Media conglomerate Cox Media Group has been pitching tech companies on a new targeted advertising tool that uses audio recordings culled from smart home devices. The existence of this program was revealed late last year. Now, however, 404 Media has also gotten its hands on additional details about the program through a leaked pitch dek.
The contents of the dek are creepy, to say the least. Cox’s tool is creepily called “Active Listening” and the dek claims that it works by using smart devices, which can “capture real-time intent data by listening to our conversations.” After the data is captured, advertisers can “pair this voice-data with behavioral data to target in-market consumers,” the dek says.
The vague use of artificial intelligence to collect data about consumers’ online behavior is also mentioned, with the dek noting that consumers “leave a data trail based on their conversations and online behavior” and that the AI-fueled tool can collect and analyze said “behavioral and voice data from 470+ sources.” The main question I have is: how the fuck is this legal? Most states have some form of wiretapping law that restricts the ability to record a person without their explicit knowledge. If we are all being recorded by our smart devices all the time, and those recordings are then being funneled into targeted-advertising so that e-commerce sites can sell us more jeans or Blu-Rays or whatever we happen to be yapping about in our living rooms, how is t.