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 that not a breach of, say, California’s state law that requires two-party consent for conversations to be recorded?
The pitch dek also claims that Cox currently partners with major tech platforms, including Google, Amazon, and Facebook. “WE PARTNER WITH THE BEST TO PROVIDE THE BEST,” the dek states, showcasing affiliations with the major tech companies. While Cox may partner with those companies in some capacity, it’s not clear that any of the companies have partnered with it in regards to this particular advertising tool.
Some of the companies listed in the dek seem like they are a little bit wary of the legal ramifications of Cox’s “Active Listening” product. When 404 Media confronted Google about the pitch dek, the company said it dropped Cox Media Group from its advertising partners program. “All advertisers must comply with all applicable laws and regulations as well as our Google Ads policies, and when we identify ads or advertisers that violate these policies, we will take appropriate action,” the tech giant told 404 in a statement.
In a brief statement, Amazon told Gizmodo, “Amazon Ads has never worked with CMG on this program and has no plans to do so.”
When contacted by Gizmodo, a Meta spokesperson wrote via email: “We don’t have any comment. But just to clarify, the pitch deck in the article lists Meta as a general marketing partner, not as a partner ‘in this program’”. They then provided a link to a blog post on Facebook’s policies on using microphones for targeted ads.
Gizmodo reached out to Cox Media Group as well as Google. We will update this story when we learn more. You can read the full pitch dek by clicking here.
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