While i understand and agree with the premise, i think it’s lacking context. It is quite disturbing to have an obscure conversation (you know, we’ve never been to tahiti), and suddenly you’re getting banner ads or sponsored results about trips to tahiti.

This is absolutely a thing that happens. It happens to my wife frequently (the amount of times i hear giggling, i was just talking about that! Now I’ve got an ad! What a coincidence!), but i disabled all my google permissions (outside of location for maps), so it doesn’t seem to happen to me at all.

I don’t think every company does this, but some do. I also had to uninstall WhatsApp because my microphone usage was up while i was sleeping. That was quite concerning to discover. Whatsapp claims it’s a bug, but I’m not sure about that.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40348711

https://www.ghacks.net/2024/09/04/report-alleges-that-microphones-on-devices-are-used-for-active-listening-to-deliver-targeted-ads/

Yeah and that is an incredible amount of money, but at 13% of the budget, that still puts it fifth place in terms of categorical spending.