Creative
December 8, 2020
The advertisements we see online are increasingly calibrated to our interests or about stuff we may intend to buy. Sometimes those ads are so accurate to the point of leading some people to believe that phones are continuously listening us, and our conversations without their knowledge.
It is a theory that has made a certain grip especially among those who do not trust some of the largest Internet companies such as Facebook or Google. Well, no doubt about that! In recent years those giant techs had major problems with the protection of the privacy of its users, attracting criticism and ending up amid scandals.
In fact, as it’s been shown on several occasions, Facebook and others do not need to spy on what we say, because they already have enough other resources available to track our online activities. A reason that is not necessarily more reassuring, that’s for sure.
Some people’s beliefs that apps spy on conversations comes from common experiences, which we’ve probably all had. Chatting in person with someone you talk about a certain product, such as a pair of shoes seen somewhere, and a few minutes later you find yourself in a shoe advertisement within Instagram, Facebook or any site with advertisements.
The obvious conclusion for many is that an application on their phones detected the conversation and then used that information to show the advertising of the shoes.
Using such a system would not only violate privacy laws in many countries but would be difficult to develop on the technical side and expensive to maintain.
Online advertising companies (well, we are a digital marketing agency and we know quite well this) exploit much simpler and more accessible information to calibrate ads to our interests, mostly exploiting data that we ourselves unknowingly provide to them.
Sophisticated tracking tools allow Facebook or Google to identify our interests even when we have never looked for them on social networks or search engines, using data relating to our movements, our habits, even our frequentations.
The most famous system, which is the basis of the operation of most sites, is the so-called cookies.
A cookie is a small file that sites install within our browsers, such as Chrome or Firefox. To understand how cookies work, we need to go back to the dawn of the web, when sites were much more simple than today and had no memory of what we did on their pages.
It was no small problem, especially if you wanted to buy something online, because there was no way to make a virtual cart remember the products placed in it. The server, which is the remote computer that operated the site, had no way of recognizing the same user between one request and another.
In 1994 a developer of Netscape, the company of the most used browser at the time, invented a system to work around the problem. He thought that the best solution was to leave the individual computers much of the work to be recognized, so that the servers would not become overloaded. He then created a small file, a “cookie” in fact, which installs itself in your browser when you visit a specific site. The cookie has a unique identification system for each user, and in this way the site can remember who is visiting it and the actions they are performing, such as filling the cart with some products.
The new solution changed the web for the better, helping to transform it from a system mainly used for consultation to a place where you could subscribe to virtual communities, shop online or register for services of various kinds. Over time, however, the use of cookies by sites has increased enormously, with increasingly sophisticated systems to exploit information on individual users for commercial purposes.
Most of the sites are maintained thanks to advertising. On the one hand there are advertisers, companies that want to promote their products or services, on the other publishers – such as large platforms (for example Google and Facebook) and site managers (such as The Bangkok Post site) – who offer their spaces to show advertisements, in exchange for money.
In the middle there are intermediaries (again, people like us in some way), providing services that make this sale of advertising and spaces on the sites possible both from a technological and economic point of view. Some companies have more than one role. Facebook and Google, for example, sell the spaces on their sites to advertisers and act as intermediaries, managing the systems that make online advertising work. They are among the largest companies to do this and as a result work with a huge amount of data on how users behave online, so as to personalize advertisements as much as possible. In general, the more personalized an advertisement is, the greater its economic performance, although there are exceptions.
Originally, cookies were designed to have a single point of contact: the site that issued them. The cookie installed in your browser by, for example, whiteshoes.com could only interact with whiteshoes.com, the one installed by blackshoes.com only with blackshoes.com and so on.
At the time it seemed like a safe and satisfactory solution, but it was underestimated that one day the sites would host content from other sites and that they would have the possibility to install cookies on a site other than their own. If your head is spinning, let’s try an example.
The founder of whiteshoes.com creates a very simple site and puts it online. Some time later, he decides to add a Facebook “Like” button, so that those who follow the site can put a “Like” directly to the whiteshoes.com page without having to go looking for it on the social network. The code to insert the button is provided by Facebook (that’s the Facebook Pixel), which manages it directly with its servers: the founder copies it and inserts it into her site.
At this point on whiteshoes.com there is an element (the “Like” button) that to work must connect to facebook.com every time someone visits the site. Facebook has obtained in this way the possibility of saving its own cookie even if you are reading a site different from its own: what is called a “third-party cookie”. The next step is more intuitive.
Since the “Like” button is present on hundreds of millions of sites, Facebook has the ability to track users’ activities as they switch from one site to another, taking advantage of its cookie. From “a cookie – a site” we have in fact moved to a situation in which cookies are exploited to follow users between different sites, collecting a huge amount of information. The system we have just seen with the “Like” button works in the same way with advertisements, whose code refers to those who manage them and makes them appear on the pages. If the reference is for example google.com, it means that Google will have its own cookie and that it can use it on all sites that show advertising managed by its systems.
We have of course simplified a little, but the basic concept is that thanks to third-party cookies and other tracking systems, the platforms are able to get a rather accurate idea of our habits, the things we like, what we could buy and the topics that interest us. Their systems are not only present on the sites, but also on the apps, which in turn collect much more data about us, such as our geographical location and consumer behaviors.
Technically all this information is anonymous and the platforms claim to have no way to trace the identities of individual users, but it has now been widely demonstrated that the large amount of data collected allows you to get a rather precise idea about users. Together with or through cookies, a lot of other information is collected, including details about the WiFi network from which you are connecting, the type of device and the version of the browser and operating system you are using.
It is the combination of this information that causes that after visiting a site to buy a pair of shoes we find the advertising of the same shoes elsewhere, in the advertisements shown on a social network or on other sites. It may happen that in some circumstances the tracking systems do not work as expected, or that they are set up to do things a little differently, and this brings us back to the question of the apps that would explain our conversations.
So, does our phone listen to us? Some have the impression of being heard because they find themselves advertising for products or services that they have recently talked about with someone. In most cases, those advertisements are the result of preferences and activities carried out over time online, and perhaps to which not much attention had been paid. It is likely that, if we talk about a pair of shoes with someone, we had seen that model somewhere online, perhaps between an advertisement and an Instagram post: and that we had clicked on it or had paused to read its description and details. Activities of this type may be sufficient to ensure that a potential interest in that product is captured, triggering the systems to re-propose it after some time through advertisements on other sites. In some cases, we see advertising for a product that we are sure we have never searched for online before, but that had been the focus of a recent conversation with another person. Again, the advertisement is likely to be shown not because an application was spying on the chat, but because our interlocutor had seen that product on a site.
Through tracking it is in fact possible to deduce that two users were in the same place, perhaps because of the same connection used, and that they knew each other. The advertisement is shown to the other interlocutor not interested in the product, but who could at some point talk about it with those who had seen it online, reinforcing his interest.
Solutions like these are quite elaborate and don’t always work perfectly. In some cases, for example, you see advertisements intended for others because you are using their same connection and you have settings in your browser. The functioning of the human brain means that, among dozens of product ads that we have never searched for online, we notice the one related to the object we talked about in the previous days: which could therefore easily be the only one that was right on many different attempts by Facebook.
There is no shortage of tools to track online activities and do not make it necessary to resort to spying systems such as listening to conversations secretly.
A study conducted about three years ago at Northeastern University (Boston, United States) considered thousands of applications for Android smartphones, many of which are equipped with systems to send information to Facebook. The study proved that none of the applications, including that of the social network itself, had secretly used the microphone of smartphones.
Facebook has on several occasions denied listening to conversations without authorization, recalling that constant listening to hundreds of millions of smartphones would imply a huge collection of data, at least 30 times higher than the current one. If the microphone were constantly active, in addition, smartphone owners would notice a significant drop in battery. A possible system of this type would involve a continuous and massive exchange of data between smartphones and Facebook, which could be easily detected.
Grasping the relevant parts of a conversation is not easy, as shown by the often disappointing results of voice assistants such as Siri and Alexa. Being able to isolate the right information from a conversation to show advertisements would require artificial intelligence solutions that we do not yet have, although considerable progress has been made in the sector in recent years. Listening via the microphone of smartphones can also not take place if there is no authorization from the operating system, which controls access to the phone’s resources. Both Android and iOS have systems to limit the use of the microphone by applications and give the possibility to prevent its use. The latest version of iOS shows a colored dot at the top right: orange when the microphone is active and green when the camera is also active. There is no possibility for applications to use the microphone without iOS indicating its activation with this system.
To make a counter-test on ads based on spied conversations, you can turn off access to the microphone by Facebook. On iOS you go to “Settings” then scroll through the list of installed apps until you select “Facebook”. In the next menu simply tap on “Microphone” to turn it off. If you have never given permission within the application to use it, “Microphone” will not even be shown in the list. Android. On Android you go to the “Settings” then you search for “Permissions Manager”, then “Microphone” and from the list of applications that appears you choose “Facebook”. In the following screen you can deny access to the microphone by the application.
Changing these settings won’t change those on activity tracking, and you’ll continue to receive personalized ads, including those that appear to be inspired by conversations you’ve had in person. In recent times, issues related to privacy have led some large companies to review the use of tracking systems. Google, for example, is moving to a system that allows you to show personalized ads, but with less invasive systems, although equally criticized. Facebook, which bases almost its entire revenue on advertising, has maintained a more cautious approach to changing things and criticized Apple for its recent choice to make tracking within each app on iPhones and iPads optional.
Changes to advertising policies are a conversation that the social network for now prefers not to hear.
The post is based from original article published on ilpost.it (Italian)
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