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Beware, Your Smartphone is Listening!

An evening with friends, discussion about the next adventure trip and suddenly an ad from an Adventure Travel Gear pops up. Good Coincidence.
Discussing with a neighbour, which leather seat cover to buy for my car. in a couple of hours, I see an ad about Exclusive / Custom made Italian Leather Seat Covers for cars on Facebook. One more coincidence.
Next day at work, working on a proposal for marketing on Whatsapp, the opportunities and the challenges in a country where DND is present but not strict, the spam messaging and brands like "Stayzilla" using whatsapp as a platform to share their offer-related ads. Same day, after a gap of 3 months, I see an ad from "Stayzilla". Coincidence? Maybe NOT.
So we do a small test at workplace, with 5 devices (on high speed internet), latest OS and loaded with all the important apps.
All the participants clear cookies, cache, etc and discuss a few brands that are not consumed /bought / browsed / Searched on Google or used by us.
The Brands or Keywords (Of brands that we have not seen ads in the recent past or used) : Dr. Batra, Micromax, Rent a home, automatic watches, Laptops, Print a Poster, Bollywood, Fitness, etc
Guess what - we saw ads like Dr. Batra, Micromax, Furlenco, Stayzilla, FitnessJoy and Vistaprint.
What our smartphones do nowadays is capture our speech and contextually target us on platforms like Facebook, Twitter and other News ads - where the inventory is available with a high on tech network like Criteo or Vizury. Gwor over basic Search algorithms where you get ads as per your search keywords or browsing history. We now have real time ads targeting us using ARS - Automatic Speech Recognition - which delivers the most relevant ads to us. Hence there may be a lot of competitor ads popped up on your devices, because at the work place you keep mentioning about the brands or products you work on!
All this through the SmartPhone you use. Though Android was assumed to be creepy w.r.t the data and privacy and the info it uses from your life (esp. Google Now, which even tells you that you should leave now so that you reach the movie theatre on time to see Furious 7, or any other movie or flight )...
As per a couple of releases by Facebook, Apple (SIRI) and even Samsung Smart TV, the intention of capturing everything the user does helps improve and personalise the smart experience. Here are a few links:
 Though it sounds snoopy, creepy and shady, it is the way forward. Just make sure your smartphones are used smartly before it can outsmart you using the power of data, information, knowledge and wisdom.

Please Note: As per a study, the gyroscope or other tool can identify the gender of a person with 84% accuracy and the word spoken with 64% accuracy. Imagine how accurate can Google or Facebook be?

Feel Free to share your reactions and feedback below, or start a conversation on Twitter at @Tottology


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