I ran across something today that made me think of this thread. It was from an ex-Google employee talking about a project he worked on ten years back...
I know from working at Google that at least back in 2008 some of the advertising folks were trying to figure out if they put a microphone in a store and pick up the same voice print of someone who had asked for directions to that store using the Goog-411 service. The goal being to create the equivalent of a ‘click’ in the online world that they could bill the company for sending that customer their way. I worked for about a month using some 20% time to sketch out what would have to be true for something like that to work, for example a microphone near the entrance to the store and a greeter who would say hello to people, encouraging them to say hello back so that a voice sample could be collected.
The use of a greeter to get you to speak at the store entrance is pretty dastardly.
The blog also referenced a recent NYT article on some of the patents Google and Amazon have for using a customer voice print, acquired from mics in a phone, ebook reader, or smart speaker, and tying it to their various advertising programs. This is even though they're both saying they would never do such a thing and they just listen for "OK Google" or "Alexa".
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/31/business/media/amazon-google-privacy-digital-assistants.html
It's one thing when we're talking about getting free web services in exchange for data but even when it's a product people pay for, the data rats can't help themselves. If caught, they'd get a slap on the wrist but still have data that's invaluable.
