
Ask HN: Is Google recording our conversations to serve us with relevant ads? - sarim
I believe we have all been served with ads for products and services that we haven’t even searched for. I presented this question to our Google Account Manager and he told me that Googles machine learning has become really good at predicting people’s intent. Having dabbled in Machine Learning myself, I don’t buy his crap.
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phillipseamore
The simplest way to prove it is to show that kind of information flowing from
a device to Google (or any other party). No one has ever done that. You
wouldn't expect a full audio stream being sent, rather the device would look
for triggers, but they would still need to be communicated in someway over the
network.

Google (or any other company) have also never promoted such an ability to
advertisers. If it would be a very closely guarded secret you would think that
high budget advertisers would be the likeliest to have access to such
targeting. However in "tests", like the 'dog toys' video that mikejb mentions
and many more, the advertisers are usually no-name companies with cheap
products. Most of these proclaimed tests also seem to be YouTube videos trying
to get revenue from views. Furthermore, if devices would be looking for
trigger words (like mentioned in the first paragraph), it would be even more
likely that you would only see this happening for high volume/big budget
advertisers.

~~~
smueller1234
I worked for a very large advertiser until end of 2017 and there was certainly
no such offering.

Disclaimer: Today, I work for Google, but nowhere near ads. And I wouldn't
share internals anyway.

~~~
DoofusOfDeath
> And I wouldn't share internals anyway.

No matter _how disturbing_ they would be to the broader public?

~~~
cm2012
What the broader public thinks is disturbing and what actually is unethical
are two very different things.

~~~
Rjevski
> What the broader public thinks is disturbing and what actually is unethical
> are two very different things.

Maybe there are some things that may be unethical without being disturbing,
I'm not sure the opposite is true; if the majority thinks it's disturbing then
it's most likely unethical.

~~~
cm2012
Facebook lets you target people for advertising based on the job titles
Facebook users enter into their profiles.

So you can advertise Bingo Card Creator to teachers. Or swimming suits to
lifeguards.

A few dozen people put gross things like "jew hater" as their job titles. So,
if you trawled hard, you could target these "jew haters" on Facebook.

Some blogger screenshotted this and it became a national uproar about the evil
Facebook profiting from hatred. None of the popular articles pointed out the
nuance. And in response, FB nerfed the job title feature to hell, which means
its harder to actually put relevant ads in front of people.

So that's an example of something that disturbed the public but was completely
misunderstood.

~~~
Rjevski
> put relevant ads in front of people

I'd say the main problem is this. Nobody has ever asked for ads to begin with.

The unethical part is not better ad targeting, it's simply the fact that
advertising exists and is depriving the world of millions of man-hours that
could be put to better use.

~~~
cm2012
People ask for varied content, but don't want to pay for many providers, so
ads help provide the content.

~~~
Rjevski
Maybe people don't pay because they didn't want the "content" and it isn't
good content anyway, but are merely being manipulated into watching it
(through "feedback loops" like social media "likes", etc) by the creators of
this garbage content for the purpose of getting ad views?

------
aosaigh
Everyone is worried that Google and/or Facebook are listening to us. Nobody
seems to realise that it's actually worse if they _aren't_ listening to us, as
it proves that their targeting is so good that they make you think otherwise.

~~~
mooman219
A funny anecdote, when Google shows off the link to the "here's what we know
about you page" every now and then, users more often then not will actually
correct parts that are wrong.

You can find it in Account > Personal info & privacy > Ad Settings. You can
also turn off ad personalization.

~~~
SiVal
Yes, Google is willing to pretend to know only what you tell them to pretend
they know. After Chrome made any login to a Google service also log you in on
the browser, I decided to use a non-Google browser for any Google service. I
switched over to another computer, which had a non-Google browser (FF) on it,
made sure all cookies, etc., were deleted, and went to YouTube. YouTube said I
wasn't logged in.

And yet, YouTube's recommendations were combination of obscure items of
interest only to me that it had been recommending on the other computer. It
was telling me to log in but already knew who I was.

Presumably it matched my IP address, but if I had used it for a while from a
different IP address, it would have been able to match my usage and identified
me that way. And if not that, one of my many Google-employee neighbors
mentioned that they record your typing rhythms when they can, and those
rhythms eventually uniquely identify you.

So when Google's "here's all we know about you" purports to reveal all, it
shows you what they think of you rather than what they actually know about
you.

~~~
cm2012
Google's "what we know" is what they're confident enough in to bucket you to
advertisers. Stuff like Youtube recommendations is a different algorithm.

------
jimrandomh
Secretly recording audio is illegal in many (but not all) jurisdictions,
including California. However, just because Google isn't recording you to
target ads doesn't mean no one is.

A fair number of people are claiming they've been targeted with ads seemingly
based on information that could only have been obtained through audio
recording. But so far no one _technically sophisticated_ has, and so these
claims never seem to involve narrowing it down to a specific device, or
checking the devices for malware or suspicious apps.

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lillesvin
Anecdote time... So, I was sitting in a car with a colleague who was talking
about how he used to live in the UK (we're both Danish but were speaking
English because we had a non-Danish colleague in the car with us). My
colleague talked about how he'd developed a fondness for cricket while living
in the UK, to which I replied that I only really knew cricket from Hitch
Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy and that it was one of those sports that I'd
always been sort of curious about since it gets so little exposure here in
Denmark. We agreed that we should maybe watch a game together so he could
explain it to me and the conversation naturally changed topic shortly after.
But a couple of days later Google Now showed me a notification saying that
cricket results were available asking if I wanted to subscribe.

There's of course always a chance that I've done something that—unbeknownst to
me—has led Google to believe I was interested in cricket, but I definitely
didn't google "cricket", watch videos about it, mentioned it in emails or some
such.

~~~
TheHeadMaster
Google knows that you and your colleague met, drove together etc from location
of both your devices. So, "maybe" your colleague frequently searched about
cricket on his device. Based on these data points, google might have shown you
cricket suggestions.

~~~
biophetik
Pretty much sums up my thoughts exactly. There was a good reply all episode
about this very thing. [https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/109-facebook-
spying](https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/109-facebook-spying)

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dragonwriter
>I believe we have all been served with ads for products and services that we
haven’t even searched for.

Sure, including ones I've never discussed; simple (not even requiring ML)
statistical prediction of likely interest based on interests of people with
similarities in search history or other things that Google overtly has in its
tracking of profiles could well explain that; with ML applied well, that gets
even better.

Covertly recording conversations for ads seems to be an unnecessary assumption
to explain any effect I've seen or heard decribed, so while it's not
_impossible_ , I don't see any reason besides paranoia to believe it is true.

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mikejb
I'm sceptical, but it's hard to prove or disprove. So many other factors that
go into making ad decisions (what did people who are somehow similar to you
show interest in? Your friends? What's currently trending in certain areas of
the internet, etc.)

I've only seen one attempt (shown in a video online, the topic was 'dog
toys'), where recorded conversations were claimed to influence ads. Lots of
people indicated foul play in the video, so I didn't book it in my "that's
happening"-bucket.

I've only tried to reproduce it once, half-hearted, and failed.

~~~
sarim
The only problem with the parameters you listed is that you get served with
the most random ads at the most optimum moments. I once saw an ad for Swiffer
mop moments after mentioning casually to my friend that I am thinking of
buying one.

~~~
mikejb
That of course is suspicious. Do you sometime receive random ads that are
completely out of the blue that you haven't talked about? (I'm asking because
if you get shown 100 random ads per week, for how many can't you attribute
them vs. how many seem to be related to some (online, offline) activity? Is it
only by chance, and we just remember the 0.1% where it worked?)

~~~
sarim
I completely understand your point. Maybe I am noticing those ads only after I
have consciously made the decision of buying the product. Or maybe the ads of
that product are sub consciously nudging me to buy those products. Most of the
display ads are meant to do just that

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Alir3z4
Here's a live test that may help you to believe
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBnDWSvaQ1I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBnDWSvaQ1I)
and
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmM9ch_oXA4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmM9ch_oXA4)

In first video, a guy talks about dog toys and then he'll see ads related to
what he talked about.

Worth noting, he doesn't have dogs or searched about it. The ads are even
specific to the toy colors he talked about.

~~~
mooman219
A more substantial test would be to monitor network traffic for audio streams,
or if basic parsing is happening on device, then those keywords being set.

~~~
earenndil
If it exists, then the parsing is almost certainly happening on-device, and
the messages are encrypted and stenographically hidden.

~~~
joshuamorton
This would have impact on battery life that no one has yet noticed.

------
uptown
There's a few data-grabbing questions I've always wondering with Google and
Facebook and others.

Does the Facebook app, if granted permission to access photos, upload
thumbnails or metadata generated on-device that's descriptive-enough to
characterize photos located on devices even if they're not chosen by the user
to be uploaded to their service.

Does Facebook and/or Google send your current clipboard contents to their
server? Google Maps seems to do-so since it has the address pre-filled when
you launch the app if you've copied it from elsewhere.

Anybody able to officially answer or speculate on either of these? I've always
resorted to assuming they do because they can.

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neekp
1\. We've discussed this question with сolleagues, and one of them discussed
with his wife bout with the gloves for his son, and on the next day he a
received ads with bout with the gloves. Аnd it was not like that once. I do
not claim that it was google, may be other ads company, but it is a fact.

2.Once a work colleague said me "Hey, listen my phone (nexus 5x)". From
conversational speaker we heard as other people said! nexus 5x was on standby
state! According to the conversation, I think that people did not talk on the
phone, but offline.

sorry for my english ).

~~~
geofft
Did the wife Google the gloves, or open a page about the gloves that also had
Google ads (or Analytics maybe)? Ad companies _do_ know that certain groups of
users/devices share interests.

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sarim
Well maybe continuous subconscious exposure to an ad is causing me to discuss
a product with my friends and I am acknowledging the presence of the ad only
after having talked about it.

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prepend
I wish. I don’t get relevant ads from Google.

Even when searching for specific items “tacos” the ad will be stupid. I can’t
recall the last time I used a Google ad productively.

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earenndil
It remains unclear. There are reasons to believe they are (it'd really improve
their ad targetting, and there are some anecdata to suggest they are), reasons
to believe they aren't (they must have _some_ ethics, and if they got caught,
the result would be Bad), and reasons to believe they can't (constant audio
recording would cause a suspicious drain on battery).

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RaceWon
Forget ads, are they selling it to Alphabet Agencies?

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kasey_junk
Try to buy an ad served against this data. How do you do it? If you can’t you
can reasonably assume it’s not tracked.

~~~
sarim
Google doesn’t mention the source of data. You can setup display campaigns to
optimize for more conversions, click through rates etc. It’ll serve the ad
based on either audience or goals

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OliverLassen
Don't think companies are willing to test if they can go that far. But many
small apps are for sure

