Who does not know the "trick": as soon as you "hammer" the name of some thing or service into a search engine, an advertisement related to this request will fall on your computer. And if you have a server at work, and one of your colleagues was looking for, say, sneakers or underwear, then get ready and you will receive advertising for shorts and shoes in the next hour or two.
However, everyone is already used to this - the reaction of phones is still surprising. It seems that the device is off, you are chatting freely with a friend, for example, about cars, or about which pool you can choose for your summer cottage. And soon you start getting advertisements for cars and all kinds of swimming pools that are in stores. Once, after talking about apartments with the phone off (!), My friend got a call from the agency and offered to find a place to live.
What is this coincidence, paranoia? Or do numerous gadgets really hear what we say and, at the slightest clue, are ready to lay out packages of offers of goods and services that we might be interested in?
We decided to find out the opinion of information technology specialists.
“No, the persecution mania has nothing to do with it,” says Ilya Obabkov, director of the Institute of Radio Electronics and Information Technologies of the UrFU. - If the screen of your phone does not light up, this does not mean that it is turned off, it will turn off only when you remove the battery from it (more precisely, all batteries). At the same time, theoretically, any smart technology connected to the Internet, in which there is a microphone and a camera, is able to hear us, there are no technical difficulties in this. It's even easier with computers that automatically send us ads based on our own requests. The servers and analysis programs process the data and give the result in the form of ready-made proposals - what we could potentially need, what we could eventually buy.
According to experts, it's no secret that manufacturers of smart technology are now involved in the advertising, content, marketing and user data trade industries. Of course, no one directly advertises this, but often users are convinced from personal experience that everything they write and say is seen and heard not only by those to whom it is addressed.
- If there is a desire to test the "auditory reaction" of phones to messages from outside, you can conduct an experiment, - says Ilya Obabkov, - put a smartphone in a completely empty, not listening room, and say three or four keywords for several hours or even days - suppose "voucher", "aqualung", "tickets". Next, try to interpret the results using well-known search engines on this smartphone. Draw your own conclusions.
It is difficult to say whether all phones without exception listen to us, as experts say, but it is absolutely certain that when buying equipment, very rare of us read the user agreement. We usually sign it without looking. And it may contain a clause stating that the user agrees to the collection and sending of data on the use of the device he buys. Well, even if we assume that the buyer does not agree, the store may say that they cannot offer other devices. Do not be left without a phone.
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By the way, a recent study in the United States proved that smart TVs Samsung, LG, Vizio and TCL take screen prints every second and send them to the server.
The four largest TV manufacturers record essentially everything that Americans watch. The network traffic of TVs was studied using the IoT Inspector program from Princeton University.
The average American spends 3.5 hours a day watching TV. TV viewing history does not contain sensitive search terms or financial data, but this history allows for a detailed consumer profile. This is valuable information for advertisers that they are willing to pay for.
And TV manufacturers are taking advantage of this opportunity, because from a legal point of view, tens of millions of TV buyers have given their permission to collect this data without removing the tick from the corresponding menu items during installation.
The test showed that TVs actively send data to the server, not only when working with applications, but even while watching live TV.
TVs record and send screen content to the server, regardless of the signal source, be it cable TV, an app, a DVD player, or streaming.
The result is a per-second log of your viewing of various content on TV, which Vizio sells to about 30 different companies.
It turns out that technically there are no problems with "wiretapping and spying" behind all of us. As Ilya Obabkov says, even a voice-controlled vacuum cleaner connected to a smart home system can theoretically become a tool for collecting data about us. At the same time, any electronics specialist will confirm that speakers and headphones can turn into a microphone, through hardware or software settings.
Are you scared to live after all this, everyone answers this question for himself individually. Some believe that this is a new technological reality and there is nothing wrong with that. All the same, almost everything is known about us, nothing can be hidden in a thoroughly digitized, smart world. Others believe that this is a blatant oversight and interference with our privacy.
It would be possible to prove this fact in court - a conversation of particular complexity. Legal services in technology companies are sagacious and very strong. They claim that they collect data not about users, but about how the gadget works. And even more so, we are not talking about the collection of personal data about users.
In such a situation, large enterprises striving to maintain the confidentiality of internal information have data protection systems, the so-called security perimeters. For ordinary users, if they have any concerns, experts advise installing specialized software (for example, antivirus) and checking the settings for accessing smartphone functions for all applications - not all of them need to constantly see your location or the image from the camera to work.
By the way
Russians make almost half of their purchases on the Internet, according to a study by Yandex and the Institute for Marketing Research.
Author: Elena Matziong