Dozens of times in the past few years I've been served relevant ads on some topic instantly after discussing it in person in proximity to a smartphone. I've encountered countless other anecdotal stories from friends. When this happens I feel an acute sense of violation and vulnerability. It's hard to imagine a less sinister explanation for this phenomena.
This seems like something that could be settled via some kind of study, like playing audio to the phone and recording what ads get shown and doing it to a population of phones and social media accounts.
> It's hard to imagine a less sinister explanation for this phenomena.
You just forget all the other signal you've giving. Funnily enough, last week somebody was trying to convince me that Facebook was recording their every word.
"I was telling a friend about a recent trip to Thailand", they said, "and I immediately saw an ad for Thai Tea". I asked if he'd used Facebook when he was in Thailand. He had.
Which is more likely: Facebook is recording every conversation of every user on their app and mini them for ads or the advertiser in question just targeted people who had recently been to Thailand.
You can't imagine a less sinister explanation other than Facebook or some other entity is secretly recording your voice and the voices of millions of people, in violation of numerous state and federal laws, through their smartphone microphones, uploading it to their servers surreptitiously, performing voice analysis on it to determine who is speaking out of 350,000,000 possible cases (presumably they've already cataloged everyone in the country somehow?), and then use that to serve you more targeted advertising?!
True, it seems far-fetched at first. We should keep in mind that a even few short years ago theorizing about the US Government operating a widespread domestic electronic surveillance dragnet was still the realm of delusional conspiracy theorists.
I don't see how that matters. Besides, people have been discussing widespread, domestic electronic surveillance for decades far outside conspiracy fringes. The Clipper chip, as just one example, was a big deal at the time and received widespread, mainstream coverage.
I mean, they did break iOS platform rules and pulled some tricks to keep the app open in the background all of the time by sending an empty audio beffer to the phone for "playback."
Not sure if it is so far fetched to do some lightweight voice analysis (client side) and store significant terms in the same way that you would store search history.
I can add to that anecdote... I was discussing which podcast app was best for Android with a friend, and in the presence of her Android phone. The next day, she started getting served ads for podcast apps all over the place.
Keep in mind, this was someone who would have been completely new to podcasting and have never searched for podcasts or podcast apps before.
I was using google navigation and someone in the back asked "what do you mean one-size fits all"... then my phone which was only running navigator chimed in "one-size fits all means blah blah blah" was definitely creepy.
Google Maps navigation feature listens for verbal input (although it's supposed to be triggered by the wake word) to do things like add stops and such without touching it
Interesting to see the dramatic rise in deaths related to substance abuse from 1996 onwards, the year Purdue Pharma introduced Oxycontin. It's especially glaring in the most impoverished parts of Appalachia.
What did they honestly think was going to happen when they introduced internet terminals across the city?
I struggle to understand the city's response to this issue, aggressive filtering could have achieved the same goal of preventing unseemly public web browsing.
We're a new digital consultancy in NYC looking for a designer we can work with on a number of upcoming projects. We have office space in Williamsburg but also would be open to remote work.
It doesn't seem to me like he has an agenda. Keep in mind that the "duck boats" are pretty much universally reviled by natives in Philadelphia; they are loud, feel out of place in the neighborhoods they operate in and are full of gawking tourists.
The incident in 2010 he mentioned was pretty big news in Philly. Just seems like a concerned reporter who was at the right place at the right time and noticed a series of recurring events with these boats.
Seconded. Although it's true this was likely the fault of the woman (she apparently walked in to traffic against a light in a high-traffic neighborhood while staring at her phone) it took about 5 minutes for news of it to get around Philly. I learned about it before the scene had even been cleared.
That would be true if there was a salary bubble. There isn't. On the contrary, salaries for engineers are still low relative to the scarcity, and tech startups are only a small portion of the IT job market. And most startup jobs are actually underpaid compared to "boring" IT.
There may be a bit of an impact in SV, but not much beyond. Same as last time.
> And most startup jobs are actually underpaid compared to "boring" IT.
Most tech workers don't realize this. I can work an exciting, below market startup job (infrastructure/devops), and then hop back into enterprise IT (it manager/vp engineering/senior linux admin) when the going gets tough and get paid more (ie market rate) until the next startup wave comes through.
With the kind of capital Snapchat can raise today, cost savings on salaries is a trivial part of their competitive advantage.
1,000 people * $100,000 average total employment cost = $100m per year (intentionally rough math). Now shave 20% off of that. It simply isn't meaningful to what they're doing; they raised $685 million in the last six months, saving $20 or $30 million per year doesn't matter.
For Snapchat, for which money is no issue relatively speaking, it's better to have this super rich funding environment. They can out-raise, and out-spend their competition when it comes to talent (and for those they can't do that to, like Google, it's moot anyway).
Interesting to see Google included in this comment, since they are currently the only company profiting off of the snapchat user base. Snapchat is built on the google cloud, presumably one of its biggest clients, Google gets a piece of every bit of funding that goes to snapchat. More users -> more growth -> higher cloud costs. Profitable or not, snapchat pays google.
I hope you're right, there _must_ be other components to their business model to warrant $116m in investment capital. At face value this all appears beyond foolish, though I'm rooting for them to make me eat my words down the road.
"21 Inc., formerly 21e6, announced it had raised US$116m in venture capital, the largest investment yet accumulated by a startup in the digital currency industry. 21 Inc.'s lead backers include American Andreessen Horowitz and RRE Venture, Chinese Yuan Capital, as well as strategic investor and chipmaker Qualcomm Inc."
I'd wager a decent fraction of their $116m is being held in Bitcoin. If Bitcoin could magically go to mass adoption that would stimulate a price in the range of $10-50k/BTC. Holding a few million $ of Bitcoin now and "doing stuff" that makes the Bitcoin more valuable has a higher expectation than trying to build sustainable business model around the Bitcoin ecosystem.
Sorry, but other than possibly validating the existence of the intuitive trait postulated by Jung, I don't know that this information is really that helpful or valuable. :-) It may help you to expound on the concrete experiences behind your feeling. Too many annoying Facebook memes on the subject? Etc.
