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No. This is one of those tech urban legends that keeps popping up. Facebook does have an opt-in feature that can identify what music, tv show or movie you are

No. This is one of those tech urban legends that keeps popping up. Facebook does have an opt-in feature that can identify what music, tv show or movie you are listening to or watching, but that's it. http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2014/05/a-new-optional-way-to-share-and-discover-music-tv-and-movies/ http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2014/05/a-new-optional-way-to-sh... https://www.facebook.com/help/iphone-app/369513256545845 https://www.facebook.com/help/iphone-app/369513256545845

ghayes 10y ago
See Betteridge's law [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
Pengwin 10y ago
Evey now and again I see a picture or article being shared around saying Facebook are spying on you and how their apps have all these permissions to use your camera and phone audio. If they are on android, I tell them to open their system settings and show them how Google Search has just about every privilege on your phone and has had it since they turned it on. Even if people are concerned they still don't stop using Facebook or android. :/
- harryf 10y ago
  > Facebook are spying on you and how their apps have all these permissions to use your camera and phone audio. And it's not just the Facebook apps. The Facebook SDK is widely embedded into many other apps Facebook SDK (it's the most popular SDK on iOS for example, according to data published from Cocoapods - https://gist.github.com/ryanolsonk/e33bf9e89677da9fe8ce https://gist.github.com/ryanolsonk/e33bf9e89677da9fe8ce ). It's so popular because Facebook is basically the most effective network to run so called "App Install Ads" and embedding their SDK providers marketers essential data for tuning their targeting and ad spend. The SDK gives Facebook access to a ton of additional usage data which they can link together with anything they already have on your from their apps. It also _potentially_ gives them the ability to exploit any permissions given to the host app which embedded the SDK. Now they publish the source of the SDK openly ( https://github.com/facebook/facebook-ios-sdk https://github.com/facebook/facebook-ios-sdk ) but it certainly would harm anyone if there was more independent scrutiny given to analysing the source and whether there's anything else we're not seeing that go into the final SDK downloads.
  - stuaxo 10y ago
    Facebook is you spying on yourself, by posting it all that info.
    - 88e282102ae2e5b 10y ago
      I'm not deliberately live streaming every conversation I have all day onto my feed.
      - xufi 10y ago
        Same here but you'd be surprised by how many people I know and you know post 1000 photos of every moment of their summer vacation on a trip. It scares me that they keep uploading all that there
  - nstj 10y ago
    You could just build it yourself from the source if you're worried about that. Does the SDK ship with any pre-built binaries?
    - harryf 10y ago
      You're right although most developers are going to get it either pre-built from here https://developers.facebook.com/docs/ios/ https://developers.facebook.com/docs/ios/ and add it manually to their project or via Cocoapods (also pre-built I believe)
- somecodemonkey 10y ago
  They dont stop using because there is no real reason not to. Nothing is free, every 'free' app takes something. Everyone knows this so they dont really care and why should they?
MichaelGG 10y ago
FB just recently shot their credibility though by making statements that seemed very dishonest regarding their content bias. I don't think it's a big issue but it'll look that way. It'll cause people to think twice -- who knows, maybe next week FB will announce "a bug in the code sometimes accidentally listened to a few users' phone calls" and "we are reviewing our auditing mechanisms to ensure this doesn't happen again". Is it a net gain for society if they're more wary, even if this particular instance is wrong?
- abalone 10y ago
  What were the "very dishonest" statements?
  - MichaelGG 10y ago
    Saying that there was no bias in their news selection, when it should be readily apparent that having humans select thing would introduce bias. Not quite outright lying, as you might possibly think they're naive enough to think humans are unbiased, but I don't think they get the benefit of the doubt here. IIRC they also started off saying it was all algorithmic.
    - abalone 10y ago
      Can you cite where they said it was "all" algorithmic? Their investigation found "no evidence of systematic political bias." So, not sure where the very dishonest statement is here.
      - _yvjs 10y ago
        The point he's making is that Facebook can't be trusted to self-regulate (in the context of privacy). With that assumption you probably wouldn't accept their opaque self-investigation so placidly. I think the point is that a casual observer would not have guessed trending tropics were so influenced by human intervention, and might have taken them to be an actual reflection of the Facebook hivemind. Further the statement of "no evidence of systematic political bias" is a bit hard to swallow given reports of Facebook employees asking "what Facebook can do to stop Donald Trump" at their all-hands (one of the top 5 questions in a poll [0] not just a lone employee walking up to the microphone). Further, the people curating these feeds are probably underpaid and young, and hence are probably going to skew left of the average journalist. Bias doesn't have to be explicit to be systematic. Anyway I find Donald Trump + much of the rest of the GOP field pretty reprehensible politics-wise, Facebook seems to be handling things well [1], and we shouldn't worry about a conflict of interest as much as w/ advertising+privacy [2], but some amount of vigilance seems wise given how much influence these platforms can have over political outcomes [3]. Twitter in particular seems to have made a few fairly illiberal moves lately from my POV. [0] http://gizmodo.com/facebook-employees-asked-mark-zuckerberg-if-they-should-1771012990 http://gizmodo.com/facebook-employees-asked-mark-zuckerberg-... [1] https://medium.com/@glennbeck/what-disturbed-me-about-the-facebook-meeting-3bbe0b96b87f https://medium.com/@glennbeck/what-disturbed-me-about-the-fa... [2] One shouldn't discount the H1B angle completely though. [3] http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/08/how-google-could-rig-the-2016-election-121548 http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/08/how-google-co...
lunula 10y ago
This could be rigorously studied. A group of people could attempt to plant false advertising opportunities in their speech and then measure the frequency at which related ads/posts arrive in their feed. I would trust something like this more than an assertion by FB that this is not happening.
- chris_wot 10y ago
  I think that if Facebook was caught doing this after they specifically denied it, then executives would probably be going to jail. I think if Facebook say they aren't doing this, then they aren't doing it.
  - emerongi 10y ago
    Even IF this was true, do you really think the executives on their meetings go like: "Okay, if we deny this, we will go to jail. So let's tell everyone that we are spying on them!" No. Denying is the only smart move here.
    - chris_wot 10y ago
      Just to be clear, are you positing that Facebook is actually doing what the article accuses it of doing?
- WalterSear 10y ago
  Easier to just monitor network traffic.
- grkvlt 10y ago
  Not just rigorously; easily studied, and checked. I haven't seen a single response here that says something along the lines of: 'Hey, I just did exactly the same as they reported the woman doing in the article, and she's right!' but instead, plenty of FOAF-type anecdotes about sort-of similar things. So, has nobody here bothered to check because they all trust news10.com as an impeccable source of technology news?
tdkl 10y ago
That's what they say. One of the urban legends was also that USA government agencies don't collect data at bulk and they were lying about it. We know the truth now. Facebook has been caught with the hand in the cookie jar too many times already and got away with it. Fuck Facebook.
- HappyTypist 10y ago
  No. I work for Facebook. This doesn't happen.
  - DavidSJ 10y ago
    I doubt that it happens myself, but out of curiosity, are you saying this because you are in a privileged position to know for sure that Facebook doesn't do this, or are you saying this based on your experience of the corporate culture?
    - alfiedotwtf 10y ago
      > are you saying this because you are in a privileged position to know for sure that Facebook doesn't do this I'd like to add "and will not do it in the future"
    - renaudg 10y ago
      I also used to be an engineer at Facebook. Definitely the corporate culture wouldn't allow anything like this. Believe it or not, many FB engineers have some kind of free software / civil liberties background in their past, and most people don't seem to realize that A) they have options, they can and would walk out if they witnessed anything shady B) the company has enough fake scandals wound up by the press as it is, to risk doing something genuinely evil for short term gain, and have a former employee eventually blow the whistle on. One controversy after the other, during my time at Facebook I witnessed the chasm between the mostly innocent motivations behind a product feature, and what the press / outside world made of it. This experience probably taught me as much about media cycles and conspiracy theory dynamics, as it did about engineering.
  - 10y ago
jsprogrammer 10y ago
How does Facebook distinguish (and prevent recording of) phone conversations from music, TV, and movies? Facebook would need to be collecting all ambient noise, just to identify (listen to) specific sources, no?
nxzero 10y ago
Be a stretch to call this an urban legend, unless you're saying the people referenced in the story don't exist. That said, this is lazy & irresponsible reporting on what is at best a singlural event. If it was reproduced, this is clearly a violation of Facebooks terms of service, regardless of if the user has opted to let Facebook listen to the music and TV that's playing in the background.
Karlozkiller 10y ago
The android app asks for microphone privilege as of a few years back when they introduced the listen-in feature. The problem here to me, is that when they add the voluntary feature they force everyone to give the app all the permissions needed as well. By doing this your phone has no way of stopping the app from misbehaving as it has given permission for it to do so. At least that was the case when the feature came out. I think I read something about android now letting you filter permissions and not blindly accept all that an app asks for?
- krupan 10y ago
  Yes, android 6 now asks you about each permission the first time an app tries to do something that requires that permission.
  - Karlozkiller 10y ago
    However at least on my Cyanogenmod device I've experienced apps breaking 100% if you deny it a permission. Even if that permission should not be vital to the functioning of the app. It's great that you can filter permissions, but when you suddenly can't use basic functionality because the programmers added obligatory geolocation to a feature, then you don't have much choice. Remove the app, or allow it to track you.
hellbanner 10y ago
As recent as of a couple years ago, Facebook's android app required access to your text messages to read texts. They were reading every text you sent & received just for some fancy Facebook linking.

ghayes 10y ago

See Betteridge's law [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...

Pengwin 10y ago

Evey now and again I see a picture or article being shared around saying Facebook are spying on you and how their apps have all these permissions to use your camera and phone audio. If they are on android, I tell them to open their system settings and show them how Google Search has just about every privilege on your phone and has had it since they turned it on. Even if people are concerned they still don't stop using Facebook or android. :/

harryf 10y ago
> Facebook are spying on you and how their apps have all these permissions to use your camera and phone audio. And it's not just the Facebook apps. The Facebook SDK is widely embedded into many other apps Facebook SDK (it's the most popular SDK on iOS for example, according to data published from Cocoapods - https://gist.github.com/ryanolsonk/e33bf9e89677da9fe8ce https://gist.github.com/ryanolsonk/e33bf9e89677da9fe8ce ). It's so popular because Facebook is basically the most effective network to run so called "App Install Ads" and embedding their SDK providers marketers essential data for tuning their targeting and ad spend. The SDK gives Facebook access to a ton of additional usage data which they can link together with anything they already have on your from their apps. It also _potentially_ gives them the ability to exploit any permissions given to the host app which embedded the SDK. Now they publish the source of the SDK openly ( https://github.com/facebook/facebook-ios-sdk https://github.com/facebook/facebook-ios-sdk ) but it certainly would harm anyone if there was more independent scrutiny given to analysing the source and whether there's anything else we're not seeing that go into the final SDK downloads.
- stuaxo 10y ago
  Facebook is you spying on yourself, by posting it all that info.
  - 88e282102ae2e5b 10y ago
    I'm not deliberately live streaming every conversation I have all day onto my feed.
    - xufi 10y ago
      Same here but you'd be surprised by how many people I know and you know post 1000 photos of every moment of their summer vacation on a trip. It scares me that they keep uploading all that there
- nstj 10y ago
  You could just build it yourself from the source if you're worried about that. Does the SDK ship with any pre-built binaries?
  - harryf 10y ago
    You're right although most developers are going to get it either pre-built from here https://developers.facebook.com/docs/ios/ https://developers.facebook.com/docs/ios/ and add it manually to their project or via Cocoapods (also pre-built I believe)
somecodemonkey 10y ago
They dont stop using because there is no real reason not to. Nothing is free, every 'free' app takes something. Everyone knows this so they dont really care and why should they?

MichaelGG 10y ago

FB just recently shot their credibility though by making statements that seemed very dishonest regarding their content bias. I don't think it's a big issue but it'll look that way. It'll cause people to think twice -- who knows, maybe next week FB will announce "a bug in the code sometimes accidentally listened to a few users' phone calls" and "we are reviewing our auditing mechanisms to ensure this doesn't happen again". Is it a net gain for society if they're more wary, even if this particular instance is wrong?

abalone 10y ago
What were the "very dishonest" statements?
- MichaelGG 10y ago
  Saying that there was no bias in their news selection, when it should be readily apparent that having humans select thing would introduce bias. Not quite outright lying, as you might possibly think they're naive enough to think humans are unbiased, but I don't think they get the benefit of the doubt here. IIRC they also started off saying it was all algorithmic.
  - abalone 10y ago
    Can you cite where they said it was "all" algorithmic? Their investigation found "no evidence of systematic political bias." So, not sure where the very dishonest statement is here.
    - _yvjs 10y ago
      The point he's making is that Facebook can't be trusted to self-regulate (in the context of privacy). With that assumption you probably wouldn't accept their opaque self-investigation so placidly. I think the point is that a casual observer would not have guessed trending tropics were so influenced by human intervention, and might have taken them to be an actual reflection of the Facebook hivemind. Further the statement of "no evidence of systematic political bias" is a bit hard to swallow given reports of Facebook employees asking "what Facebook can do to stop Donald Trump" at their all-hands (one of the top 5 questions in a poll [0] not just a lone employee walking up to the microphone). Further, the people curating these feeds are probably underpaid and young, and hence are probably going to skew left of the average journalist. Bias doesn't have to be explicit to be systematic. Anyway I find Donald Trump + much of the rest of the GOP field pretty reprehensible politics-wise, Facebook seems to be handling things well [1], and we shouldn't worry about a conflict of interest as much as w/ advertising+privacy [2], but some amount of vigilance seems wise given how much influence these platforms can have over political outcomes [3]. Twitter in particular seems to have made a few fairly illiberal moves lately from my POV. [0] http://gizmodo.com/facebook-employees-asked-mark-zuckerberg-if-they-should-1771012990 http://gizmodo.com/facebook-employees-asked-mark-zuckerberg-... [1] https://medium.com/@glennbeck/what-disturbed-me-about-the-facebook-meeting-3bbe0b96b87f https://medium.com/@glennbeck/what-disturbed-me-about-the-fa... [2] One shouldn't discount the H1B angle completely though. [3] http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/08/how-google-could-rig-the-2016-election-121548 http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/08/how-google-co...

lunula 10y ago

This could be rigorously studied. A group of people could attempt to plant false advertising opportunities in their speech and then measure the frequency at which related ads/posts arrive in their feed. I would trust something like this more than an assertion by FB that this is not happening.

chris_wot 10y ago
I think that if Facebook was caught doing this after they specifically denied it, then executives would probably be going to jail. I think if Facebook say they aren't doing this, then they aren't doing it.
- emerongi 10y ago
  Even IF this was true, do you really think the executives on their meetings go like: "Okay, if we deny this, we will go to jail. So let's tell everyone that we are spying on them!" No. Denying is the only smart move here.
  - chris_wot 10y ago
    Just to be clear, are you positing that Facebook is actually doing what the article accuses it of doing?
WalterSear 10y ago
Easier to just monitor network traffic.
grkvlt 10y ago
Not just rigorously; easily studied, and checked. I haven't seen a single response here that says something along the lines of: 'Hey, I just did exactly the same as they reported the woman doing in the article, and she's right!' but instead, plenty of FOAF-type anecdotes about sort-of similar things. So, has nobody here bothered to check because they all trust news10.com as an impeccable source of technology news?

tdkl 10y ago

That's what they say. One of the urban legends was also that USA government agencies don't collect data at bulk and they were lying about it. We know the truth now. Facebook has been caught with the hand in the cookie jar too many times already and got away with it. Fuck Facebook.

HappyTypist 10y ago
No. I work for Facebook. This doesn't happen.
- DavidSJ 10y ago
  I doubt that it happens myself, but out of curiosity, are you saying this because you are in a privileged position to know for sure that Facebook doesn't do this, or are you saying this based on your experience of the corporate culture?
  - alfiedotwtf 10y ago
    > are you saying this because you are in a privileged position to know for sure that Facebook doesn't do this I'd like to add "and will not do it in the future"
  - renaudg 10y ago
    I also used to be an engineer at Facebook. Definitely the corporate culture wouldn't allow anything like this. Believe it or not, many FB engineers have some kind of free software / civil liberties background in their past, and most people don't seem to realize that A) they have options, they can and would walk out if they witnessed anything shady B) the company has enough fake scandals wound up by the press as it is, to risk doing something genuinely evil for short term gain, and have a former employee eventually blow the whistle on. One controversy after the other, during my time at Facebook I witnessed the chasm between the mostly innocent motivations behind a product feature, and what the press / outside world made of it. This experience probably taught me as much about media cycles and conspiracy theory dynamics, as it did about engineering.
- 10y ago

jsprogrammer 10y ago

How does Facebook distinguish (and prevent recording of) phone conversations from music, TV, and movies? Facebook would need to be collecting all ambient noise, just to identify (listen to) specific sources, no?

nxzero 10y ago

Be a stretch to call this an urban legend, unless you're saying the people referenced in the story don't exist. That said, this is lazy & irresponsible reporting on what is at best a singlural event. If it was reproduced, this is clearly a violation of Facebooks terms of service, regardless of if the user has opted to let Facebook listen to the music and TV that's playing in the background.

Karlozkiller 10y ago

The android app asks for microphone privilege as of a few years back when they introduced the listen-in feature. The problem here to me, is that when they add the voluntary feature they force everyone to give the app all the permissions needed as well. By doing this your phone has no way of stopping the app from misbehaving as it has given permission for it to do so. At least that was the case when the feature came out. I think I read something about android now letting you filter permissions and not blindly accept all that an app asks for?

krupan 10y ago
Yes, android 6 now asks you about each permission the first time an app tries to do something that requires that permission.
- Karlozkiller 10y ago
  However at least on my Cyanogenmod device I've experienced apps breaking 100% if you deny it a permission. Even if that permission should not be vital to the functioning of the app. It's great that you can filter permissions, but when you suddenly can't use basic functionality because the programmers added obligatory geolocation to a feature, then you don't have much choice. Remove the app, or allow it to track you.

hellbanner 10y ago

As recent as of a couple years ago, Facebook's android app required access to your text messages to read texts. They were reading every text you sent & received just for some fancy Facebook linking.