Tech is Eavesdropping On You
A pitch deck from Cox Media Group (CMG) that was leaked to a reporter from 404 Media suggests that advertisers are eavesdropping on users to create targeted ads. The pitch deck claims that using AI, the company can collect and analyze “voice data” by “listening to our conversations” from “smart devices,” and that the company can improve advertising campaign performance through selective targeting based on this “real time intent data”.
They couple the “real time intent” voice data with behavioral data; the wealth of information “consumers leave” as a “data trail” when they have conversations, visit websites, buy things online, and even in the grocery store because even grocery stores sell your data.
Cox claims Facebook, Google and Amazon as clients that utilize this technology. Meta - Facebook's parent company - announced that it was reviewing CMG for terms of service violations. Amazon responded to 404 Media by claiming that it “never worked with CMG on this program and has no plans to do so.”
Cox Media Group, based in Atlanta, GA, is owned by Apollo Global Management in conjunction with Cox Enterprises, who retained 29% of the company after selling the majority stake in CMG to Apollo Global Management on December 17, 2019. It remains unclear whether Amazon or Cox Media Group is lying about this relationship, but it’s clear that one of them must be.
Google removed CMG from their “Partners Program” website after the story broke; they have continually claimed that Google doesn’t eavesdrop. A 2019 report from Flemish Public Broadcasting (Belgium) showed that these claims are false. VRT NWS listened to more than a thousand excerpts, 153 of which were conversations that should never have been recorded. They explain:
Google Holland even made a smooth YouTube ‘explainer’ to remove any misconceptions about eavesdropping. In this video, Google employees answer the question ‘Does Google eavesdrop?’. They say that the commands are being stored and transferred to Google for analysis. And they very clearly state: ‘No, you are not being eavesdropped’.
It is true that Google does not eavesdrop directly, but VRT NWS discovered that it is listening in. Or rather: that it lets people listen in. We let ordinary Flemish people hear some of their own recordings. ‘This is undeniably my own voice’, says one man, clearly surprised. A couple from Waasmunster immediately recognise the voice of their son and their grandchild.
What did we do? VRT NWS was able to listen to more than a thousand excerpts recorded via Google Assistant. In these recordings we could clearly hear addresses and other sensitive information. This made it easy for us to find the people involved and confront them with the audio recordings.
In a related blog from the company that contradicts both what VRT was able to do with the recordings it reviewed and mentions that it is investigating the leak upon which VRT’s reporting was based, Google claims that they “apply a wide range of safeguards to protect user privacy throughout the entire review process.”
VRT also reported at the time that, “Google is not the only company that works this way. In April, the Bloomberg news agency revealed that American internet giant Amazon also does it.”
There have been similar allegations for years that the National Security Agency (NSA) is surveilling internet and telephone data and that the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) uses this data for parallel construction.
Parallel construction is a term that refers to a technique used when building criminal cases based on illegally obtained, warrantless data collected by the NSA and other federal agencies that is excluded from “discovery” in the Court record in order to keep the existence of illegal mass surveillance hidden in complete secrecy with no judicial oversight.
Former NSA technical director William Binney called parallel construction “the most threatening situation to our constitutional republic since the Civil War.”
404 Media first revealed the existence of CMG's Active-Listening service in December 2023, when they also exposed an AI marketing company, MindSift, for using smart devices to target ads at consumers.
Futurism reported a since-deleted blog post from CMG in November 2023 that defended the legality of their program:
“We know what you're thinking. Is this even legal? The short answer is: yes. It is legal for phones and devices to listen to you.”
“When a new app download or update prompts consumers with a multi-page terms of use agreement somewhere in the fine print, Active Listening is often included.”
CMG has not responded to requests for comment from multiple news agencies, including Futurism, Gizmodo, the Daily Mail and now… Murder Pop.