Big Brother is Watching · 8:49pm May 18th, 2022
Yesterday, I went to see an orthodontist about fixing my terrible teeth. He sat down with my X-rays and proposed two options: a retainer, or aligners.
I got his name, address, and phone number from my doctor, written down, by hand, on paper. His office is half a mile away, on a street I know well, so I didn't have to look it up. I parked across the street and a few offices down from his. I took the printed documents they gave me home, threw them on my desk, and did nothing at all with them or about them.
Today, the first or second web page I looked at with ads on it, showed me an ad for aligners.
How does Google know that an orthodontist just told me about aligners? I did no relevant Google searches, not for aligners, or orthodontists, or for my orthodontist (I just checked).
The only thing I can think of is either that Google had software that read my Google Calendar appointment to see the orthodontist, and figured out that it was an orthodontist's office; or that my Android phone used my location to figure out that I was in an orthodontist's office and reported that to Google Ads.
Even more creepy, the orthodontist usually recommends braces. How did the advertiser know to show me aligners?
Any other ideas how they did it? Anyone have similar experiences?
ADDED: Yep, my phone identified my orthodontist's office, and reported that to Google. It's in my location history. I didn't know Google mined that for advertisements.
oh yea, they use the location tracking from everything, so if you give ANYTHING permission to see your location, they get free info
the rest is guess work and trial and error on their algorithms part, but it's had a lot of practice, and plenty of data to compare from even before the proper digital era
normally I'd follow that with a "we'll soon be hailing our digital overlords", but more and more I begin to realize we already do, albeit with something of a "ironic" or joking tone; but that's how it always begins, yea?
as to what that ultimately means for us, eh, I ain't bright enough for that one
The only thing I can think of is either that Google had software that read my Google Calendar appointment to see the orthodontist, and figured out that it was an orthodontist's office; or that my Android phone used my location to figure out that I was in an orthodontist's office and reported that to Google Ads.
Likely that.
And this is why I keep GPS/Location turned off, and prevent apps from accessing location. Doesn't stop Google, but I can at least try to achieve a false sense of security/privacy.
Yeah. You don't want retainers. They always need livery and small beer and sumpters to ride.
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ed up ****.
Fun fact from someone who actually read 1984: it's never made clear whether Big Brother technically exists. Orwell wrote some
yeah, it uses location tracking, and combines it with both what it knows about that location (the orthodontist, and anything else nearby) and other people's searches around that location. That's how sometimes, if you're talking to someone else about something and *they* look something like that up, you might get ads for it!
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Any public wifi you connect to that gives you an IP address will also have an approximate location with it. It isn't too hard to figure out. Isn't data terrifying?!?!?! John Oliver did a great video about the terrifying realities of data. That's not even getting into the nightmare of social media! And, short of not bringing your phone along with you and trying to stay unrecognizable to all technology everywhere, there's nothing you can really *do* about it.
I only wish I could somehow profit off of it. I mean, if they're gonna sell MY data, I should at least get a cut, and be able to tell them they're wrong when they send me manly sports ads.5658461 Friends don't let friends connect to public wifi.
Goog mine everything for advertisements. The only things they don't harvest, at this point, are blood and stool samples, but it's only because they haven't figured out a way to con people into handing them over yet.
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My [FFxiv mmo] retainers live in opulence, they each have a cardboard box to live in rather than having to share. I know, it's rather extravagant but sometimes you just have to splurge for your lackies.
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Two words: "Smart Toilets". It's definitely on the way.
While they can't mine blood sample data yet (thanks to HIPAA regulations, which may or may not last); if you get genetic testing done through some place like 23andMe, they sell the genetic data to various organizations.
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I'm confident that 23andme removes your name from that data before selling it to ANYBODY. And they're up-front about what they do; the testing is cheap BECAUSE they sell the data.
Genetic data is TOO private today; it's currently impossible for most researchers to get useful genetic data from studies, because corporate lawyers and government officials are too afraid of the uncharted waters there.
The FDA granted themselves authority over genetic testing (without any legal basis other than their claim that a microarray is a "medical device"). This is why 23andme is useless for most people. They used to give you lots of information about what diseases you might be likely to get, but the FDA basically said they were practicing medicine without a license, and the AMA said this was obviously criminal since no doctors were being paid. At first the FDA just ordered them to cease operations, saying it was illegal to give people genetic info without having a doctor sit down and discuss each one of the 600,000 alleles in the 23andme data.
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just wanna say donating plasma makes bank right now and its great cause you dont feel woozy afterwards like with whole blood donation and its for a good cause!
But I mean, Jesus, why:
1. Didn't you just walk? You don’t need to take you care for a half-mile outing.
2. Leave your phone at home? Do you really need carrying your phone around?
3. Didn't you turn your phone location off. I’m not sure it would be useful, though.
4. Change for a handed-down iPhone? :p
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If you are making bank off it arent you not donating though? :p
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Semantics-schmantics
This effectively happens to me all the time. I'm 99% sure google listens to your conversations. I'll be discussing something specific with a friend, like, say, what day of the week Hitler died on, I'll go to google it, and by the time I've typed "on what" google offers the auto fill search option "on what day of the week did Hitler die". Creepy eh? That's way too specific to guess on two words, and somehow I don't think the subject is top of the search charts, so that isn't why google suggested it. They're clearly listening. Gives me the warmest of fuzzies inside.
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Check whether you have something like Bixby or Siri running in the background. Doing stuff like that is their purpose.
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). I've got it disabled, but checking into the settings again I see it still had permission to my microphone. Shouldn't be using it while disabled, of course, but I guess that's a 20th century mentality.
Actually all my phone has is google assistant (it's a google pixel--"well there's your problem"
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Samsung (Bixby) and Apple (Siri) are both hyper-paranoid about collecting too much user data or using it improperly. Sometimes Samsung sucks at the "not collecting data" part, but it's generally due to a lack of coordination, not due to anything like profit motives. Maybe that'll change in the future, but at least for now it's a pretty safe bet that they're not mining your data.
Bixby's purpose was to build out an ecosystem around voice-based interactions. The hypothesis was that voice could provide a rich interface to the phone, and control over that interface would be important for extending operating system functionality. Samsung is gung-ho about differentiating their operating system from other mobile OS's. Most of Samsung's money comes from selling hardware, and they know it. They see their software as a way to introduce selling points for the sake of selling more hardware.
I don't know if Siri had some purpose beyond trying to be a useful feature, but Apple has an extremely strong privacy culture internally.
Of the three big mobile OS vendors, Google is the only one that gets any significant amount of money from data and analytics. Samsung does have an advertising business (Samsung Ads), and maybe Samsung Ads does sketchy things with that data, but it's mostly an independent thing, and they're certainly not getting Bixby voice data. There may be some apps share data with Samsung Ads, but these are going to be more obvious cases where the app is sending you context-aware things. These teams talk to each other out of necessity, not out of some joint vision like modeling the user.
All of this applies to mobile phones. I don't know what goes on with other devices.
Of the three, Google seems to be the only one that fundamentally does not understand what privacy means. Seniors on their privacy team seem to think that privacy is just a part of cryptography, and they seem incapable of understanding what's wrong with Google using all of the data it collects across apps for ads. As far as they're concerned, it's only a privacy issue if their data leaks externally, regardless of which Google systems use which data.
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Interesting. Thanks for the inside view.