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Here's the fun part, they don't need to listen to you. You are far more predictable than you realize. They already know everything about you, what you search, what apps you use, what kinds of exercise you do and when, what you eat, what articles you read, movies and podcasts you consume, music you listen to, what you buy, where you go, who you hang out with, and everything about the people you hang out with. Every minute of your life is meticulously tracked and analyzed and compared to the hundred thousand people who are just like you in terms of interests and patterns. They can predict to a scary degree what your thinking before you might even realize it yourself. They know you better than you know yourself. Why waste the resources sifting through hours of recordings when they already know everything going on in your head from the million data points you voluntarily transmit to them everyday?
The other part of this to keep in mind is that you are bombarded with ads all day most of which you ignore. It's just that those few times where they manage to hit a straight bullseye, showing you an add for something you were just talking about or even just thinking about, those are the ones that will stick in your memory.
- Please, please, please, can people just understand this?! It's infuriating hearing all these conspiracies when in reality, it's so much simpler to just use the data we already know they collect.
  
  It’s also frankly scarier that they can predict our thoughts, patterns, movements etc. without the need to listen to us at all. That scares the shit out of me.
  
  If you an average male into video games it's going to shill you popular video games. That's an assumption given your gender and age and probably location and most of the time it's a correct choice. It's not as advanced as you think it is.
  
  It's not really all that crazy to think though. We create categories for people in our own heads and predict their behavior all the time. Often times we get it right because people are at least somewhat predictable. Look no further than starter pack memes.
  
  Nah, none of this explains the Lemonbalm Tea incident.
  I assure you, the Lemonbalm Tea incident does not require further explanation than "whatever many steps you think is the answer, you can add plus 2 to it and still come up short".
  
  There is no "lemon balm incident" that even bears worth putting on the Internet after a quick google search. You're talking out your ass so can it.
  
  I cannot replicate any of these claims no matter how hard I try. I ran out of contact solution this weekend and I spent a good 20 minutes repeating the words "contact solution" "contact solution delivery" "1-800-contacts" "I need contact solution " with Facebook open, directly into the microphone. All I get are vaguely relevant ads for shit I obviously would want (bike parts and bikes because, spoiler alert, I use FB almost exclusively to keep up with local mountain bike events) and absolutely nothing about contacts or contact solution.
  But guess what? This still doesn't prove anything because, like your example, it's an anecdote. And a single anecdote counts for fuck all in terms of evidence. I find it exceedingly unlikely that any of the tech giants are wasting time and resources listening in on our conversations simply to target us with advertisements when they already have sufficient data based on past search history, app usage statistics, our friend groups, location data, demographic data, ...
  This stupid conspiracy is just as illogical as the vaccine tracking chip conspiracy. Hello, you are voluntarily carrying a tracking device you bought with your own money and keep charged with your own power, and you willingly expose even more data to it like private messages and photos. There's absolutely no reason to invent GPS tracking nano technology to solve an already solved problem.
  And I by no means am saying that these big tech companies are innocent or that they don't abuse the data they collect. There's a 100% chance they do. But you are ascribing a level of sophistication they don't really need to "read your mind" or listen in on your private conversations. You are human, and they have a few billion other examples of humans they can use to analyze behavior. We're pretty predictable, it turns out.
- There was the incident of Target or some store realizing someone was pregnant before they did themselves, which seems relevant here.
  
  Yes! I was going to mention that, I heard about that years ago, so things have to be way more sophisticated now. Just looked it up the story was from 2012, and target was just tracking credit card numbers and noticing when women started buying things like unscented lotion. So this is waaay less sophisticated then the information companies are sucking up in present day.
  As Pole’s computers crawled through the data, he was able to identify about 25 products that, when analyzed together, allowed him to assign each shopper a “pregnancy prediction” score. More important, he could also estimate her due date to within a small window, so Target could send coupons timed to very specific stages of her pregnancy.
  One Target employee I spoke to provided a hypothetical example. Take a fictional Target shopper named Jenny Ward, who is 23, lives in Atlanta and in March bought cocoa-butter lotion, a purse large enough to double as a diaper bag, zinc and magnesium supplements and a bright blue rug. There’s, say, an 87 percent chance that she’s pregnant and that her delivery date is sometime in late August.
  https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target-figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/?sh=75e6dd266668 The story I found was a girl who got a target mailer for pregnancy stuff and her dad was pissed, only to find out later that his daughter was im fact pregnant. Target changed tactics, instead of sending mailers with just baby stuff, they start sending personalized mailers with some baby stuff mixed in, increasing as the due date approaches. And again this was 11 years ago and just used credit card information and target purchase data. It's wild to think of what they can do now.
  
  Low income, less than high school education, late teens, living in the deep south, buying pickles in bulk from Costco... Survey says: prèganté
- then how do you explain facebook giving people ads for stuff they say
  eg. this youtuber made an experiment where he wasn't getting ads for oven and when he started saying oven multiple times, he got ads for oven https://youtu.be/-nkiPEGU_lY
  
  Or Facebook recommending people that I’ve talked to by text and never met irl (met on dating app, moved to text, fizzled out) when it’s not supposed to have access to my contacts.
  
  Yeah but Facebook probably has access to the other person's contacts where your name and phone number were stored
  
  That’s a good point. She popped up after she changed my contact info to my new name, which I updated on FB a few weeks ago.
  Though it did happen with another girl I was talking to last year and haven’t talked to since.
  
  Assuming this isn't because the person you're contacting has lax privacy set up in their FB account, have you ever played "6 degrees of Kevin Bacon"? You (I assume) probably live near this person, are probably approximately the same age, single, you may even have some obscure friends in common. Or friends of friends. And what you don't remember are the countless recommendations that are totally off base. For every "uncanny" friend recommendation I get, there are dozens of people I don't know.
  
  The video you linked would be stupid easy to reproduce by recording a voice over after scrolling ads on Facebook for a minute. If you want to convince me, you would need to perform a controlled experiment with multiple unrelated search terms, fresh Facebook accounts with no browsing history, etc.
  Or, what if this is real? Maybe the YouTuber wasn't just phishing for view counts with clickbait to boost his channel and actually did make that video in good faith and sure enough, Bluetooth speakers show up in his feed? What's to say he hasn't been seeing Bluetooth speaker ads because he's a tech inclined, middle aged man with disposable income and the opposite effect is true: maybe he chose Bluetooth speakers because he's been seeing ads for them on Facebook recently? Our minds aren't exactly good at keeping track of that kind of thing and advertisers take advantage of that shit all the time. Look at the familiarity principle or mere exposure effect.
  My point isn't to say Facebook and Google don't collect tons of data about us, they do that all the time for sure. It's just that there are simpler, more reliable and less processor intensive ways to build a behavioral model. Google knows where I work, what I search for, how old I am, how many kids I have, what YouTube videos I watch, ... There's more than enough there to figure out what kind of ads to serve me.
  
  Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/-nkiPEGU_lY
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
- And yet they can’t recommend a song that I would actually like.
- But I don't see any ads. I use ublock on PC and mobile. I use only lemmy and mastodon and I have multiple apps to watch youtube ad free.
  Well, I should probably say that the ads I do see, I see voluntarily. Like trailers for instance.
  
  My dumbass reread this comment 3 times before I realized you weren’t looking into buying trailers
- This is such a fucking dumb comment lol.
  
  https://gizmodo.com/these-academics-spent-the-last-year-testing-whether-you-1826961188
- Google offers free voice to text engine APIs and constantly listens on your phone for "hello google" or however their phrase goes. So if it is constantly listenning to you anyways, why not also filter for other keywords like "buy" "like" "want" ?
- Dumb take is dumb

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