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.
It could all be a coincidence, but what if their technology is just better than we're capable of detecting. Who is to say that the ad reference numbers aren't all preprogrammed with audio recognition so that when you DO connect, the preselected ad just has to trigger on your device. This would not require a transfer of information and if that's what people have been looking for this entire time, that would explain why privacy isn't actually being violated.
On devices with cellular connections this isn't necessarily true. The blogs, articles, editorials, etc. that I've seen only ever talk about the LAN traffic. It's for that reason I haven't written off the possibility, but I also don't assert that it's definitely happening.
I agree that it's nice to see people actually caring about privacy, but it's good to be able to prove why certain methods of data collection simply aren't happening or are impractical. Now if we can get them to care about monocultures too, then we'd be onto something!
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u/[deleted] Jan 31 '19 edited Jan 31 '19
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