4 ms·

This is as circumstantial as it gets. I think this is happening, then I saw an ad that confirmed my original thoughts and thus this lofty claim must be true. I

by wyxuan 6y ago

This is as circumstantial as it gets. I think this is happening, then I saw an ad that confirmed my original thoughts and thus this lofty claim must be true. Its similar to that Reply-All story where they looked into whether the claim that FB was listening in on people's discussion, and despite there being no physical way for it to happen, people still believed it.

mxcrossb 6y ago
Indeed we have to remember that when assessing the likelihood of a coincidence, it’s not the odds of any given event, but the odds that none of the many possible events you might recognize occur
djsumdog 6y ago
I remember that story and they really failed to make a case. With as many security experts are constantly looking at the big apps like Messenger/Insta, you think someone would notice huge packets of audio data if this was happening. I think what's much more likely is that machine learning algorithms are so good right now, they're able to determine what people are interesting in based on browsing habits and other metadata. Either that or they're using your location data and tracking what adverts people are physically seeing on signs/billboards. So you may think your app is listening to you because you get an ad for something you talking about, but you don't realize you talked about it because your brain subconsciously registered a billboard over and over again.
- nitrogen 6y ago
  huge packets of audio data Not that it's actually happening, but the best cell network speech codecs use ~6kbits/s, and it's probably possible to go lower with reduced speaker identifiability. You also only need to record when there's speech detected, and can delay and/or batch transmissions.
  - monkpit 6y ago
    I don’t see why they would even have to send the actual audio bits over the wire...? Couldn’t the phone just do some work on audio and send the data after?
    - z3t4 6y ago
      Gotta use all those computers in the datacenter for something...
- blincoln 6y ago
  It may also be obscure enough that no one has noticed. Voice can probably be compressed using a lossy algorithm pretty heavily before it becomes useless for keyword matching. Maybe there's some sort of de-duping, and unique results are only sent up once per day/week, etc. If it's encrypted, it might look like random other telemetry. About ten years ago, I discovered that one of the major "rate you shopping experience"-type survey providers had a feature where shoppers would be tagged at the beginning of their session, and if they were randomly selected, everything they did on the website was recorded (including text entered in fields, etc.). When they checked out, they'd get a pop-up asking if they wanted to complete a survey. If they answered "no", supposedly that recording was deleted, but who knows? There was certainly no indication that answering "yes" would result in it being saved indefinitely for playback by the marketing department. The only reason I found it was that I was curious about some binary data that would be uploaded every once in awhile. It wasn't hard to take apart (zlib, I think), but the standard tools didn't catch it at all because it was a custom thing developed by that vendor. I've still never seen anyone discuss it publicly, despite it having been very common on online stores for years. It could also be that no one is doing marketing analytics based on voice recordings, of course. I just wouldn't take it for granted that someone would have found it and disclosed it.
  - xmodem 6y ago
    See https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2020/09/podcasts-on-floppy-disk/ https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2020/09/podcasts-on-floppy-disk/ for a recent experiment in how far you can intelligibly compress voice these days
- ocdtrekkie 6y ago
  Maybe we should stop taking the "it's listening to you" thing seriously, but it's still creepy. The fact that people think it does means we're way over the creepy line in how much tracking is happening, regardless of exactly how advertisers are getting their data.
- kbenson 6y ago
  > I think what's much more likely is that machine learning algorithms are so good right now, they're able to determine what people are interesting in based on browsing habits and other metadata. I and a friend were discussing this before that podcast. He was of the opinion that FB was very likely listening because he had multiple occurrences where he'd visit family, and they'd talk about something, either some product that family was interested in or had just bought, and hours to a couple days later he'd see an advertisement for it. My stance (which looks to be the same as yours) was that they don't even need to listen to you, and doing so would probably be really bad if it was found out. Instead they know who you're around, they what that they're interested in, and they make some educated guesses and tag you as interested in stuff they are also or that they just bought, and it's the hits that stick in our mind, not the random other stuff you were shown that you never talked about with others but they had searched for or bought. Throw enough data at he problem, you'll get some hits. There's a lot of data out there right now.
  - mleonhard 6y ago
    Yes. If you visit someone's home and connect to their wifi, every app on your phone can record that you are there. They record the other people that are there, too. If one of those people has been reading websites about topic X, the ad networks record a high interest in that topic. It makes sense to advertise X to the people close to that person.
ghostbrainalpha 6y ago
Facebook doesn't have to listen to us for that to be happening though. Purina Dog Chow purchases "Qualified Leads" from marketers who have lists of people interested in Dog Food. We have no idea where they get those lists. If you play Candy Crush, and that third party app has Microphone access it could be collecting the data, and selling it to marketing agencies, which then sell the qualified leads to Purina dog chow. You are still being listened to and your information sold. It just happens on Facebook more than it being Facebook's fault directly.

by wyxuan 6y ago

mxcrossb 6y ago

Indeed we have to remember that when assessing the likelihood of a coincidence, it’s not the odds of any given event, but the odds that none of the many possible events you might recognize occur

djsumdog 6y ago

I remember that story and they really failed to make a case. With as many security experts are constantly looking at the big apps like Messenger/Insta, you think someone would notice huge packets of audio data if this was happening. I think what's much more likely is that machine learning algorithms are so good right now, they're able to determine what people are interesting in based on browsing habits and other metadata. Either that or they're using your location data and tracking what adverts people are physically seeing on signs/billboards. So you may think your app is listening to you because you get an ad for something you talking about, but you don't realize you talked about it because your brain subconsciously registered a billboard over and over again.

nitrogen 6y ago
huge packets of audio data Not that it's actually happening, but the best cell network speech codecs use ~6kbits/s, and it's probably possible to go lower with reduced speaker identifiability. You also only need to record when there's speech detected, and can delay and/or batch transmissions.
- monkpit 6y ago
  I don’t see why they would even have to send the actual audio bits over the wire...? Couldn’t the phone just do some work on audio and send the data after?
  - z3t4 6y ago
    Gotta use all those computers in the datacenter for something...
blincoln 6y ago
It may also be obscure enough that no one has noticed. Voice can probably be compressed using a lossy algorithm pretty heavily before it becomes useless for keyword matching. Maybe there's some sort of de-duping, and unique results are only sent up once per day/week, etc. If it's encrypted, it might look like random other telemetry. About ten years ago, I discovered that one of the major "rate you shopping experience"-type survey providers had a feature where shoppers would be tagged at the beginning of their session, and if they were randomly selected, everything they did on the website was recorded (including text entered in fields, etc.). When they checked out, they'd get a pop-up asking if they wanted to complete a survey. If they answered "no", supposedly that recording was deleted, but who knows? There was certainly no indication that answering "yes" would result in it being saved indefinitely for playback by the marketing department. The only reason I found it was that I was curious about some binary data that would be uploaded every once in awhile. It wasn't hard to take apart (zlib, I think), but the standard tools didn't catch it at all because it was a custom thing developed by that vendor. I've still never seen anyone discuss it publicly, despite it having been very common on online stores for years. It could also be that no one is doing marketing analytics based on voice recordings, of course. I just wouldn't take it for granted that someone would have found it and disclosed it.
- xmodem 6y ago
  See https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2020/09/podcasts-on-floppy-disk/ https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2020/09/podcasts-on-floppy-disk/ for a recent experiment in how far you can intelligibly compress voice these days
ocdtrekkie 6y ago
Maybe we should stop taking the "it's listening to you" thing seriously, but it's still creepy. The fact that people think it does means we're way over the creepy line in how much tracking is happening, regardless of exactly how advertisers are getting their data.
kbenson 6y ago
> I think what's much more likely is that machine learning algorithms are so good right now, they're able to determine what people are interesting in based on browsing habits and other metadata. I and a friend were discussing this before that podcast. He was of the opinion that FB was very likely listening because he had multiple occurrences where he'd visit family, and they'd talk about something, either some product that family was interested in or had just bought, and hours to a couple days later he'd see an advertisement for it. My stance (which looks to be the same as yours) was that they don't even need to listen to you, and doing so would probably be really bad if it was found out. Instead they know who you're around, they what that they're interested in, and they make some educated guesses and tag you as interested in stuff they are also or that they just bought, and it's the hits that stick in our mind, not the random other stuff you were shown that you never talked about with others but they had searched for or bought. Throw enough data at he problem, you'll get some hits. There's a lot of data out there right now.
- mleonhard 6y ago
  Yes. If you visit someone's home and connect to their wifi, every app on your phone can record that you are there. They record the other people that are there, too. If one of those people has been reading websites about topic X, the ad networks record a high interest in that topic. It makes sense to advertise X to the people close to that person.

ghostbrainalpha 6y ago

Facebook doesn't have to listen to us for that to be happening though. Purina Dog Chow purchases "Qualified Leads" from marketers who have lists of people interested in Dog Food. We have no idea where they get those lists. If you play Candy Crush, and that third party app has Microphone access it could be collecting the data, and selling it to marketing agencies, which then sell the qualified leads to Purina dog chow. You are still being listened to and your information sold. It just happens on Facebook more than it being Facebook's fault directly.