5 ms·

Getting to the bottom of the ads-coinciding-with-conversations mystery

43 points by spking 8y ago

seren 8y ago
It seems to be a bold statement without much proof or explanation.
- elicash 8y ago
  I can't believe this is on Hacker News. The only source here is a random cybersecurity guy with no factual basis for making the claim. That and a poorly thought-out "experiment" that seems to be about as sophisticated as "I talked about shirts and I see shirt ads." And what the hell is this referring to? "Seeing Google are open about it...” What exactly is Google open about in regards to sending random audio from phones to any app that wants it? How can this writer just throw that out there with no explanation? The conspiracy theory here is that Facebook built the most sophisticated ad product ever invented and is using it secretly for their advertisers to improve advertisers' results without telling them about it.
0898 8y ago
The author's "evidence" of Facebook eavesdropping on conversations is the fact that he talked about 'shirts' and then saw adverts for them in his newsfeed. He doesn't seem to have realised that every other post on r/entrepreneur is from a FB ad bro with a drop-ship t-shirt business.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- reacweb 8y ago
  Confirmation bias is a more probable cause.
  - AndrewOMartin 8y ago
    I used to ascribe many things to confirmation bias, but now I worry that I can only remember the times when confirmation bias was the cause, and I've simply forgotten the other times. Think about it, isn't it eerily common that you can ascribe something to confirmation bias?
kposehn 8y ago
This is pretty sloppy reporting on Vice’s part. If you wanted to definitively test this you could, but the author’s method brings no real conclusion outside of confirming their own bias it seems.
- optimuspaul 8y ago
  That was my takeaway as well. I notice coincidences like the examples all the time, but I don't always have my phone and many times the ads are on TV or Radio. Usually when I see the ads online that seem like a coincidence it tends to trace back to me actually looking for an item I had talked about on amazon or something. And honestly based on the number and variety of ads I see I wouldn't be surprised to see something pop up out of the blue that I had recently talked about. I'm not convinced, but I think I could be.
jaclaz 8y ago
>Phrases like I’m thinking about going back to uni and I need some cheap shirts for work. Then I carefully monitored the sponsored posts on Facebook for any changes. The test phrases are way too common. Proposed phrase for a future experiment: I surely need to find a new postillion (as the previous one was struck by lightning). though there is the risk that no postillion is paying for the ads, making a false negative ...
Karupan 8y ago
Genuine question: is there definite proof that phones and services (Siri/Alexa/Google assistant) are NOT listening and recording everything? I've always refused to use those services because I have no idea what kind of data they collect, regardless of what they claim.
- jsjohnst 8y ago
  > are NOT listening and recording everything Yes, I can definitively say they do not record everything. Listening however is hard to prove conclusively.
- zdkl 8y ago
  The general assumption is someone probably would notice suspicious traffic from the device, or an unexplained power draw, or even undocumented parts. But I don't know either, haven't checked myself!
- shagie 8y ago
  Yes. Attach the device to a network where you can monitor the amount of traffic (don’t need to monitor the actual content). Streaming voice takes a bit of data. That traffic would be clearly evident. 320kbps rate translates to 2.40 MB per minute or about 1 GB every 8h. I can assure you my data plan would notice that. As I don’t see gigabytes going out of my devices (I have several amazon and apple devices at home), it’s fairly safe to say they aren’t uploading all the noises of the house for analysis.
  - shabble 8y ago
    Why on earth would you be streaming 320kbps? Roughly telephone-equivalent bitrate is <100kbps, potentially down to 8kbps or so for (bad) speech. Noise-gating or even rudimentary voice detection (sound is a voice, not random ambient) can reduce that duty cycle to a tiny fraction. So you could get a lot of useful information out for <100MB/day. If you wanted to be sneaky, there are probably viable ways of hiding it from casual detection; buffering locally and appending to user-uploads (images, video, voice) when there's already data flowing. Or do some pre-processing on the device to slim it down even more. Maybe only when it's on external charge to avoid running the battery down too far. I'm not suggesting this is actually happening, but it's far more plausible than your estimates suggest.
djsumdog 8y ago
I've heard about this multiple times and there was even a Reply All podcast about it. If it were true, there are plenty of security researchers and bug bounty hunters that install their own CAs on phones and pull packet dumps. You'd think we'd see reports of this by now. Facebook/Google and others have some pretty advanced learning algorithms, and a whole shit ton of data on you. What if, via some predictive analysis based on browsing history, messages, photos and other sources, their algorithms guessed the author would be thinking about Tokyo before the conversation happened? If true, it's kinda sad such a powerful system is simply used to sell shit to us. And if true, it could also provide some crazy insights into determinism and human predictability. The post is shit though. The author needed to team up with a researcher, pull apart the Messenger/Facebook/Instagram apks (or whatever iPhone packages are) and find real evidence the apps passively listens to conversations and transmits that data.
kall 8y ago
I'm not an expert on the iOS security model so I'm happy to be corrected about this, but as far as I understand this (enabling the mic without the alert banner or fetching data from wherever Siri might cache requests) would mean that either Apple is secretly colluding with Facebook or that Facebook is using an iOS exploit and sneaking it past app review. Thats an extraordinary claim that needs more then yet another anecdote and a vague technical expert to back it up, especially since it would not be unreasonably hard to provide some technical proof for this.
- jsjohnst 8y ago
  I’m not an expert either, but I’ve played one on TV, and I agree, it’s utter BS this was happening on an iPhone.
zdw 8y ago
Continuous speech recognition is difficult. There are technical reasons why this entire supposition is wrong, at least in the phone case. The reason for the "Hey device..." preamble to most conversations with the device is that, in most battery powered devices at least, the always-on mic and processing unit that handles this is a separate, very low power unit that recognizes only the preamble, then fires up the rest of the system (usually along with buffering a bit of audio) to handle the rest of the query which can be more complex. I could imagine that it's always listening/recording for non-catchphrase data on the power unlimited always-on pucks though, but a network traffic analysis would probably reveal that as well.
- gnode 8y ago
  It's probably possible to do speech recognition with much less power / computation, if you don't care about its reliability. For the purpose of targeting ads it doesn't really matter if you get it wrong, as long as you improve the probability of getting it right. That said, the article lacks any conclusive evidence this is happening. It's a scary prospect that it could happen though.
mrtksn 8y ago
I really don't understand this conspiracy theory. These devices don't run on magic but on technology that's well understood by a very large number of engineers and scientists all around the world, even in countries that are not exactly friendly enough to maintain the conspiracy of the American corporations or whomever else you believe is behind this. Because these devices run on technology and not on magic we can also observe their behaviour and reverse engineer them. We can see when and what is transmitted from these devices, we can observe individual components, we can observe apps. I find it very unlikely that such a privacy violation and grand lie can survive the scrutiny of mortal enemies of the corporations that are allegedly behind this. What's more likely is that your unscientific observations are flawed and you are biased to confirm your "theory" and write an article to make some ad money and fame.
- gadders 8y ago
  I think if it were true, someone would have leaked it by now. I think what is happening is the effect where you discuss buying, say, a new Ford XX car and then when you go for a drive you see them everywhere.
oldcynic 8y ago
Where's the control in this "experiment"? Even just a colleague at the same location checking ads without uttering these ridiculously generic test phrases. Did he ensure his logged in account wasn't used to research some points for this story, either on his laptop or phone? There's quite a few trivial ways he could have polluted his ad stream before needing to look to voice monitoring. Half of the stories on this topic seem to be merely the effect (I'm sure someone's coined a name for it) of seeing more of what you look for. e.g. Decide you are buying a Tesla and suddenly you notice there seem to be more Teslas on the roads... I'd like to see some studies and stories on this that are a significantly more credible. I am naturally suspicious but in the absence of evidence I tend to think it's not happening, yet. This piece clarifies nothing.
- seren 8y ago
  > Half of the stories on this topic seem to be merely the effect (I'm sure someone's coined a name for it) of seeing more of what you look for. e.g. Decide you are buying a Tesla and suddenly you notice there seem to be more Teslas on the roads... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases#Frequency_illusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases#Frequ... Frequency Illusion or Baader Meinhof phenomenon.
BenoitP 8y ago
I'll take Occam's razor on this one. This is much better explained by people becoming more aware of something after having been exposed to it recently [1]. They talk about it with a friend, and suddenly the ad that usually goes under the radar now goes above the consciousness threshold. It connects to more neurons that usual, and thus makes a complete cycle in the brain. Furthermore, this is highly amplified by marketing tactics. Their friend would have been exposed to the same campaign, and this might be why he/she talked about it. This is the co-occurence that the second person actually reacts to. It knows the statistics are skewed on this one. Something is up. I would not be surprised if Facebook campaigns are rolled out clusters by clusters of friends. It takes repetition for consumers to remember a message, and this is an efficient way to create it. That's the nature of social ads. If anything, it informs us of the emergent phenomena that can arise in a social graph. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases#Frequency_illusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases#Frequ...
liberte82 8y ago
So... yet another article full of nothing but anecdotal evidence. What will it take to actually get a real answer on this?

43 points by spking 8y ago

seren 8y ago

It seems to be a bold statement without much proof or explanation.

elicash 8y ago
I can't believe this is on Hacker News. The only source here is a random cybersecurity guy with no factual basis for making the claim. That and a poorly thought-out "experiment" that seems to be about as sophisticated as "I talked about shirts and I see shirt ads." And what the hell is this referring to? "Seeing Google are open about it...” What exactly is Google open about in regards to sending random audio from phones to any app that wants it? How can this writer just throw that out there with no explanation? The conspiracy theory here is that Facebook built the most sophisticated ad product ever invented and is using it secretly for their advertisers to improve advertisers' results without telling them about it.

0898 8y ago

The author's "evidence" of Facebook eavesdropping on conversations is the fact that he talked about 'shirts' and then saw adverts for them in his newsfeed. He doesn't seem to have realised that every other post on r/entrepreneur is from a FB ad bro with a drop-ship t-shirt business.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
reacweb 8y ago
Confirmation bias is a more probable cause.
- AndrewOMartin 8y ago
  I used to ascribe many things to confirmation bias, but now I worry that I can only remember the times when confirmation bias was the cause, and I've simply forgotten the other times. Think about it, isn't it eerily common that you can ascribe something to confirmation bias?

kposehn 8y ago

This is pretty sloppy reporting on Vice’s part. If you wanted to definitively test this you could, but the author’s method brings no real conclusion outside of confirming their own bias it seems.

optimuspaul 8y ago
That was my takeaway as well. I notice coincidences like the examples all the time, but I don't always have my phone and many times the ads are on TV or Radio. Usually when I see the ads online that seem like a coincidence it tends to trace back to me actually looking for an item I had talked about on amazon or something. And honestly based on the number and variety of ads I see I wouldn't be surprised to see something pop up out of the blue that I had recently talked about. I'm not convinced, but I think I could be.

jaclaz 8y ago

>Phrases like I’m thinking about going back to uni and I need some cheap shirts for work. Then I carefully monitored the sponsored posts on Facebook for any changes. The test phrases are way too common. Proposed phrase for a future experiment: I surely need to find a new postillion (as the previous one was struck by lightning). though there is the risk that no postillion is paying for the ads, making a false negative ...

Karupan 8y ago

Genuine question: is there definite proof that phones and services (Siri/Alexa/Google assistant) are NOT listening and recording everything? I've always refused to use those services because I have no idea what kind of data they collect, regardless of what they claim.

jsjohnst 8y ago
> are NOT listening and recording everything Yes, I can definitively say they do not record everything. Listening however is hard to prove conclusively.
zdkl 8y ago
The general assumption is someone probably would notice suspicious traffic from the device, or an unexplained power draw, or even undocumented parts. But I don't know either, haven't checked myself!
shagie 8y ago
Yes. Attach the device to a network where you can monitor the amount of traffic (don’t need to monitor the actual content). Streaming voice takes a bit of data. That traffic would be clearly evident. 320kbps rate translates to 2.40 MB per minute or about 1 GB every 8h. I can assure you my data plan would notice that. As I don’t see gigabytes going out of my devices (I have several amazon and apple devices at home), it’s fairly safe to say they aren’t uploading all the noises of the house for analysis.
- shabble 8y ago
  Why on earth would you be streaming 320kbps? Roughly telephone-equivalent bitrate is <100kbps, potentially down to 8kbps or so for (bad) speech. Noise-gating or even rudimentary voice detection (sound is a voice, not random ambient) can reduce that duty cycle to a tiny fraction. So you could get a lot of useful information out for <100MB/day. If you wanted to be sneaky, there are probably viable ways of hiding it from casual detection; buffering locally and appending to user-uploads (images, video, voice) when there's already data flowing. Or do some pre-processing on the device to slim it down even more. Maybe only when it's on external charge to avoid running the battery down too far. I'm not suggesting this is actually happening, but it's far more plausible than your estimates suggest.

djsumdog 8y ago

I've heard about this multiple times and there was even a Reply All podcast about it. If it were true, there are plenty of security researchers and bug bounty hunters that install their own CAs on phones and pull packet dumps. You'd think we'd see reports of this by now. Facebook/Google and others have some pretty advanced learning algorithms, and a whole shit ton of data on you. What if, via some predictive analysis based on browsing history, messages, photos and other sources, their algorithms guessed the author would be thinking about Tokyo before the conversation happened? If true, it's kinda sad such a powerful system is simply used to sell shit to us. And if true, it could also provide some crazy insights into determinism and human predictability. The post is shit though. The author needed to team up with a researcher, pull apart the Messenger/Facebook/Instagram apks (or whatever iPhone packages are) and find real evidence the apps passively listens to conversations and transmits that data.

kall 8y ago

I'm not an expert on the iOS security model so I'm happy to be corrected about this, but as far as I understand this (enabling the mic without the alert banner or fetching data from wherever Siri might cache requests) would mean that either Apple is secretly colluding with Facebook or that Facebook is using an iOS exploit and sneaking it past app review. Thats an extraordinary claim that needs more then yet another anecdote and a vague technical expert to back it up, especially since it would not be unreasonably hard to provide some technical proof for this.

jsjohnst 8y ago
I’m not an expert either, but I’ve played one on TV, and I agree, it’s utter BS this was happening on an iPhone.

zdw 8y ago

Continuous speech recognition is difficult. There are technical reasons why this entire supposition is wrong, at least in the phone case. The reason for the "Hey device..." preamble to most conversations with the device is that, in most battery powered devices at least, the always-on mic and processing unit that handles this is a separate, very low power unit that recognizes only the preamble, then fires up the rest of the system (usually along with buffering a bit of audio) to handle the rest of the query which can be more complex. I could imagine that it's always listening/recording for non-catchphrase data on the power unlimited always-on pucks though, but a network traffic analysis would probably reveal that as well.

gnode 8y ago
It's probably possible to do speech recognition with much less power / computation, if you don't care about its reliability. For the purpose of targeting ads it doesn't really matter if you get it wrong, as long as you improve the probability of getting it right. That said, the article lacks any conclusive evidence this is happening. It's a scary prospect that it could happen though.

mrtksn 8y ago

I really don't understand this conspiracy theory. These devices don't run on magic but on technology that's well understood by a very large number of engineers and scientists all around the world, even in countries that are not exactly friendly enough to maintain the conspiracy of the American corporations or whomever else you believe is behind this. Because these devices run on technology and not on magic we can also observe their behaviour and reverse engineer them. We can see when and what is transmitted from these devices, we can observe individual components, we can observe apps. I find it very unlikely that such a privacy violation and grand lie can survive the scrutiny of mortal enemies of the corporations that are allegedly behind this. What's more likely is that your unscientific observations are flawed and you are biased to confirm your "theory" and write an article to make some ad money and fame.

gadders 8y ago
I think if it were true, someone would have leaked it by now. I think what is happening is the effect where you discuss buying, say, a new Ford XX car and then when you go for a drive you see them everywhere.

oldcynic 8y ago

Where's the control in this "experiment"? Even just a colleague at the same location checking ads without uttering these ridiculously generic test phrases. Did he ensure his logged in account wasn't used to research some points for this story, either on his laptop or phone? There's quite a few trivial ways he could have polluted his ad stream before needing to look to voice monitoring. Half of the stories on this topic seem to be merely the effect (I'm sure someone's coined a name for it) of seeing more of what you look for. e.g. Decide you are buying a Tesla and suddenly you notice there seem to be more Teslas on the roads... I'd like to see some studies and stories on this that are a significantly more credible. I am naturally suspicious but in the absence of evidence I tend to think it's not happening, yet. This piece clarifies nothing.

seren 8y ago
> Half of the stories on this topic seem to be merely the effect (I'm sure someone's coined a name for it) of seeing more of what you look for. e.g. Decide you are buying a Tesla and suddenly you notice there seem to be more Teslas on the roads... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases#Frequency_illusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases#Frequ... Frequency Illusion or Baader Meinhof phenomenon.

BenoitP 8y ago

I'll take Occam's razor on this one. This is much better explained by people becoming more aware of something after having been exposed to it recently [1]. They talk about it with a friend, and suddenly the ad that usually goes under the radar now goes above the consciousness threshold. It connects to more neurons that usual, and thus makes a complete cycle in the brain. Furthermore, this is highly amplified by marketing tactics. Their friend would have been exposed to the same campaign, and this might be why he/she talked about it. This is the co-occurence that the second person actually reacts to. It knows the statistics are skewed on this one. Something is up. I would not be surprised if Facebook campaigns are rolled out clusters by clusters of friends. It takes repetition for consumers to remember a message, and this is an efficient way to create it. That's the nature of social ads. If anything, it informs us of the emergent phenomena that can arise in a social graph. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases#Frequency_illusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases#Frequ...

liberte82 8y ago

So... yet another article full of nothing but anecdotal evidence. What will it take to actually get a real answer on this?