“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.”
Of course this is possible. Is it practical? Nope. There is already so much data harvested by the likes you Google and Facebook that they can tell what you like, what videos or articles you read, what you share, in some cases who you talk to. Importing a shit ton of audio data is pointless, they already know what you like.
you just need to process the audio on the devices and then send keywords to Google etc. it's technically trivial since most phones already have dedicated hardware for that. your phone listens to activation words all the time, unless you disable it. there is no reason why they can't also forward anything else it hears as text
Anecdotally, the odds are near zero that my wife and I can talk once about maybe buying some obscure thing like electric blinds and suddenly targetted ads for them somehow pop up on our devices.
This happens a lot.
I think you're being naive if you believe they don't locally distill our discussions into key words and phrases and transmit those.
Ok but third parties have no access to this in the background. My guess is they are buying marketing data from their listed “partners” and making wide claims about how they obtained it. Still a huge breach of privacy though!