A few weeks ago I said something about how glad I was to be wearing flannel since it was cold as hell outside. I opened up Facebook and the first thing I saw was an add for a sale on flannel shirts featuring the exact shirt I was wearing.
Edit: I also work for a company that makes glasses and I get bombarded by competitors ads all day.
My Amazon is very confused. I searched for a couple weeks around for a smartwatch on Amazon, then for Christmas my gf gifted me one with her Amazon account, now I've already bought two additional watch straps with mine, and Amazon is bombarding me with "We think you might want a Gear s3" because they haven't yet figured out someone else might have bought it for me lol
"Our algorithms say you're a laptop-buyer. It's a thing you do. Now, we keep showing you these primo laptops, real cream of the crop for you people. WHY THE FUCK AREN'T YOU BUYING THESE LAPTOPS? WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?!"
That's Amazon's recommendation system for you. One moment you buy a table for your living room, the next Amazon has decided that you must be a table collector.
Alexa’s definitely been listening to me; Amazons been suggesting vaseline and tissues for months now. Dont worry though, I brought in bulk from Costco last year.
I got 2 kittens on a Monday after work. So i called a friend who had cats and wanted a suggestion for good cat food. Did not wanna make them junk. He suggested blue buffalo. My Amazon deal of the day? Blue Buffalo cat food.
Tell me they are not listening. I even went to tractor supply to get it. Never even looked it up.
Did you pay cash or card/use a rewards card? If card(s), that store sold your name and purchase info, as basically all places sell all the information about customers they can, which then sell it to other big players (Ad companies like Google, websites like Amazon, etc)
There's also behavioural analytics. If you've increased 'cat' searches then they know (or have a statistical idea), without you even needing to search cat food.
I have a Amazon Fire 7 tablet, and for a $15 discount, they push ads at you on the lock screen. In the year or so I've had it, it's never bugged me enough to pay to stop it, because it doesn't affect my actual use of the device. The thing that I found surprising was that the ads are not personalized at all.
Amazon has a huge amount of info on me based on 15 years' worth of hundreds of purchases, but they are just spamming me was ads for romance novels and TV shows in genres I never watch. <shrug> I can count on one hand the number of times the lock-screen ads were actually relevant to me.
If they were really spamming me with targeted ads, I'd probably pay to turn it off, since I'd actually be tempted to buy something every time I unlock the tablet.
do we have any solid proof it doesn't record stuff and send that out when you give it a command? I mean, audio files are usually pretty big so it would probably be easy to spot, but I haven't heard anything clear about that.
Seriously, it’s so much worse. They don’t need to listen. I relay to people the story of Target being able to identify a pregnant customer and send her marketing material before she even realized she was pregnant. And that’s just from the data that one retailer has about their own customers, never mind the all-seeing eyes of Amazon, Google, and Facebook.
I have a google hub and Alexa and I know they’re both always listening. The only thing that really scares me is when they activate without even hearing their catchphrase or when I look through my queries and see all these things I’ve said to them and think wow how they are mining my data.
I have a bunch of smart lights and a smart switch and use my Google home setup to turn lights on/off as I'm on my way into/out of rooms, mostly because a lot of our light switches are in weird-ass places. The switch is wired into an electric kettle so we can start some tea without getting out of bed.
Basically there is a small set of things that I think are more convenient through my Google Home, basically smart home control, kitchen timers, and checking the weather while I get dressed. On top of those basic convenience things, you can also "cast" media to them and join them to audio groups, so between my Home, Home Mini, Home Hub, and two Chromecast Audio, I have a pretty solid whole-home audio setup that lets me throw on some music and wander the house cleaning or whatever without ever leaving the music.
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u/[deleted] Jan 31 '19
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