We always suspected our phones were listening to us, and now we have proof — advertising company CMG Local Solutions reveals “active listening” uses AI to capture voice data it can sell to target ads
Have you ever had a conversation with someone about an item only to have eerily familiar adverts come up on your iPhone or Android afterward? If so, one marketing agency has been bragging about its ability to sell this kind of data to other companies, but its blog advertising the feature has mysteriously gone dark.
As originally pointed out by 404 Media, CMG (Cox Media Group) Local Solutions calls it Active Listening and specifically references conversations like “Do I see mold on the ceiling?” or “We need a better mortgage rate” as the data it would sell to other companies. On the original page, 404 found the following paragraph:
“What would it mean for your business if you could target potential clients who are actively discussing their need for your services in their day-to-day conversations? No, it’s not a Black Mirror episode—it’s Voice Data, and CMG has the capabilities to use it to your business advantage.”
Our Investigation
The page cited by 404 has been taken down by CMG, however, investigations by iMore confirm the group indeed published a blog post on November 28 titled “Active Listening: An Overview.” That page states, in no uncertain terms, “Active Listening gives organizations clarity into the most effective channels and timing for their advertising efforts. By incorporating and analyzing customer data gleaned from conversations happening around smart devices, we can pinpoint where and when customers are most likely to engage with ads.”
In the FAQ at the bottom of the page, it says “Our technology is on the cutting edge of voice data processing. We can identify buyers based on casual conversations in real-time. It may seem like black magic, but it’s not-it’s AI. The growing ability to access microphone data on devices like smartphones and tablets enables our technology partner to aggregate and analyze voice data during pre-purchase conversations.”
[Bold emphasis added by iMore]To paraphrase Jordan Belfort, is this all legal? CMG’s post again says “yes”, and claims that “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,” meaning that users might actually be agreeing to this practice, if CMG is to be believed. As 404 originally reported, “Cox Media Group (CMG) claims it has the capability to listen to ambient conversations of consumers through embedded microphones” not only in smartphones but also smart TVs “and other devices to gather data and use it to target ads,” suggesting that this isn’t even a problem confined to our mobile devices.
Cox Media Group is an American agency that runs its own advertising company, as well as tens of local TV and Radio stations. Its parent company, Apollo Global Management, is a private equity firm with hundreds of billions in assets. If properly introduced to the marketing market, Active Listening could represent a real privacy breach, something that Apple prides itself on. CMG Local Solutions has been involved in 200,000 + digital marketing campaigns since its inception and cites partners and publishers in the field such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and more. As of right now, we are unsure to what degree CMG Local Solutions has used Active Listening but 404 reports “the company notes it is ‘a marketing technique fit for the future. Available today'” and states it found a company representative on LinkedIn “explicitly asking interested parties to contact them about the product.”
I personally don’t like the idea of my devices listening to me and especially don’t like the idea of that information being used to sell me more things. It’s hard to believe that many of the users of modern smartphones are aware of, or consent to, this kind of information being used, aside from what CMG lists in its FAQ about user agreements. As the CMG Local Solutions site references its use of AI to do this, there is a chance it works like smart assistants – processing data without storing it. This means that your device can display adverts based on something you’ve said today but may not use that to form a wider dataset on your gender, age, hobbies, and more. Apple prides itself on taking user privacy very seriously, and touts privacy as one of the defining features of using its products, something Active Listening, if it’s being used on iPhones, could seriously undermine.
As these pages have been taken down, CMG Local Solutions likely recognizes how unpopular this kind of tech is. Hopefully, this will deter it from further exploring Active Listening. There is a possibility CMG published the article in error or has taken the page down to revise it, and the company wasn’t immediately available to comment on the story. We’ll update this story accordingly with more information should that change.
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