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Is the FTC going to do something about the “unacceptable”?
No.
Took them long enough. The ad networks, and companies like Google, know more about me, than my own immediate family. My preferences, my complete location history, my hardware info, and everything in between. The fact that this is allowed to begin with is absolutely mental
They know everyone’s fetish which feels kind of creepy and weird.
The feature is going away but on Google Maps they have a Timeline section where you can go back and see exactly where you’ve been each day. I found it useful when I traveled in Japan to see the names of shops and restaurants I stopped at but then realized… Google has known everywhere I’ve been for over a decade now. Hmm.
I think it’s a nice feature, when it’s explicitly opt-in, and gives you control over what it’s doing. We all know how Google handles that
This is one of those features that I’d love if it wasn’t controlled by an evil organization.
And all that data probably takes up less room than a few pictures, could easily be stored locally, and encrypted locally before backing up on a server. But why give individuals control and privacy over their own behavior and history when you can sell it to anyone and keep the profits for yourself? /s
You can use “Google Takeout” to download all location data. It has all coordinates and what you were doing (e.g. walking, driving) with timestamps.
Yeah, no fucking shit. Could have told you that without the need to spend 100’s of millions of dollars on the investigation. Here’s a free one for you. Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, listen to phone calls and ease drop on conversations near home assistants too. The fact that you get an ad for the thing you just talked about 10 min ago should prove that to even the dumbest asshole.
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What this demonstrates is how good tracking is now. They’re not listening to your microphone, at least not while your phone is in your pocket or whatever, because they don’t need to. They can already see your fingerprint, what websites you’re visiting, what your searching, and all of this applies to people you know as well- people who likely aren’t privacy conscious and share all contact info with whatever app is requesting. Listening to the mic is not necessary to suggest highly relevant ads.
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How many times a day are you shown ads that are completely irrelevant?
Me personally, I’ve never once experienced the “they’re listening to my mic for ads” phenomenon. I think someone would notice by now either by seeing increased upload usage or a hot device- at least with current technology. On device machine learning will make this much easier to analyze without having to upload audio.
Not that I don’t think it’s entirely possible to listen right now, I just don’t think it’s occurring to unimportant people. I’m not particularly important or rich nor is anyone I know. It seems much more plausible to me that we’re just seeing conventional web tracking get a lot better + a healthy dose of confirmation bias.
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Let’s hope they also do something meaningful about it.
A few million dollars in fines will not fix it. Making it a felony, convicting and punishing the people responsible (extraditing them if necessary), might.
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“The sky is blue” Man finds. “I decided to look up” he says.
