this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2024
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This keeps getting brought up and it's simply not true. No, your phone isn't listening to you, plenty of tests have been done. It could easily be traceable with higher CPU usage, higher battery usage, network usage and so on, but there is zero difference between having a conversation next to your phone or the phone being in a literal sound proofed room.
Meta data, people you spend time with, what you look up online, your age, your hobbies, your interests, ads you have recently seen, location data, .. there's so much about you online that it's easy to predict.
And sometimes you talk about things because everyone else is talking about them. You're not that special.
It can be a bit scary how much you can predict about a person by just using a few simple facts (sex, age, location, income, ..).
It's funny because we've done this exact testing with the Facebook application on iOS by leaving my friend's iPhone14 with the screen locked next to Telemundo (a Spanish only public television channel) for 24 hours. (Our primary language is Ukrainian)
The next day, all of their ads were in Spanish.
So I do think additional research is needed for certain, the polling rate might be not as granular as you mentioned, but intermittent anonymous data collection like "primary language" could very likely be done passively with minimal impact on battery life, and it may be permissions-based and operating system dependent.
It makes absolutely no sense for advertising to switch all advertising to Spanish from a single day of recording. This would mean they disregarded ALL of the meta data they had on them. Location, things they visited, pages they visited etc. I've been on vacation and spoken a different language for two weeks and it didn't change the language of my ads. It just makes no sense to do that from a single data point, when all else contradicts them being/speaking Spanish.