmy.ml -1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

The first sources I've ever found was this https://piped.video/watch?v=gsZo_I8wIKI and this https://piped.video/watch?v=U0SOxb_Lfps

But since it's a very popular topic, you can find more articles, tests and researches. There's also this video that explains other kinds of tracking https://piped.video/watch?v=gsZo_I8wIKI

I'm bad at searching and I don't follow actual research papers. You can find that yourself I think.

[–] aviation_hydrated@infosec.pub 6 points 4 months ago

Yeah I'm more on the actual research paper route, I need science and not opinion or speculation. But with that, I'll probably take a look since community lead efforts can be good too, thanks for sharing