(ORDO NEWS) — Journalists from the Daily Mail decided to conduct an experiment to check whether it is true that Android smartphones listen and record users’ conversations in order to show them relevant ads.
However, the results of the experiment disproved this conspiracy theory. In addition, the experiment helped clarify how contextual advertising works on mobile devices.
During the experiment, journalists used a Samsung smartphone reset to factory settings with a new Google account.
This account was registered to a fictitious person named Robin, and the journalists spoke out loud the names of various products using this phone.
However, after a two-day experiment, the ads were not focused on the control words. But when journalists used mobile app search and Google Assistant, the algorithm for selecting ads changed significantly.
As soon as the journalist started looking for products on Google, ads began to appear in his search engine.
This smartphone behavior can be disabled at myadcenter.google.com in the “Ads personalization” section.
There you can also adjust the list of brands suitable for the user, prohibit advertising of any category of goods, or find out what Google knows about the user based on the information provided by them: marital status, income, knowledge of languages, age, presence of children, etc.
According to cybersecurity expert Jordan Schroeder, Google does not need to listen in on user conversations for at least two reasons.
Firstly, the company has other ways to get information about the user, and secondly, listening costs are too high for the company to recoup through advertising.
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