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Every week or so there's a new theory that some tech company is constantly using your phone's microphone or camera and siphoning all the data back to HQ. Every
by knzhou 7y ago
Every week or so there's a new theory that some tech company is constantly using your phone's microphone or camera and siphoning all the data back to HQ.
Every time the reason is the same: incompetence. Something like this can result from a single misplaced line of code. On the other hand, no tech company on Earth wants to have the job of processing a billion extra audio or video feeds. This would require enormous resources, on the scale of whole engineering departments, for questionable gain. And it couldn't be secret, because the point of gathering all that data is to target ads, so advertisers would have to know about it. The notion that this is intentional is about as credible as the average conspiracy theory.
(Of course, selective monitoring by the government is perfectly possible -- but we already knew that, and it would be a lot more subtle than this.)
- loteck 7y agoDid we learn nothing from the NSA? The big players long ago learned: you won't ever have the option to process something you never collected in the first place. "Collect it all." Process it later.
- knzhou 7y agoDo some order of magnitude calculations. There isn't enough storage space to reasonably collect everybody's video feed continually. It would require a significant chunk of literally all bandwidth that exists. If the NSA were actively monitoring your phone's camera feed, it wouldn't only work when Facebook is open, and it wouldn't literally say it was doing so on the screen, like it is here. What is actually happening just doesn't look like genuine surveillance. As I said, it looks like a mistake.
- asjw 7y agoIf you have the metadata regarding phone usage or engagement you know when it's the best moment If you can process the images on the phone for cheap (modern phones can do that) you can send only the relevant metadata
- pembrook 7y agoI love hacker news but this is one trigger topic where the community goes a little crazy. Your comment is entirely rational and yet it’s been downvoted to the bottom. Privacy is an extremely important issue, but it’s 100% clear in this case that Facebook is not doing anything nefarious here. I’ve got a buddy in growth marketing who tells me any headline inciting privacy hysteria is a super easy way to game the front page here.
- jesterson 7y agoCommunity goes crazy because community values it's privacy, while big corporations are exploiting it for obvious reasons. You are saying FB is not doing anything nefarious here like Cambridge Analytica never existed. And it's only one thing we know - how many leakages - or shall we call it deliberate exploitation of personal information - we were not aware of? While corporations will continue dealing with private data as they please without letting us know, those cases will gain attention.
- SmellyGeekBoy 7y ago"Nothing to see here, my buddy who abuses peoples' personal data for a living says it's perfectly fine"
- wizzwizz4 7y agoThey could easily be gathering facial expression data, processed on the phone, in order to better assess people's reactions to what they're being shown, in order to better manipulate them for money. Just because it's possible doesn't mean they are doing it – this instance is probably just a bug. Doesn't explain why Instagram turns on the laptop camera indicator light on Windows 10 when the app isn't even (supposed to be) running, and stuff like that, though.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- kurttt 7y agoVideo/image/audio data is likely processed locally on device and the important bits and bytes are sent back to "HQ"
- danillonunes 7y ago> And it couldn't be secret, because the point of gathering all that data is to target ads, so advertisers would have to know about it. Not necessarily. They don’t need to tell the advertisers “target people who are talking about X on their phone’s microphones”, they can just tell “target people who is interested in X”, and they will still be profiting because advertisers will figure whatever their black box algorithm for targeting is doing, it’s doing better than the competition.