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Facebook is using smartphones to listen to what people say: https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/facebook-using-people-s-phones-to-lis

Facebook is using smartphones to listen to what people say: https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/facebook-using-people-s-phones-to-listen-in-on-what-they-re-saying-claims-professor-a7057526.html https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/ne... A lot of people said Facebook ads suggest them products or services debated on phone calls. If you have Echo or Kindle Fire TV, guess it can be easily reproduced when Amazon really listening and analyze your voice.

skocznymroczny 8y ago
"A lot of people said" is not enough for a proof. What might be happening, is that Alice and Bob are friends. Bob spends some time researching a topic, say looking for a new car of brand X. He calls Alice and tells her about him wanting to buy a car of brand X. Some time later, Alice sees ads for car of brand X. Now, it could have been FB listening on the phone call. But there's another possibility - FB knows that Alice and Bob are friends, and it knows Bob likes brand X, so it assumes that a friend of Bob will be interested in brand X.
- everydayworks 8y ago
  I could see it working like that. However, the best way to figure out is to just test it. Talk about something random and see if those ads popup on your feed. I did it on my own and well, the results came out to be true or a really big coincidence.
  - lm28469 8y ago
    I think people underestimate the number of data points fb/google has access to. Many of these examples can be explained by other things. Receiving baby items ads while no one knows your wife is pregnant ? Well maybe she googled a brand of baby strollers and fb used its graph + the fact that you're at the same location everyday after work to determine you're her husband. Receiving ads for a small music band you only heard at that open mic night you randomly joined 3 days ago ? There probably was an event on fb with the list of bands that played that night + logged in the bar wifi. With the number of people in the "hacker" community who want to prove fb and google are bad we'd already have real technical proof of it happening. Either they send the data back to a server and process it there, or process it on the device directly, both of which should be fairly easy to detect.
- paulcarroty 8y ago
  > "A lot of people said" is not enough for a proof. Agree. Here's something like video proof from BBC: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35639549 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35639549
  - pavel_lishin 8y ago
    This sounds like a technological proof of concept that someone _could_ build such a thing, and a few anecdotes.
shatnersbassoon 8y ago
This is the magical thinking explanation. What is much more plausible is that they have such enormous datasets that they are able to train machine learning models to predict interests of people on the basis of any number of online behaviors that they record. The behavior doesn't even need to "make sense" - it could be that people who log on at these times, live here, travel by train, like dog photos and belong to certain groups are highly to be interested in a particular product. It doesn't matter, the system will learn these relations anyway. It might seem spooky and eavesdropping-y from a naive user's perspective, but the simple fact is that when you have that much data you don't even need to eavesdrop.
dekhn 8y ago
Nearly all cases I've seen of this are better explained by other information that Facebook has about you.

skocznymroczny 8y ago

"A lot of people said" is not enough for a proof. What might be happening, is that Alice and Bob are friends. Bob spends some time researching a topic, say looking for a new car of brand X. He calls Alice and tells her about him wanting to buy a car of brand X. Some time later, Alice sees ads for car of brand X. Now, it could have been FB listening on the phone call. But there's another possibility - FB knows that Alice and Bob are friends, and it knows Bob likes brand X, so it assumes that a friend of Bob will be interested in brand X.

everydayworks 8y ago
I could see it working like that. However, the best way to figure out is to just test it. Talk about something random and see if those ads popup on your feed. I did it on my own and well, the results came out to be true or a really big coincidence.
- lm28469 8y ago
  I think people underestimate the number of data points fb/google has access to. Many of these examples can be explained by other things. Receiving baby items ads while no one knows your wife is pregnant ? Well maybe she googled a brand of baby strollers and fb used its graph + the fact that you're at the same location everyday after work to determine you're her husband. Receiving ads for a small music band you only heard at that open mic night you randomly joined 3 days ago ? There probably was an event on fb with the list of bands that played that night + logged in the bar wifi. With the number of people in the "hacker" community who want to prove fb and google are bad we'd already have real technical proof of it happening. Either they send the data back to a server and process it there, or process it on the device directly, both of which should be fairly easy to detect.
paulcarroty 8y ago
> "A lot of people said" is not enough for a proof. Agree. Here's something like video proof from BBC: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35639549 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35639549
- pavel_lishin 8y ago
  This sounds like a technological proof of concept that someone _could_ build such a thing, and a few anecdotes.

shatnersbassoon 8y ago

This is the magical thinking explanation. What is much more plausible is that they have such enormous datasets that they are able to train machine learning models to predict interests of people on the basis of any number of online behaviors that they record. The behavior doesn't even need to "make sense" - it could be that people who log on at these times, live here, travel by train, like dog photos and belong to certain groups are highly to be interested in a particular product. It doesn't matter, the system will learn these relations anyway. It might seem spooky and eavesdropping-y from a naive user's perspective, but the simple fact is that when you have that much data you don't even need to eavesdrop.

dekhn 8y ago

Nearly all cases I've seen of this are better explained by other information that Facebook has about you.