What You Say to Google Assistant and Alexa (but Not Siri) Gets Used for Ad Targeting. (Study)

deme on 11/09/2023 - 09:23

https://www.consumerreports.org/electronics/digital-assistan…

What the Researchers Did
To figure out just how voice assistants profile you, researchers spent hours creating fake user personas on Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, and Apple’s Siri. (Consumer Reports partly funded the study.)

They asked each assistant a series of questions designed to give lots of hints about the personas’ demographics. For example, asking for “family trip destinations” was meant to suggest that the hypothetical user was married; “apartments near Boston” could show that the user rents their home.

Next, the team looked to see how each company had categorized the user personas. Google makes it easy to see those categories—they appear on the company’s My Ad Center page—but Amazon and Apple make you request a download of your user data, a process that can take days.

Outcomes varied. Google usually assigned the tags the researchers expected, but not always: It consistently assigned the “homeowner” tag to personas who asked about topics like mortgage payments, but it tagged some users as “single” after when they asked for things like Disney tickets for a family. In real life, if Google gets a user’s profile tags wrong, that person might get less relevant ads and search results in the future.

Computing Voice Assistant

Comments

  • Mechz on 11/09/2023 - 09:31
    +1

    Shocking.

  • MS Paint on 11/09/2023 - 09:32

    Hey Google. Unsubscribe.

  • Jimothy Wongingtons on 11/09/2023 - 09:32
    +6

    what's the saying? when the service is free, you are the product

    • deme on 11/09/2023 - 09:33

      Buy you have to pay for Google Smart Speakers?

      • Jimothy Wongingtons on 11/09/2023 - 09:34
        +2

        no ongoing costs for the service itself and any feature upgrades to go with it though - servers etc dont run on good will and feelings of self satisfaction they are helping the world

        • ihfree on 11/09/2023 - 09:48
          +2

          The average consumer does seem to expect free services online. This could be a lack of understanding, entitlement, or maybe it is pushed by certain groups. As an example, mainstream media were really against Musk's plan to charge $8 a month for 'X' to avoid being the product.

          Ultimately, at the end of the day it's up to consumers to decide what they are comfortable with balancing costs, convenience, etc. You can avoid advertising by:

          • Ad blocking
          • Not using services
          • Self hosting apps
          • Paying subscriptions
          • Selecting different service providers
          • rumblytangara on 11/09/2023 - 09:59
            +1

            @ihfree:

            The average consumer does seem to expect free services online. This could be a lack of understanding, entitlement, or maybe it is pushed by certain groups. As an example, mainstream media were really against Musk's plan to charge $8 a month for 'X' to avoid being the product.

            I think that the big names using Twitter were refusing to pay the $8 because they already knew they were the product.

        • Chandler on 11/09/2023 - 13:33
          +1

          on good will and feelings of self satisfaction they are helping the world

          what's the saying? exposure

  • ESEMCE on 11/09/2023 - 09:59
    +2

    The only surprise from this study is that Apple apparently don't feed Siri data into their Ad platform.

    • ihfree on 11/09/2023 - 10:23
      +1

      Privacy is one of the ways Apple differentiate themselves from Android. They also made changes to their platform a while ago which broke Meta's ad system(random source).

      Google are an advertising company. Amazon wants to sell you everything. Apple's ad business is a reasonably small percentage of their companies revenue so I don't imagine this will change anytime soon.

      • ESEMCE on 11/09/2023 - 10:38
        +2

        Privacy is one of the ways Apple differentiate themselves from Android.

        Yes, I'm aware that Apple promote this, but Ad revenue is a massive growth area for Apple and it's likely already at 1% of annual revenue ($3b on $300b), essentially entirely profit too.

        https://appleinsider.com/articles/22/06/15/apple-ad-business…
        https://www.statista.com/statistics/1330127/apple-ad-revenue…

        • ihfree on 11/09/2023 - 14:10

          AFAICT, the only ad service that Apply currently provide is search ads.

          It will be an interesting one to watch and see if the path changes - I don't feel like they could without damaging their hardware business.

          • ESEMCE on 11/09/2023 - 14:54

            @ihfree: And they've been active in the business for a total of (not even) 3 years.
            You don't seriously think that today's model is the mature business do you?
            If they do not continue to grow the Ad business and all the sweet, sweet, almost zero effort, revenue, that comes from it, then the board should be voted out!

            • ihfree on 11/09/2023 - 15:11

              @ESEMCE: Probably not - from your article, they point out the size of the market.

              With rules around replaceable batteries and hardware at a level that is good enough there is potential for shrinking of the hardware market - it definitely could be a potential revenue stream. That said, ads in the app store and apps in ads are quite different.

              It would also be interesting to see if previous changes made to the privacy policy benefit a potential future business from Apple. If so, maybe there's some potential for an antitrust case.

              Either way, until something actually happens it is all just speculation.

    • Sinnerator on 12/09/2023 - 09:30
      -1

      apple will be doing something dodgy they just have obfuscated it, or simply gave free iphones to the researchers not to report ;-)

  • barge-in hunter on 11/09/2023 - 11:29

    This is interesting - but am disappointed I can't find a link to the study/references in the article (either disappointed in the author for not putting them in, or myself for not seeing it).

    I'll do some digging to find the original case study as I'd like to understand things like:
    - what devices the researchers used (just Amazon/Google/Apple "smart speakers", or third party devices - like a Samsung/LG TV running Google TV, or a phone or tablet running Android)
    - how controlled the environment was - were the devices able to hear other random conversation or just the tested "hey google" commands… were they within range of other previously identified bluetooth or wifi enabled devices.

  • jv on 11/09/2023 - 15:20

    What You Say to Google Assistant and Alexa (but Not Siri) Gets Used for Ad Targeting.

    Hey Google, what's the time.

    • deme on 11/09/2023 - 17:49

      As an ethical language model, I cannot tell you the time.

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