A true event happened to a friend of mine. It involves “Cheetos” but it is not about that product, nor the manufacturer and this story in no way is meant to accuse anyone or detract from any one or anything. It’s not about Cheetos.
She (my friend) was visiting with her family, and was watching the GrandKid for a bit while Mom and Dad were out. GrandKid was taking care of himself, so she had her laptop open to do some work. Then he comes to her and proclaims he is hungry, can he have some “Cheetos,” please. This was per family custom, so Grandma allowed as he could, and went to the kitchen to fetch some.
When she returned to her laptop there was an ad on the website that she’d been working with, now showing an ad for… yes… “Cheetos.” And that’s not the only time such a thing has happened to her, and I’ve had it reported since by other folks.
Think you camera is problem? And you put tape over the camera, right? (If not you, trust me, lots and lots of folks do.) But we forget about the microphones that are also built into all laptops and tablets and phones now. Speech to text services like Cortana and Alexis (just to name two) are potentially marvelous at picking up stray “key words” and reporting them the whatever the advertising space is on the current website. (I’m not saying this happens, but it seems the obvious conclusion from evidence.)
This doesn’t happen often, maybe because then it would become too obvious otherwise? A single such event could be called coincidence, but several such incidents become statistically improbable.
Where / when did you agree that the search engines / ad services / internet has the right to listen to what you are saying without even letting you know?
Again, this is NOT about Cheetos or the manufacturer of same. Probably they and other such clients of the Internet Advertising Systems don’t even know this goes on. If this is actually what it seems to have been.
Improbable is not impossible. Just very, very unlikely (to mis-quote Douglas Adams).
By the way, you can turn your microphones off on your devices; you can also monitor what the microphone is hearing. Just a thought.