Interesting. I just texted a friend "car insurance, need car insurance, buy a car and I need insurance".
My next advert on Gmail was "Ford Transit from £179 pm The Best Prices Guaranteed."
Possibly a coincidence, I'm not sure. I don't drive currently and haven't emailed anyone about wanting to or planning to, etc. I also use Ghostery and rarely am signed in to Gmail.
Huh? I mean, I would assume if you use Google Voice, they have an ability to do so. I doubt they are, if anything they might use text messages the way they use Gmail mails, but this article seems to be implying that Google has access to calls between arbitrary subscribers on arbitrary networks.
Besides that being an absurd claim, I'd rather Google do it than those who we already KNOW are listening to them....
Google's privacy policy allows them to use a person's data to develop new products and services. Scanning voice communications for key words and then converting those into targeted advertising seems like it would be consistent with such use.
And without the intent to do something along those lines, it is hard to see a business case under which Google could justify devoting resources to Voice.
"And without the intent to do something along those lines, it is hard to see a business case under which Google could justify devoting resources to Voice."
I agree. They offer Google Voice, and it's easy to assume they apply the same type of analysis to voice communications like they do with other forms of communication.
The post itself is a bit looney but the question is fair. I once noticed in my GV history a transcript of an outgoing message I'd left on another machine. Which is weird, because I thought GV was only supposed to transcribe incoming messages. Unfortunately I didn't save a copy or take a screenshot so I have no way of proving I didn't hallucinate the whole thing.
Since the first example given is about wearing a T-shirt with the Dutch flag on it and getting Gmail adds about Holland, I think this is a offhand post about coincidences rather than something suggesting Google is monitoring voice calls to give more relevant advertising.
I think this post was written mostly as a joke, right?
First of all, it was written in 2009, secondly it starts:
Now this is really really eerie stuff. Today I came to office wearing my “Holland” T-shirt. I normally never wear this shirt to office.
I fired up my Gmail in the browser, and see a “Study in Holland” Google ad!
Now, maybe my sense of humour is way off, but I think the guy wasn't being serious about Google looking at his shirt and serving adverts based on it...
It is possible to do it though. I was in bangalore when that happened (and carried a non-Android phone at that time). Google already knows what I look like, and Banaglore is full of surveillance cameras everywhere. It also knew where my office was based on my GMail login co-ordinates. So if you stitch up all of that you can produce that sort of advertisements. (I am the author of the blog post)
On a related note, a friend was recently telling me they think Apples big strategy is in being able to mine the Siri data stream of a user. So to me this doesn't seem as far fetched when considered from that perspective.
Getting Siri data and recording phone calls are totally different things. Siri using your data to improve itself isn't a big deal, in my opinion. That's because you're talking directly to a service, you shouldn't expect it to be totally private.
Phone calls are different, they're meant to be private.
I see your distinction. I'm not talking about Siri improving itself I'm talking about Apple suddenly now being the primary recipient of your search requests and mining the voice data. You could say your emails should be just as private as your phone calls. I see this as just Googles version of the same strategy. Not saying I agree with it though.
And the blog-post wasn't talking about "Google Voice". It was regular phone conversation (pre-android). The author believes (and I sort of agree with him) that Google perhaps has a deal with service providers (in India) that allows them to mine voice conversations and use the information to provide targeted content.
If both are using the same WiFi router, it's trivial to correlate a phone and computer on a small network. Particularly if you have lots of data regarding the browsing patters of both devices.
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 65.1 ms ] threadMy next advert on Gmail was "Ford Transit from £179 pm The Best Prices Guaranteed."
Possibly a coincidence, I'm not sure. I don't drive currently and haven't emailed anyone about wanting to or planning to, etc. I also use Ghostery and rarely am signed in to Gmail.
Besides that being an absurd claim, I'd rather Google do it than those who we already KNOW are listening to them....
However it would not be out of the question google had the technology to do this. Not sure this is a breach of privacy.
And without the intent to do something along those lines, it is hard to see a business case under which Google could justify devoting resources to Voice.
http://www.google.com/enterprise/search/
However, obviously it's not their main source of revenue, but they are in that business.
I agree. They offer Google Voice, and it's easy to assume they apply the same type of analysis to voice communications like they do with other forms of communication.
http://www.google.com/googlevoice/about.html
First of all, it was written in 2009, secondly it starts:
Now this is really really eerie stuff. Today I came to office wearing my “Holland” T-shirt. I normally never wear this shirt to office.
I fired up my Gmail in the browser, and see a “Study in Holland” Google ad!
Now, maybe my sense of humour is way off, but I think the guy wasn't being serious about Google looking at his shirt and serving adverts based on it...
Phone calls are different, they're meant to be private.
http://www.google.com/patents/US20040083101
And the blog-post wasn't talking about "Google Voice". It was regular phone conversation (pre-android). The author believes (and I sort of agree with him) that Google perhaps has a deal with service providers (in India) that allows them to mine voice conversations and use the information to provide targeted content.
Telcos ask for email addresses at the time of subscribing to their plans. Most people end up providing their gmail address. This gentleman did too.
Fun fact: the wikipedia article contains a link to Littlewood's law (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Littlewood%27s_law), another lesser-known piece of trivia