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Simon Willison

Here's one thread on Lobste.rs - triggered by a new story about that thing from December last year where an ad sales team at Cox Media Group were caught lying to their customers about having "active listening" technology that targeted ads based on recorded audio: lobste.rs/s/mf7guc/leak_facebo

2 September at 17:27 | Open on fedi.simonwillison.net
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Simon Willison

Here's the ad sales pitch deck in question - my "this is a total scam" antenna were vibrating like crazy when I read it documentcloud.org/documents/25

2 September at 17:28 | Open on fedi.simonwillison.net
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@simon
When I was in my 18-early 20's, I was a bit more chaos fuelled.

I worked out that a certain type of person, with a very specific tattoo, liked one of a few sentences about their tattoo.

I didn't know them. I didn't need to have listened to them. This tattoo, meant I could use a few lines.

All the "ads are listening" folks are saying is "How are the ads being targetted at me?".

3 September at 2:45 | Open on phpc.social
gabert

@simon
Yeah i was disillusioned when a video titled "they are listening to us after all" (or something to that accord) had only this pitfh deck to show for proof. It's a nothing sandwich as far as I am concerned until there is literal proof. Here the video in question youtu.be/2wjy-v7RXtg

3 September at 6:45 | Open on troet.cafe
nilesh

@simon Here is CMG's "denial" from last December.

Note the way this denial is phrased which still allows third-party apps listening & then sharing either the audio or the data inferred from it with CMG.

- They say "do not LISTEN" instead of "do no ANALYZE" conversations.
- "data set" is too broad and includes both raw audio and inferred data.
- "encrypted" is meaningless if CMG has the decryption keys.
- No explanation given for the article published on the official website.
5 September at 3:34 | Open on fosstodon.org
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