Apple cares about privacy? I have confirmed Apple is using the microphone, camera and imessage on my iphone XR and iphone 12 to sell ads. I was talking about disney cruises with my wife in the car in a store parking lot and sure enough when I come home i see disney cruises play on youtube ads on the apple tv. I was texing my wife about changing car insurance plans at home and sure enough I’m getting youtube ads about car insurance. I was drinking beer and just happened to point my phone camera over a beer can and sure enough several youtube ads about beer companies. Tested in my home and car with everything off except my iphone. Removing facebook and youtube and other apps I thought were spying on me and came to the conclusion that Apple has a back door in the software where they can secretly record what you say, type or see with the camera and then sells the info. It’s either that or I have telepathic powers.
I guess it’s time for you to start your tarot card reading business because what you’re describing is simply not happening, especially not by Apple sharing recordings with Google, of all things.
Do a Google search, and you’ll see many people who think the same thing and studies done on this phenomenon.
The truth is that you (and I, for that matter) are just boringly predictable, and there’s a lot of other tracking in play (if you don’t take precautions).
From a technical level, it wouldn’t even make sense to record everyone all the time, even if you think Apple would be willing to share your recordings with the likes of Google.
The bandwidth and computing power needed to go through billions of people’s daily recordings sourced from microphones and cameras in the hopes of finding that one nugget of consumerism information that then happens to match with an ad in an ad network’s ad library is beyond imagination even when you’d have trillions of dollars to burn on it.
Not to mention the chunky batteries needed to sustain all that.
What is super easy, however, is to look at your demographic cohorts (e.g., age, gender, location), mix it perhaps with some of your purchasing habits, some in-app tracking if you haven’t turned off the ATT, and combine it with the search history of the people you’ve been with and crank out a couple of ads you’re most likely to be receptive to.
In a way your examples prove how easily your behavior is predicted, if you’re willing to at the proper order of cause and effect.
You’re interested in Disney cruises and would you look at that, Google knows it too so they’re showing you an ad for Disney cruises.
You’re a beer drinker and Google figured that out too so you get beer ads.
You’re a car owner and haven’t searched for car insurances in a while, so Google thought it would be a great idea to tempt you with an ad for car insurance.
I couldn’t help but notice that other than Disney cruises (arguably the most well known cruise company), your beer ads weren’t for the specific beer company whose beverage you were enjoying and your car insurance ads weren’t specific to the company you were talking about.
You’d think if they’d go through the expensive effort of monitoring you 24/7 they’d at least bother to advertise the exact company you’re talking about each time (or not bother advertising it to you at all since you’re already on the cusp of spending your hard earned moneys on those products).
en.wikipedia.org
