Anonymous wrote:DH was out with DD and mentioned that there was a crack in her water bottle and we needed to order a new one. The next day I started getting ads on gmail for the very specific type of water bottle she had.
During an appearance before a committee of U.K. lawmakers today, Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie breathed new life into longstanding rumors that the Facebook app listens to its users in order to target advertisements.
Damian Collins, a member of parliament who chaired the committee, asked whether the Facebook app might listen to what users are discussing and use it to prioritize certain ads.
“That’s probably a question for Facebook,” Wylie said.
But, Wylie said in a meandering reply, it’s possible that Facebook and other smartphone apps are listening in for reasons other than speech recognition. Specifically, he said, they might be trying to ascertain what type of environment a user is in in order to “improve the contextual value of the advertising itself.”
Anonymous wrote:Last night while playing with Amazon TV for the first time I saw the movie The Final Countdown was listed; The movie came out when I was eight years old and one is one of the first movies I can remember seeing. I started it and about 30 minutes in there was a character named Senator Samuel Chapman.
The movie has some historic references so I started typing into my iPhone SAMU and the auto fill came up with Senator Samuel Chapman, I follow the link and it explained how it was a poorly fictional character.
This is a 35-year-old movie and there have to have been so many more modern instances of note starting with SAMU...
The prime account is under my wife’s name, our router is acting funny so I was using cellular data on my phone; the microphone on my phone must be live every few minutes or so, that’s the only way I could possibly explain how a really vague start to a Google search could reveal such precise results to a 35-year-old movie reference.
Anonymous wrote:Yes I am freaked out by this. A coworker and I were in my office discussing a very RANDOM vacation destination. I have never been to this place nor ever researched going there EVER. 10 mins later, an ad pops using my Chrome browser for a vacation package to this destination- freaks me out.