Post

Huh oh. As a committed anti-conspiracy-theorist for the "phones listen to your microphone and targeted ads based on what you say" thing I can tell this is going to be exhausting

From the Reuters story: www.reuters.com/legal/apple-... "Two plaintiffs said their mentions of Air Jordan sneakers and Olive Garden restaurants triggered ads for those products. Another said he got ads for a brand name surgical treatment after discussing it, he thought privately, with his doctor."

... but since the case is being settled, I don't think we get to hear if that ended up being proven or not It's actually a detail that originates with the original lawsuit filing back in 2021 www.reuters.com/technology/a...

I bet that detail ends being used as "proof" that this happens from now on out, and nobody will ever try to explain how Apple's Q&A recordings of snippets of wake words were somehow fed in realtime to the world's ad networks in a way that resulted in as targeting shortly afterwards

It would be interesting to see what happened if USA congress tried to pass a law banning ad targeting via surreptitious microphone recordings, mainly because I would love to see who came out to lobby AGAINST that

I'm fully aware that this is a total waste of my time, but I wrote a blog post about this anyway: simonwillison.net/2025/Jan/2/t...

It used to be easier to argue against this (read: still impossible) because it was trivially technically infeasible. On-device voice recognition wasn’t a thing and the bandwidth to process audio from a billion devices wouldn’t have been worth it. Now that on-device voice recognition is good, though…