So I am recently looking up the options to buy a new EV and, clearly, I’ve been discussing it with my family and close friends.
There was one constant tho, anytime we ended up discussing it, THEIR phones would light up with a plethora of Car adverts.
This has made my mother snap, she has told me she wants to buy the same phone as mine and I’ve finally been able to discuss with her other ways these devices are made to work for the manufacturer, not their buyers.
So far so good! I personally can’t wait to setup the GrapheneOS phone for her.
I’m glad for the switch. Buuuut it doesn’t work like that.
You search cars heavily. You and your Mum have FB/social media. You have Bluetooth or location or WiFi on. Social knows your hanging out and likely to discuss cars. It shows them ads.
A tech podcast did a dive into this. It even works if your partner and mum arnt connected on social media. Imagine your Mum lives interstate. Mum searches plane tickets and is coming in a month, during the time she searches perfumes but doesn’t buy. A few days before arrival your partner gets perfume ads from a place nearby. When mum lands she talks about getting perfume. Partner has been primed where to go.
Its insidious. Graphine will help a little but if you use the internet there is still tracking.
My phone carrier requires an app to change plans. I installed it in a separate profile then the next day got ads for it in FB.
The only relatively safe way to avoid it is to not use any app unless it’s from f-droid or similar places, to use a degoogled phone, to use an adblocker for all websites, to use an end-to-end messenger for private conversations and not social media, to use federated non-profit social media if you ever use any at all, to use a paid email provider that doesn’t make money of your data as primary income, and to use an actually private web search (not Bing, not Google).
It’s a shame that it requires so much knowledge and effort for a bare minimum of privacy.
You also shouldnt buy a new car because it’s going to do the same thing her phone was doing
lol “if you pay thousands of dollars for a car with surveillance capitalism features, you are the product”
My partner’s cousins love the spying. We were playing chess and talking about practicing more, and one cousin opened his phone and there were ads for chess apps. They were delighted.
I cannot imagine being excited by advertisements. Sounds like something out of Fahrenheit 451 or Brave New World.
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My partner had some similar instances where she discussed selling a niche product and ads popping up all of a sudden while we did not search for it or anything.
Are there any focused ideas on how this is triggered? First thing I thought of was us being listened in to but this is mostly dismissed when I read up online.
One thing that people often forget is TVs / stream boxes and Alexa/google assistants.
Smart TVs all have microphones that are recording (for “voice commands”) and the same with the remotes for stream devices (though probably not unless asked because of battery life), also google and Alexa’s are constantly always listening. They are simply spyware devices that parse everything you say and hand it to advertisers, insurance, governments, etc…
Phones also suffer from the battery life problem, so jury is still out on whether they listen to you because constantly recording audio would degrade battery life quite a bit (though maybe it is factored in). Phones absolutely do share location data and any phones discovered on the same WiFi network or in the same location if that data was available and from there will share entire search history of devices on the same network (well, that is on the data center end, phones likely just send what devices and for how long they were together). From there it is quite easy to advertised based on search history, unencrypted text data, etc…
For example in OP, OP had likely searched around about cars and checked out manufacturers websites and such before meeting with the parents (unless they were going in completely blind to dealerships), so it would have shared exactly the cars that they were looking at and linked it to the parents for advertising.
Still fucked, ethically wrong and legally grey, but “listening” is a bit of an inefficient way to do it, generally.
any focused ideas on how this is triggered?
Be careful of what you say in front our Smart TV, warns Samsung
i still highly doubt it’s audio recording. more likely that someone (even nearby, maybe at close ip/location) searched for it?
Can they attest that they didn’t interact with an online version of it? Googling it/the brand of it. otherwise yeah, we being spied on, be it audibly or otherwise is indifferent to me
I would love to get my partner on gOS but without google pay she’d be lost
I had this problem on Graphene, but (in the UK at least) there are alternative wallet apps. I’m on Curve myself.
I think its still usable, just like the sandboxed google play
That’s cool and all, but I don’t get these problems because I don’t have ads on my browser, my social media or YouTube
That doesn’t mean there might not be an app recording you. Stay away from Google phones and don’t use apps with microphone permissions unless they’re either open-source or they have a really good reason for having them.
Kind of sucks when you’re privacy conscious but can’t afford 400+ for a phone.
I agree. It’s a horrible situation.
I use a slow phone that supports postmarketOS, but it’s so far behind that I couldn’t recommend anybody else to use it. I guess the only “easy” solution is to only use a dumbphone for calls and as a hotspot where otherwise unavoidable, and to otherwise stay away from phones entirely…
I’m really sorry to tell you this, but dumb phones offer no security, either. I don’t even know if real (not VoIP)landline is secure anymore, but it’s probably more secure than mobile.
Oh I know they don’t, they just make it easier for you not to put any data into them.
Ads are the least of my concerns, but trackers can be used against you in many ways.
Hey grammar nazi moment here:
- Ads is the less of my concerns
Is better expressed as:
- Ads are the least of my concerns
I’m sorry, I fixed it. My english is getting worse every day, I’m not native but it’s definitely getting worse. Probably due to mental issues.
That’s life, one step at a time. Gotta take those hits with stride.
Don’t be sorry. I used to correct people thinking English wasn’t the native tongue, thinking perhaps people may appreciate it. Most don’t.
I’m sorry you’re suffering mh issues and hope you are able to find an expedient, affordable, effective way to address your health. Unfortunately, doing your own legwork until you stumble on something that works for you. And don’t be surprised if proven methods make you feel worse at first, because sitting with really uncomfortable feelings long enough to process them, usually multiple times (because healing isn’t linear) is part and parcel of a long, tedious process that actually works. The intricate trick is figuring out if feeling worse is because it’s working or because it’s exacerbating. Daunting and frustrating, but I’m not going to lie to you about it; but it is so worth it, if you can tolerate it.
If you’ve got an Android phone, you can turn your microphone and camera off at the system level with the whatever-it’s-called quick menu thing you pull down from the top.
I just keep them off always, unless I need it specifically to make/answer a call or take a photo.
If you receive a call, you get a pop up with yes/no about enabling the mic to answer. If you hit yes, you get the permissions pop up for the phone app and can allow it for “this time only”. The microphone will automatically shut back off when the call is done.
Never once had this happen to me.
This assumes nobody circumvents the software control of you’re microphone and camera hardware, but at least it increases the difficulty barrier to do this without informing the end user.
Yeah, it’s not airtight or anything, but it works well for what it does
