Your phone isn't listening to you.
A smoking gun that wasn't
In 2024, we finally had the smoking gun.
Atlanta’s Cox Media Group promised to “use voice data to target your advertising to the EXACT people you are looking for.”
Except the smoking gun was an empty water pistol.
Yesterday the FTC ordered CMG to pay nearly $1 million for lying to customers about its “Active Listening” AI service, which turned out to be overpriced email lists.
I heard this all the time when I was at Google. People were creeped out by seeing an ad for something they just mentioned to a friend.
Big tech does plenty of creepy things, but this isn’t one of them.
Active Listening would be illegal and a massive PR risk. Not to mention the poor AI who has to sift through trillions of hours of white noise and family arguments waiting for someone to say Nutter Butters.
But if it isn’t big tech, maybe someone…else is listening? 👽