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.

[–] notenoughbutter@lemmy.ml 11 points 2 years ago (2 children)

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

[–] june@lemmy.world 9 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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.

[–] graham1@gekinzuku.com 22 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Yeah but Facebook probably has access to the other person's contacts where your name and phone number were stored

[–] june@lemmy.world 5 points 2 years ago

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.

[–] PipedLinkBot@feddit.rocks 7 points 2 years ago

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[–] outdated_belated@lemmy.sdf.org 11 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

There was the incident of Target or some store realizing someone was pregnant before they did themselves, which seems relevant here.

[–] NevermindNoMind@lemmy.world 12 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

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.

[–] scifu@lemm.ee 9 points 2 years ago

And yet they can’t recommend a song that I would actually like.

[–] Holzkohlen@feddit.de 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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.

[–] TeckFire@lemmy.world 1 points 2 years ago

My dumbass reread this comment 3 times before I realized you weren’t looking into buying trailers

[–] Zuberi@lemmy.world -2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

This is such a fucking dumb comment lol.

[–] noodlejetski@geddit.social 1 points 2 years ago

https://gizmodo.com/these-academics-spent-the-last-year-testing-whether-you-1826961188

[–] BubblyMango@lemmy.wtf -3 points 2 years ago

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" ?

[–] Zuberi@lemmy.world -3 points 2 years ago

Dumb take is dumb