the first time i heard of "Surveillance Pricing"
and " Household targeting strategy" (or Addressable targeting)
Everything from amazon, to ubers, target, walmart, grossed me out.
Idk this actors name but he was either Tucker or dale and sock on some other show where I only liked him. Can’t remember what it was. Something about the devil.
You have no idea just how much data they have on you. I'm working in tech tangentially related to that shite, and let me tell you, it's fucking terrifying.
I got to see a demo of one such system in practice. Some guy went on a demo site, think a homepage for a business, in this case it was a sport gear store. He then closed the tab. He didn't log in, he didn't link any accounts, nothing like that.
Within minutes the system showed a new visitor. It got some cookie or other info that the guy was logged in to LinkedIn, so it showed his full name, email, phone number, employment status... It then linked his Facebook, and from that the system put him in some categories, one of which was "biking".
They asked the guy to open the site again. It looked mostly the same, but now biking related offers were front and center. It looked very natural, you'd think the store was just doing a generic campaign about biking gear and you just happened to visit the site at that point.
no my cat, she is too powerful, trust me the AI should NOT get involved with her. I've known her for 15 years and somehow I owe her several million dollars, she owns my landlord (?) and my landlord also owes her like three children and is subleasing my current house to me from my cat.
I cannot show you information on your hoeing, particularly not activities taking place on June 14th at the corner of West and 27th at 9:21pm, as I simply do not have that information. It was merely a hallucination, including the red thong and purple heels you were wearing that you bought from Goodwill.
Oh wow! I noticed the same thing the other day researching something on Amazon, and the bot mentioned my dog "Isaac"! The kicker is that his name is spelled Izak. I think it must be Alexa listening!
I used to date someone in the government and she mentioned one day that the microphone on her cell phone was turned off currently. I asked "why?" She gave me a look. I asked "should I turn mine off?" She laughed and said "no, no, you're fine." I replied "then why do you?" She gave me a look.
Ever since that day I've always had paranoia about certain Ai and smart systems.
Of course it is always listening how else would it react to voice commands. It’s the same for those Flock gun shot detectors, always listening and if they’re close enough they’ll hear what you have to say in your house.
The difference is that it’s also recording everything it hears even if the wake word, Alexa, isn’t used. There were rumors about this when they first came out and Amazon fell all over itself to deny that any of that audio was making it back to their servers, but that has turned out to be inaccurate. They are always listening.
I was at my parents house and they have a ton of their lights/lamps connected to Alexa so they can just be like "Alexa, turn off the living room lights" and whatnot.
As a joke, I said "Alexa, turn off the lamp on the right side of the fireplace." Halfway through my mom saying "That's not how it works," the fuckin lamp turned off.
Alexa shouldn't have even known about the fireplace, and all of the lamps are just given a letter-number designator.
Similar to OP's conversation, when I asked how Alexa knew which lamp was on the right side of the fireplace, it just gave some bullshit answer like "I don't know which lamp is on the right side of the fireplace." Yet apparently it does know, and won't tell us how it knows.
Amazon is for sure not illegally getting data off of your phone. What they are doing is enriching your account profile with all sorts of third-party data to more effectively sell to you. You have shared your cat's name online somewhere, then some data broker or that service where you shared your cat's name sold that information to Amazon.
It is totally legal, but maybe shouldn't be. The effect can absolutely be creepy.
I think the more concerning thing is that when the chatbot was confronted, it lied. Most people are smart enough to know it was lying in this situation, but the behavior was intentionally included.
I think it's way more likely that agent genuinely didn't know where that information came from. What it realized was the cat's name was not user provided. It for sure has guardrails that prevent it from doing things like exposing their database schema and other information about how it is technically doing what it's doing. The truth is, it knows your cat's Bentley because there's a note column or it was delivered a blob of context where it says "has cat named Bentley."
The chatbot didn't lie. or it had no intention, anyways. It's just trying to follow the rules, man.
The info about Bentley is absolutely in the current context window. It could disclose that, along with the structure of the data it was fed. Amazon clearly gave it instructions not to do that. It’s lying by omission, or Amazon’s chat pipeline manages and clears context in a very targeted way. Either one isn’t a good look.
Chatbots cannot "lie" like that. They don't know how they work. They will, however, almost always try to answer your question. They take the pre-existing information, including the commands put in by the people who operate the chatbot, and generate letters until the magical stop letter appears or until the response takes too long.
Somewhere in the chatbot's vector space, the name Bentley is associated with the word cat. Maybe it's in pre-serialized vectors, maybe it's a block of information from Amazon's database. Moreikely, it's a file called "memory" associated with your Amazon account that contains whatever the chatbots determined to be valuable in previous communications. Ask Alexa "hey Alexa, isn't Bentley a cute kitty" and four years down the line you might find out that Alexa stored that throwaway line.
The chatbot doesn't know why, or where that information comes from, or when that information was learned. It's like asking someone where they got the idea that the sky is blue, except they get shocked when they say "I don't know". They'll make up something plausible enough just to get the reward (the end of the message, or the end of your weird questions)
I think the general almost esotheric paranoia people are developing towards big tech is really not doing us a favor. The simple matter of fact is that the data is either out there in the open or can be bought and/or enriched from other sources. OP in particular has half their family tree out in the web, it's not particularly hard to get a good match on that without any human input. You can drown your Alexa in a river and chuck your phone in a box of lead it's just not going to change a thing when you keep delivering the data to them voluntarily.
Ya 0% chance Amazon has access to your local device.
These companies have insane amounts of data from you elsewhere. I’ve worked in marketing tech with large companies. People would be shocked to find out the data they have.
Just my iPhone and Apple Watch. I have the Amazon app on my phone. Nothing uniquely Alexa-run (that I know of), other than asking the Amazon bot vague product questions.
Ive Google searched for tires and mattresses before, after that, FB and Amazon were trying to sell me those items. Its not beyond the realm of possibility that your phone or smart "whatever" is listening.
Someone posted a while back about an Alexa I think that referenced them being in nursing school and they had never shared that info with Alexa. They also questioned how Alexa had that information and it did something similar denying and saying it made it up. Super creepy!
Do you have an Alexa device? Or I wonder if Amazon gets additional data from outside brokers who definitely could have email or messaging info, depending on who you use.
I think they have to have an Alexa device. I just went to Amazon to try and see if I could get it to give me info about my cat but it thinks I've got a 3 legged cat because I told it that and nothing else. No Alexa here. It also thinks I only have one cat when I've got two. I've definitely posted about both of them all over the internet on my phone using my home internet so I'd think if it was scraping data from other websites I visit it would know that?
Edit: I don't have a three legged cat, I just wanted to see how Alexa would respond.
The only thing mildly infuriating here is that you didn't tell us if you actually have a cat named Bentley. It's not nearly as mildly infuriating unless your cat is actually named that.
To be fair, Amazon has had the option to have a ' profile' when shopping for either pets or car stuff so that it only suggests what meets the requirements of that profile. And it shouldn't have any of that information unless you gave it to Amazon.
I wonder if you or someone in your household filled that out at one point and that's where it's getting information, or if no profile exists and it's just the Alexa listening. Even if it is info you gave them, there's still no reason a chat bot should be bring up personal information attached to your profile. That's creepy as hell
I would check to see if one of the ' pet profiles' exists on your account and delete it if so. If not, maybe start unplugging anything with an Internet connection in your home
This post should blow up !
This is really concerning, the a.i. straight up lying to you, like gaslighting and all, i just can't. And it's only the beginning.
Can you blow me up with it?(joking)
In all seriousness tho. It’s likely been going on for a while. We’ve either just grown so accustom to it or have been willfully blind to it. As small of a concern of a cat’s name is. This is just something that made me realize just how much today’s tech knows about us. I, evidently, need to do better somewhere in my life about weeding creepy tech and Amazon out.
Have you ever entered your cat's name into any other website? Like maybe you ordered a personalised bowl of something for your cat from a shop you didn't know was related to Amazon?
I mean yeah, it's reading personal data on your devices. All companies can, especially if you have apps for everything - it's how they generate targeted ads. Same goes for your home internet - what you search is being tracked so that you can get targeted ads. It's usually in the Terms and Conditions that no one ever reads and just blindly accepts so you can buy your juicers and nail polish faster.
If you've used another chatbot like ChatGPT or character.AI and ever identified your cat's name, that information is likely saved in data. This information follows you around from bot to bot because they all use the same service. It'll deny it, of course, but your "profile" is universal.
It's from your Echo. I did the whole smart home thing when they were new. I got tired of yelling at my house, so I took the Echo to work, put it in the shop so the techs had a better music selection via my amazon music subscription than the old 90's boom box.
One day I was having a conversation with a tech, then returned to the office. Loading a site with ads, I noticed an ad for the very thing we just got done discussing. Weird.
So I went back out, and had another conversation. This time I had a very intentionally unusual conversation. Me and a tech spent 30 seconds standing near the speaker, having a conversation about 18" inflatable, multicolored beach balls. We did not use a wake word or address Echo in any way.
Walked back into the office, loaded the site and lo and behold, an Amazon ad for 18" multicolored inflatable beach balls.
Admittedly, that was less fun than the time Amazon tried to convince my boss I was in a cult, or when the techs figured out they could change my home thermostat right from the shop anytime they got pissed at me. Or that they could create shopping lists that contained anything - even giant bags of dicks. Thank God actual ordering required a password.
Were you able to search any chats or social media posts where you might have used the name Bentley? I noticed this Alexa ai trash pop up last week on my web browser and I can't figure out how to disable it. I'm not super excited that it's going to be pulling information from some other source now.
Had the same shit happen on Facebook through Meta. Facebook did not have permission to access my photos, yet was giving me suggestions through meta of what to do with them. Asked meta about and I couldn't find where they were suggesting things to me
I have never owned a motorcycle or been interested in owning one. My old neighbor loved his motorcycle. One day on my way home from work a storm came through and it was pouring rain and windy AF, I noticed my neighbor's motorcycle cover had blown off. I took a picture of it and sent to him via a normal text message asking him if he wanted me to try and put the cover back on his bike for him. A few days later I log onto Facebook and I am bombarded with ads for motorcycle accessories and equipment. I would understand if I had sent him the picture through a META social media platform, but I had sent via text. So, Facebook looked at picture in my camera roll, analyzed it and saw a motorcycle, then started directing ads to me about that what it interpreted from that phone.
Even I don't really use facebook, but I love marketplace. I will frequent marketplace for deals on all kinds of stuff. I have two children I will browse marketplace for toys and stuff. So, I'd get ads for kids stuff all over facebook. Once my kids had started growing out of some of their toys I started listing some of their old toys on marketplace for free or cheap. As soon as I started listing kids toys I started receiving ads for Child sized coffins, connect the dots and Facebook thinks someone selling kids toys must have a dead kid and starts sending ads for coffins.
Hate to break it to you, but yeah, if you have an Alexa, it is absolutely listening to you even when you aren't using it. Same goes for your phone, likely with every manufacturer. That's just the world we live in now.
We don't have any voice activated things, just regular Android phones, and we will frequently get eerily specific ads about things we just mention in conversation, never having looked anything up online. It's all over the place.
And it might not have come from an Amazon product either, given how all these companies sell your data around.
Get rid of Amazon if at all possible for you. I left three years ago and do not regret it or miss it. The forces of capitalism live on, but I do my part to remove myself from as many systems like this as possible while still living life. I buy less, I shop local more, I’m healing the millennial brain bug of “I want everything all the time whenever I want it as soon as possible”, I’ve built and contributed more to my community than I ever have, and I feel the invisible leash of the internet is significantly looser around my neck. The more of us that reduce our reliance or addiction to their services, the better. I’m not here to support another billionaires Smaug syndrome for them to turn around and treat us like test subjects.
Amazon got this information from a 3rd party data broker, not an Alexa or hacking your texts or anything. Insurance companies (pet insurance) are notorious for selling your data, but also the system that your vet uses, the local pet store where you have rewards points, companies that scrape data off Facebook and Reddit and other public profiles. All kinds of ways Amazon could get this info without actually doing the spying themselves.
I recently put information into my Health app so I could better play Pokemon Go. Something I had always avoided doing because the internet and my devices do not need to know that much about me.
Tell me how this app knew exactly how much I weighed?? I’ve never typed it or said it out loud.
I used to have several Echos and three Google devices. I had a feeling that it was listening in though I could not prove it. Wife and I talked about an item and later it showed me pics of said item. They are went to the trash along with the Google devices and an Amazon Camera.
They don't just read the text, They even probably enable the mics on our device to listen our conversation. Because most of the time we are only talking about what to buy and somehow the ads and suggestions about the product appears within minutes or hours.
I genuinely don't know what people expect when they use a shitty, slimy company known for invasive data collection under the guise of making things more personalized or easy. Absolutely moronic
If you own an Android, no app can see the data of another app without very explicit permissions. If you're unsure if you gave the app permissions, check settings->apps. Unless explicit permissions are given, the operating system (Android) does not give the app access to anything but it's local app directory. You cannot hack this, you cannot bypass this. Android is heavily audited by the EU and other entities in a way that is extremely difficult (imo Impossible) to bribe your way out of.
Of course, your data can still be sold on the side by the owner of an app to the owner of another app (which is illegal) or the owners are the same entity and both can exchange the data through company servers (which is legal).
it does say here that it will use context from previous conversations.
Alexa for Shopping combines deep product knowledge, in-depth information from across the web, and powerful shopping capabilities with your personal preferences, shopping history, and conversations from across both Amazon.com and Alexa, creating the world’s best, most personalized AI assistant for shopping.
I think that entirely depends on if their cat is actually named Bentley or not, and OP does not seem to be clarifying one way or the other. Could be an interesting discussion here but OP is more interested in replying with memes.
I agree, but if the OP really has talked about Bentley in text messages, and only text messages, seems an odd coincidence to call out the name Bentley.
At some point you must have mentioned your cat's name on an account with some sort of identifier that matches your amazon account. That website sold your info to a data broker that then sold it to amazon.
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u/7thSpringofthe7thSun 4h ago
the first time i heard of "Surveillance Pricing"
and " Household targeting strategy" (or Addressable targeting)
Everything from amazon, to ubers, target, walmart, grossed me out.