These companies absolutely do use your microphone to listen.
My wife and I have tested this and you can too.
Have a conversation near your phones about purchasing something offbeat. We used a kitchen garbage disposal in our test. Talk about them for a few minutes, about needing to buy one, different brands, etc.
Almost immediately you’ll be served garbage disposal adds.
I even got an email out of nowhere right in my inbox from Dell the same day I was talking about Dell laptops with my book club. I would be so shocked if these examples are mere coincidence
Having worked on the tech side of email marketing campaigns I would actually be impressed
Setting aside confirmation bias (idk, because it’s boring?): So people you’re in a book club with, an established group which it is very easy to associate you with, were discussing Dell laptops… and you think it’s strange you got looped in? If three people from your book club all looked up dells later, or earlier, or etc. etc., why wouldn’t they figure you might also be interested in dell laptops? An approach that doesn’t require NLP of god only knows how much hypothetical audio taken from pockets, and works much better?
I’m just shocked that there are marketing departments that actually know what they’re doing. Granted I haven’t worked for any huge companies, so that’s probably why I have difficulty picturing it.
These companies absolutely do use your microphone to listen.
My wife and I have tested this and you can too.
Have a conversation near your phones about purchasing something offbeat. We used a kitchen garbage disposal in our test. Talk about them for a few minutes, about needing to buy one, different brands, etc.
Almost immediately you’ll be served garbage disposal adds.
This has been common knowledge for several years now.
There are deniers. They’re wrong.
I even got an email out of nowhere right in my inbox from Dell the same day I was talking about Dell laptops with my book club. I would be so shocked if these examples are mere coincidence
Having worked on the tech side of email marketing campaigns I would actually be impressed
Setting aside confirmation bias (idk, because it’s boring?): So people you’re in a book club with, an established group which it is very easy to associate you with, were discussing Dell laptops… and you think it’s strange you got looped in? If three people from your book club all looked up dells later, or earlier, or etc. etc., why wouldn’t they figure you might also be interested in dell laptops? An approach that doesn’t require NLP of god only knows how much hypothetical audio taken from pockets, and works much better?
I’m just shocked that there are marketing departments that actually know what they’re doing. Granted I haven’t worked for any huge companies, so that’s probably why I have difficulty picturing it.
I’ve tested this many times and never saw it happen.