As every professional will tell you, one of the business dangers of attending social events is that people you barely know use it as an opportunity to get free advice from you for the price of a drink. , for which they do not even pay. Doctors are ambushed by strangers looking for a second opinion, stockbrokers are scolded for stock tips, and even chefs have to withhold requests for recipes—such as at a noisy bar. The culinary secrets described could be worth the experience of a lifetime.
When people find out I’m a tech lawyer, the conversation inevitably leads to secrecy. In most cases, there is a 50:50 chance that someone will ask me if it is true that our phones are always on, we listen to everything they say. Before I have a chance to respond, another person gives an example of how they found an ad about information so personal that it must be from someone or someone listening in private. And things go downhill from there.
According to a Consumer Reports survey (‘Is your smartphone secretly listening to you?’ bit.ly/3rQzDiW), 43% of respondents believed their phone was recording their conversations without their permission. The idea that our mobile devices spy on us all the time has now become so ingrained in our minds that it is widely believed to be an irrefutable fact. Everyone has a story about how little moments after they decide on a family vacation, they are flooded with information about their chosen destination. Or how after returning from a vacation, he found advertisements for a toothpaste he used there, even though all he did was put in his mouth – don’t speak about it.
As compelling as the evidence for this may sound, it is incredibly difficult to implement an always-on electronic surveillance system like this. In an article in Wired magazine, former ad-tech entrepreneur Antonio García Martínez crunched the numbers to demonstrate the challenge of statistics. The average voice-over-internet-protocol (VoIP) call consumes about 3 kilobytes of data per second – which means that if our phones record whatever we hear and upload it to a cloud for processing, So each phone would need to push about 260MB. Data per day to remote servers. Aside from the fact that it’s hard to imagine any of us wouldn’t notice if our phones actually consumed this level of data bandwidth, overall, the total amount of data that could be generated by such an operation Too big for even the largest organizations. Analysis. There are over 500 million active social media users in India alone, suggesting that the ad-tech industry would have to process more than 64 petabytes a day using this information to target ads at us.
Even if this is technically possible, we need to ask ourselves whether such an approach is a useful allocation of resources. To be able to extract useful cues from the noise of casual conversation, we need the voice recognition and natural language processing capabilities that are currently available. Human conversation is incredibly complex—intuitive, short-handed, and full of nuance, as it is, for any existing artificial-intelligence tool to understand. Even if we can record every conversation that takes place within hearing range of the closest mobile device, we don’t have the technology to be able to extract value from it—at least not at the cost that advertisers would expect. Will be ready to pay.
The unfortunate reality is that the advertising industry has other equally effective ways of generating personal insights about us that cost only a fraction of this elaborate eavesdropping exercise. Martinez points out that advertisers already pay data aggregators to collect vast amounts of data about us from everywhere. All of this data is filled with unique identifiers—mobile numbers, email addresses, dates of birth—which allows them to cross-reference information from different data sources and create incredibly granular profiles about us. A large part of this data is also tagged with our GPS coordinates, which is generated by apps that have allowed us to track our location for a variety of purposes—for example, from our personal profiles to our family’s. Allows for cross-reference with members and colleagues. , in whose physical proximity we often find ourselves. This is how advertisers generate their remarkably insightful predictions about us.
Despite everything I’ve said so far, there are probably still some incidents in your personal experience that defy explanation—advertising messages are so faintly prescient that there’s no way they’re directed at you without someone listening. can. In these cases, all I would suggest is not to rule out availability bias. As Kahneman and Tversky pointed out, humans have a tendency to over-weight their judgments in favor of easily remembered information. This, coupled with a confirmation bias that is constantly nurtured by similar experiences shared by people around, may explain why the conspiracy theory of persistent electronic surveillance still survives.
The fact is, as long as Internet businesses rely on advertising for revenue, data profiling won’t stop. In the previous articles in this column, I have pointed out that we need to remove our dependence on advertising and adopt alternative business models. Until we do, I see no loss in the inventiveness that advertisers will deploy to understand us more accurately. Or in the obstinacy of surveillance.
Rahul Mathan is a partner in Trilegal and also has a podcast called Ex Machina. His twitter handle @matthan . Is
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