After a week at my mom’s house I'm getting ads for her toothpaste brand

Re:After a week at my mom’s house I'm getting ads for her to... by Kiro on Sunday May 30, 2021 @09:58AM (#27333285)

As the Twitter thread says this has been debunked many times. People have been sniffing traffic for years trying to find evidence of this. However, the point of the thread is that they don't need to since they have other, possibly more sinister, ways to target you.

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Re:After a week at my mom’s house I'm getting ads for her to... by dotancohen on Sunday May 30, 2021 @10:04AM (#27333335)

Other ways of targeting may yield other results, but surely there is value in verbal keywords as well.

In fact, not only keywords but even by just knowing verbal habits such as phrases used, frequency of curse words, accents, etc, could be very valuable in targeted marketing. The couple who regularly say phrases such as "please prepare the tea, dear" may be better to target different ads to than the couple which regularly say "wazzup dog".

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Re:After a week at my mom’s house I'm getting ads for her to... by Kiro on Sunday May 30, 2021 @10:23AM (#27333441)

Yes, but when you can get similar results using completely "legal" methods that people, even when confronted with straight facts like this, don't seem to care about - why would you risk it?

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Re:After a week at my mom’s house I'm getting ads for her to... by dotancohen on Sunday May 30, 2021 @10:50AM (#27333639)

Did the US government use completely "legal" wiretapping methods?

And their is nothing illegal about listening for keywords, even if the companies currently deny doing so. There really is no risk: The people up in arms about privacy will remain up in arms, and the 99% who don't care will continue not caring.

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