Ancestors

Toot

Written by J. Peterson on 2024-04-28 at 01:28

My wife and some of her friends are heavy users of @signalapp. Three times now, she has had spam (email and/or ads, popups on other sites) start occurring for products she has only mentioned in a Signal conversation.

Enough to know it's not a coincidence.

Is Signal selling keywords to advertisers? The Mac OS text edit client?

@Mer__edith

=> More informations about this toot | More toots from isonno@mastodon.social

Descendants

Written by Meredith Whittaker on 2024-05-01 at 19:08

@isonno @signalapp God no. Never. Ever. Literally would rather shut down than even consider such a thing.

=> More informations about this toot | More toots from Mer__edith@mastodon.world

Written by small patatas on 2024-05-01 at 19:40

Yeah my thoughts quickly went to this fantastic article from 2018: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/may/03/why-silicon-valley-cant-fix-itself-tech-humanism

It's long (and well worth reading!) but for anyone short on time, do a ctrl-f for the phrase 'When Zuckerberg announced' to get the gist of what I think is likely happening: surveillance advertisers know who your close friends are, and if you're talking about it on signal, you're probably also both searching/browsing for those products on the web

@Mer__edith

@isonno

=> More informations about this toot | More toots from smallpatatas@gotosocial.patatas.ca

Written by J. Peterson on 2024-05-02 at 09:44

@smallpatatas @Mer__edith @signalapp Thanks for the response.

So the theory is my wife's correspondent searched the product, and Google's/XYZ-ad-network's state vector correlated my wife and her correspondent, and started showing my wife the ads too.

Apparently this is considered the likely source of the "Facebook is listening to my phone" episodes.

https://lifehacker.com/facebook-isn-t-recording-your-conversations-but-it-may-1820193946

=> More informations about this toot | More toots from isonno@mastodon.social