5 ms·

No, Facebook and Instagram are not monitoring conversations. Yes, many security researchers routinely examine traffic from these apps to see what’s being commun

No, Facebook and Instagram are not monitoring conversations. Yes, many security researchers routinely examine traffic from these apps to see what’s being communicated with the servers. Recording and interpreting speech would require a lot of CPU (if done on device) or network bandwidth (if uploaded to the cloud). Enough that it would be immediately obvious if apps were trying to do this. That is, if they even could. iOS limits what apps can even do in the background and shows an icon when the microphone is in use in the background. Again, it would be obvious if apps were listening. But let’s assume that somehow they managed to avoid all of these pitfalls and they were listening to conversations, performing speech to text, and uploading your conversations. This would require communication with their servers, which isn’t difficult to extract through basic reverse engineering. Many security researchers reverse engineer these communications on a regular basis to look for bugs, some of which can be worth six figures in these companies’ bounty programs. If there was an API for uploading your secret conversations, it would be the holy grail discovery for a security researcher. Someone would have found it. The myth persists because coincidences will happen in high numbers at scale. If hundreds of millions of people are spending hours on social media each week, some number of them will see ads related to some conversation they had recently by pure random chance. Add in a general distrust for big tech companies right now and some subset of people will become convinced that their coincidences are evidence of a conspiracy.

dylan604 5y ago
>Recording and interpreting speech would require a lot of CPU (if done on device) Does this include the newer Apple Axx series units with increasing number of ML cores? Siri is supposed to run locally on device. Hardware is moving explicitly in this direction. If this is done locally, no actual voice data would need to be sent down the wire. Insstead, a small compressed bit of text on keywords could be sent whether that's immediately or saved up until user foregrounds the app. No tinfoil hat needed to see how your premise is pretty weak.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  > Insstead, a small compressed bit of text on keywords could be sent whether that's immediately or saved up until user foregrounds the app. Which would then appear in the packet captures that can be performed on the traffic (after circumventing certificate pinning). My premise wasn’t that each step was impossible. It was that many steps would have to take place without being detected anywhere along the chain.
  - dylan604 5y ago
    How do you distinguish the, assumed, encrypted transmission from a foreground app sending this data compared to just requesting an update for the app's viewport?
    - hutzlibu 5y ago
      With a fully reversed engeneered app, this would be possible. But I believe the effort for this is quite high. And with obfuscation even higher.
- b3morales 5y ago
  > increasing number of ML cores? Siri is supposed to run locally on device. ... If this is done locally, no actual voice data would need to be sent down the wire. Surreptitiously taking advantage of what you describe would be restricted to Apple, which is its own concern but a different topic than what we started with, which is 3rd-party apps.
ignoramous 5y ago
The advertisements I see online or in email spam happen to coincide with whatever I had just been discussing with my mates. This has been the case for a good part of three years. May be its the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon as someone else in this thread points out, but the ads I see, at the time I see, make me quite uneasy knowing what I know being in tech. Edward Snowden, famously, rids of the entire microphone-array from his phones and only uses external mics: https://youtu.be/ucRWyGKBVzo?t=888 https://youtu.be/ucRWyGKBVzo?t=888 See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27932952 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27932952 (Snowden on Privacy and Democracy) https://twitter.com/snowden/status/1175422816403038208 https://twitter.com/snowden/status/1175422816403038208 (Snowden on smartphones)
- Terretta 5y ago
  The simplest explanation of this is that there’s an antecedent reason you’re discussing what you’re discussing, and that’s the reason that correlates to the ads you see, rather than your discussion itself. Perhaps it’s content you read. Perhaps it’s another product you researched. Perhaps it’s something someone in your office or home looked for from the same IP. Perhaps another ad campaign triggered the discussion. Then you talk about it. Then you see an ad related to the original trigger, and you notice it (the Baader Meinhof bit).
  - abnry 5y ago
    IMO this is the real story. Tech companies know so much about you from your browsing history and your purchase history. But they also know this about your friends and family, which I think increases the creepiness factor, as they may serve you ads based on _your friends & family's_ activity.
kurthr 5y ago
I agree that the platforms don't currently allow them default access to microphones, but that's not how it used to be. I also agree that we would have likely heard about this (old) capability, due to the number of people who would have worked on it (unless they were supported by a TLA). However, your description of what it would need to work is woefully naïve. There were startup funded apps that matched entire recorded song libraries to ambient sound (along with location) in the age of flip phones to track copyright violations in clubs. They relied on matching compressed periodogram hashes with an error tolerant database. The databases were large, but not unwieldy, and the computational load reasonable in the early 2000s. The ability to craft a database to a person to match a large set of commercial words/names with very low bandwidth is not impossible. Machine learning has made it easier.
- fragmede 5y ago
  Shazam was bought by Apple several years ago, but identifying music is a different beast from picking out the phrase Hey Siri/Google/Alexa.
  - kurthr 5y ago
    Those are both additional proof cases, but I wasn't talking about either Shazam (which does a lot of processing remotely) or "wake words" although I'm familiar with the accuracy and compute power requirements for those. Multi-keyword detection for advertising with >50% FAR/FRR is much easier than either of them. A conversation is likely to hear the word (or related ones) mentioned multiple time by multiple parties and the matcher can be tuned to the individual locally.
WA 5y ago
So, does Instagram upload meta data such as GPS infos of your entire photo library if you give it access? - there is no OS indicator - it doesn’t require CPU time - it doesn’t require much bandwidth - it could happen only occasionally and could’ve slipped (automated) third party security screening I don’t know if they do it. But I assume they can and might have done this. Hence, no access to my photo library.
- SahAssar 5y ago
  It's reasonable to assume that any photo sharing app checks EXIF data (and uploads it), including geotags. For some people this is something they want, as some people want the app to be able to show that info or be able to search their library by date/location. If the app does not explicitly say it does not, I'd assume it does. I don't know if facebook/instagram has said if they do or don't.
yes_man 5y ago
> If hundreds of millions of people are spending hours on social media each week, some number of them will see ads related to some conversation they had recently by pure random chance Another, probably more common reason that people often don’t think about is that a participant of such conversation may have searched for said product, or be otherwise profiled for it, and you might get the ad because Big Ad knows you are related to them. For example FB doesn’t need to know the contents of your Whatsapp or FB messenger messages to know how close you are to someone: how often you message, how many messages, when etc
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
NikolaNovak 5y ago
"Recording and interpreting speech would require a lot of CPU (if done on device) or network bandwidth" It was my understanding that typically phone voice audio quality is a few kilo bits per second - not much more than a kilobyte per second. This would get positively lost in the noise of modern smartphone constant background connectivity, no? (largely agree with your other points, though my understanding of original post was question for specifics on who actually may be checking these things rather than "somebody surely would've caught it")
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  > This would get positively lost in the noise of modern smartphone constant background connectivity, no? If you’re only looking at total up/down traffic for the entire device, it might. But we can inspect traffic per-app, including decoding the actual traffic (if you go through steps to circumvent certificate pinning). Security researchers can, and do, look at the actual raw data coming out of apps. If voice was in there, it would be seen.
  - angelzen 5y ago
    Average person speaks 16k words per day. Android considers app background traffic excessive at 50MB / hour, which is 1GB / day. 10% of that rate to steer clear of raising red flags is 100MB / day, about 10kB for each word you speak. Rather trivial to steganograph a word in 10kB of background traffic. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/women-talk-more-than-men https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/women-talk-more-t... https://developer.android.com/topic/performance/vitals/bg-network-usage https://developer.android.com/topic/performance/vitals/bg-ne...
    - fsociety 5y ago
      You have to calculate the amount of data provided from all users in this case + storage + processing power to do all of that. It’s probably more than you would expect too. The second point is why would a company do that? If the NSA or whomever wants to snoop on you, they’ll drop malware on your phone, subpoena your iCloud backups etc. not try to coerce a company to record people’s conversations when said company has no desire to do so.
giansegato 5y ago
It's not only a matter of "big numbers", but also of confirmation bias. We're never paying any attention to irrelevant ads - we're ad blind to them. But the moment we see a very relevant ad to a recent conversation, that will inevitably pop up. "See, this one ad is tied to this conversation I had yesterday: they must be listening", while in reality it's more like "See, this one ad out of 100s I've seen in the last day is tied to this one conversation out of 10s I had in the last day".
- MrDunham 5y ago
  This is correct. We even have a brain circuit for this: the reticulating activating system. It's the reason I hadn't seen a Volvo for over 10 years until I mentioned that fact, then saw three that day. So to your point, the RAS filters out/ignores 99 ads but will bring to your attention the one that is similar to something you've mentioned recently.
- tompazourek 5y ago
  I also have one more theory which is that this effect can be caused by the network aspect of Facebook. Maybe I haven't been interested in a specific topic, but one of my friends was. And Facebook is serving me ads because they were relevant for my friends so they might be relevant to me. And the conversations where I heard about a topic are a consequence of that same thing -- one of my friends is interested in a certain topic. I don't know how valid it is though. But it could contribute to the whole thing I guess...
znpy 5y ago
> Recording and interpreting speech would require a lot of CPU (if done on device) or network bandwidth I'm skeptical regarding bandwidth. Modern codecs can achieve spectacular compression, you don't necessarily need to record audio-cd-level quality audio, and Facebook has state of the art hardware and software in terms of ai/ml and a very well trained workforce in the field. If anything, one should regard Facebook as "capable of pulling this off".
- fragmede 5y ago
  That's assuming the audio gets uploaded. For the purposes of serving more relevant ads, simple hotword detection need only be good enough to distinguish eg Nike vs Adidas, and could be done locally. That changes the upload to mere bytes, which is way more easily obfuscated in any number of opaque IDs. fbclid= anyone?
sva_ 5y ago
> some number of them will see ads related to some conversation they had recently by pure random chance. Or perhaps, they're just correlating the interests of people: 1. Person A reads about X online 2. Person A tells Person B about X 3. Person B sees ads about X, without ever having searched for it, concludes they're being spied on I'm 99.9% sure WhatsApp does this, perhaps illegally or at least grey-area.
- tompazourek 5y ago
  Maybe WhatsApp knows that these 2 people are friends, so it tries to serve person B ads that worked for person A.
  - sva_ 5y ago
    That's was the point I was trying to make. Maybe I wasn't clear
eeegnu 5y ago
> The myth persists because coincidences will happen in high numbers at scale. If hundreds of millions of people are spending hours on social media each week, some number of them will see ads related to some conversation they had recently by pure random chance. It's certainly more frequent than just by random chance, but by virtue of the fact that we say many things, and the things we will say can be predicted (at least to some extent), by our browsing history, which already is constantly being churned through however many ML algorithms to know what ads will be relevant to us. I'm also convinced location data is thrown in there too; after I recently started spending more time in a new area, I stared getting ads for one of the adult braces companies that I've only ever seen there a block away. In those cases there's a decent probability someone will mention it because it's new to them, only for the algorithms to also figure: 'this is probably the kind of person that would be interested in this, and they're nearby now!' It happens frequently enough to almost everyone I know that the random argument loses its credibility to me.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
max_ 5y ago
You have started with a conclusion and filled in the blanks with your personal opinions. And you have not actually answered the question. Which is, "have you actually VERIFIED that popular apps are not recording your conversations?"
- jatins 5y ago
  Depends on what level do you trust. For me, I'd generally trust OS indicators. So, if iOS doesn't show me a mic on indicator when Facebook is not open I'll consider thar verification. A potentially better option would be if some independent non profit security firm audited major apps every once in a while, monitoring network traffic and such.
- polote 5y ago
  "If there was an API for uploading your secret conversations, it would be the holy grail discovery for a security researcher. Someone would have found it."
  - axiosgunnar 5y ago
    "That 20 dollar bill lying on the ground in front of me clearly does not exist. Somebody would have picked it up already!"
  - fragmede 5y ago
    Yeah the logic here is seriously lacking. Heartbleed shows that it's entirely possible someone might not find it for over a decade! Or the most recent Apple Bootrom exploit.
    - jb0x168 5y ago
      Or, y'know, the NSO group exploit. I think the difference here is that apps getting uploaded to the app store have static analysis run on them looking for unauthorized calls. Still doesn't rule it out, but adds an extra check to the process.
mahogany 5y ago
> Yes, many security researchers routinely examine traffic from these apps to see what’s being communicated with the servers. For my own learning, I'm interested in this and what methods are used. Do you have any resources (blogs, videos, etc of these security researchers who are looking at these apps) you were thinking about in particular when you wrote this?
mixologic 5y ago
The coincidences are generally amplified by the fact that apps generally do send location data, when you visit friends you generally talk about stuff you've been looking at lately, so it certainly plausible that linking profiles based on proximity and similarity of interests would mean that there's a much higher chance that advertising interests spread from one user to another, merely by geography.
abnry 5y ago
> The myth persists because coincidences will happen in high numbers at scale. I think the myth persists because Big Tech can learn more about you from browsing history and credit card purchases (from you and your friends and family) than most people realize.
linkandzelda 5y ago
I've had at least 10 situations where Facebook or YouTube recommend me an ad or video based on a real-life conversation which took place around 1 minute before.
solarkraft 5y ago
Confirmation bias, coincidences at scale, sure, certainly a part of it. But I had always thought big tech would just correlate interests of people it knows spend time with each other. E.g. my father gets an e-bike, I get e-bike ads. It could of course be due to me scrolling over one e-bike ad less quickly once.

dylan604 5y ago

>Recording and interpreting speech would require a lot of CPU (if done on device) Does this include the newer Apple Axx series units with increasing number of ML cores? Siri is supposed to run locally on device. Hardware is moving explicitly in this direction. If this is done locally, no actual voice data would need to be sent down the wire. Insstead, a small compressed bit of text on keywords could be sent whether that's immediately or saved up until user foregrounds the app. No tinfoil hat needed to see how your premise is pretty weak.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> Insstead, a small compressed bit of text on keywords could be sent whether that's immediately or saved up until user foregrounds the app. Which would then appear in the packet captures that can be performed on the traffic (after circumventing certificate pinning). My premise wasn’t that each step was impossible. It was that many steps would have to take place without being detected anywhere along the chain.
- dylan604 5y ago
  How do you distinguish the, assumed, encrypted transmission from a foreground app sending this data compared to just requesting an update for the app's viewport?
  - hutzlibu 5y ago
    With a fully reversed engeneered app, this would be possible. But I believe the effort for this is quite high. And with obfuscation even higher.
b3morales 5y ago
> increasing number of ML cores? Siri is supposed to run locally on device. ... If this is done locally, no actual voice data would need to be sent down the wire. Surreptitiously taking advantage of what you describe would be restricted to Apple, which is its own concern but a different topic than what we started with, which is 3rd-party apps.

ignoramous 5y ago

The advertisements I see online or in email spam happen to coincide with whatever I had just been discussing with my mates. This has been the case for a good part of three years. May be its the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon as someone else in this thread points out, but the ads I see, at the time I see, make me quite uneasy knowing what I know being in tech. Edward Snowden, famously, rids of the entire microphone-array from his phones and only uses external mics: https://youtu.be/ucRWyGKBVzo?t=888 https://youtu.be/ucRWyGKBVzo?t=888 See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27932952 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27932952 (Snowden on Privacy and Democracy) https://twitter.com/snowden/status/1175422816403038208 https://twitter.com/snowden/status/1175422816403038208 (Snowden on smartphones)

Terretta 5y ago
The simplest explanation of this is that there’s an antecedent reason you’re discussing what you’re discussing, and that’s the reason that correlates to the ads you see, rather than your discussion itself. Perhaps it’s content you read. Perhaps it’s another product you researched. Perhaps it’s something someone in your office or home looked for from the same IP. Perhaps another ad campaign triggered the discussion. Then you talk about it. Then you see an ad related to the original trigger, and you notice it (the Baader Meinhof bit).
- abnry 5y ago
  IMO this is the real story. Tech companies know so much about you from your browsing history and your purchase history. But they also know this about your friends and family, which I think increases the creepiness factor, as they may serve you ads based on _your friends & family's_ activity.

kurthr 5y ago

I agree that the platforms don't currently allow them default access to microphones, but that's not how it used to be. I also agree that we would have likely heard about this (old) capability, due to the number of people who would have worked on it (unless they were supported by a TLA). However, your description of what it would need to work is woefully naïve. There were startup funded apps that matched entire recorded song libraries to ambient sound (along with location) in the age of flip phones to track copyright violations in clubs. They relied on matching compressed periodogram hashes with an error tolerant database. The databases were large, but not unwieldy, and the computational load reasonable in the early 2000s. The ability to craft a database to a person to match a large set of commercial words/names with very low bandwidth is not impossible. Machine learning has made it easier.

fragmede 5y ago
Shazam was bought by Apple several years ago, but identifying music is a different beast from picking out the phrase Hey Siri/Google/Alexa.
- kurthr 5y ago
  Those are both additional proof cases, but I wasn't talking about either Shazam (which does a lot of processing remotely) or "wake words" although I'm familiar with the accuracy and compute power requirements for those. Multi-keyword detection for advertising with >50% FAR/FRR is much easier than either of them. A conversation is likely to hear the word (or related ones) mentioned multiple time by multiple parties and the matcher can be tuned to the individual locally.

WA 5y ago

So, does Instagram upload meta data such as GPS infos of your entire photo library if you give it access? - there is no OS indicator - it doesn’t require CPU time - it doesn’t require much bandwidth - it could happen only occasionally and could’ve slipped (automated) third party security screening I don’t know if they do it. But I assume they can and might have done this. Hence, no access to my photo library.

SahAssar 5y ago
It's reasonable to assume that any photo sharing app checks EXIF data (and uploads it), including geotags. For some people this is something they want, as some people want the app to be able to show that info or be able to search their library by date/location. If the app does not explicitly say it does not, I'd assume it does. I don't know if facebook/instagram has said if they do or don't.

yes_man 5y ago

> If hundreds of millions of people are spending hours on social media each week, some number of them will see ads related to some conversation they had recently by pure random chance Another, probably more common reason that people often don’t think about is that a participant of such conversation may have searched for said product, or be otherwise profiled for it, and you might get the ad because Big Ad knows you are related to them. For example FB doesn’t need to know the contents of your Whatsapp or FB messenger messages to know how close you are to someone: how often you message, how many messages, when etc

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

NikolaNovak 5y ago

"Recording and interpreting speech would require a lot of CPU (if done on device) or network bandwidth" It was my understanding that typically phone voice audio quality is a few kilo bits per second - not much more than a kilobyte per second. This would get positively lost in the noise of modern smartphone constant background connectivity, no? (largely agree with your other points, though my understanding of original post was question for specifics on who actually may be checking these things rather than "somebody surely would've caught it")

PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> This would get positively lost in the noise of modern smartphone constant background connectivity, no? If you’re only looking at total up/down traffic for the entire device, it might. But we can inspect traffic per-app, including decoding the actual traffic (if you go through steps to circumvent certificate pinning). Security researchers can, and do, look at the actual raw data coming out of apps. If voice was in there, it would be seen.
- angelzen 5y ago
  Average person speaks 16k words per day. Android considers app background traffic excessive at 50MB / hour, which is 1GB / day. 10% of that rate to steer clear of raising red flags is 100MB / day, about 10kB for each word you speak. Rather trivial to steganograph a word in 10kB of background traffic. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/women-talk-more-than-men https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/women-talk-more-t... https://developer.android.com/topic/performance/vitals/bg-network-usage https://developer.android.com/topic/performance/vitals/bg-ne...
  - fsociety 5y ago
    You have to calculate the amount of data provided from all users in this case + storage + processing power to do all of that. It’s probably more than you would expect too. The second point is why would a company do that? If the NSA or whomever wants to snoop on you, they’ll drop malware on your phone, subpoena your iCloud backups etc. not try to coerce a company to record people’s conversations when said company has no desire to do so.

giansegato 5y ago

It's not only a matter of "big numbers", but also of confirmation bias. We're never paying any attention to irrelevant ads - we're ad blind to them. But the moment we see a very relevant ad to a recent conversation, that will inevitably pop up. "See, this one ad is tied to this conversation I had yesterday: they must be listening", while in reality it's more like "See, this one ad out of 100s I've seen in the last day is tied to this one conversation out of 10s I had in the last day".

MrDunham 5y ago
This is correct. We even have a brain circuit for this: the reticulating activating system. It's the reason I hadn't seen a Volvo for over 10 years until I mentioned that fact, then saw three that day. So to your point, the RAS filters out/ignores 99 ads but will bring to your attention the one that is similar to something you've mentioned recently.
tompazourek 5y ago
I also have one more theory which is that this effect can be caused by the network aspect of Facebook. Maybe I haven't been interested in a specific topic, but one of my friends was. And Facebook is serving me ads because they were relevant for my friends so they might be relevant to me. And the conversations where I heard about a topic are a consequence of that same thing -- one of my friends is interested in a certain topic. I don't know how valid it is though. But it could contribute to the whole thing I guess...

znpy 5y ago

> Recording and interpreting speech would require a lot of CPU (if done on device) or network bandwidth I'm skeptical regarding bandwidth. Modern codecs can achieve spectacular compression, you don't necessarily need to record audio-cd-level quality audio, and Facebook has state of the art hardware and software in terms of ai/ml and a very well trained workforce in the field. If anything, one should regard Facebook as "capable of pulling this off".

fragmede 5y ago
That's assuming the audio gets uploaded. For the purposes of serving more relevant ads, simple hotword detection need only be good enough to distinguish eg Nike vs Adidas, and could be done locally. That changes the upload to mere bytes, which is way more easily obfuscated in any number of opaque IDs. fbclid= anyone?

sva_ 5y ago

> some number of them will see ads related to some conversation they had recently by pure random chance. Or perhaps, they're just correlating the interests of people: 1. Person A reads about X online 2. Person A tells Person B about X 3. Person B sees ads about X, without ever having searched for it, concludes they're being spied on I'm 99.9% sure WhatsApp does this, perhaps illegally or at least grey-area.

tompazourek 5y ago
Maybe WhatsApp knows that these 2 people are friends, so it tries to serve person B ads that worked for person A.
- sva_ 5y ago
  That's was the point I was trying to make. Maybe I wasn't clear

eeegnu 5y ago

> The myth persists because coincidences will happen in high numbers at scale. If hundreds of millions of people are spending hours on social media each week, some number of them will see ads related to some conversation they had recently by pure random chance. It's certainly more frequent than just by random chance, but by virtue of the fact that we say many things, and the things we will say can be predicted (at least to some extent), by our browsing history, which already is constantly being churned through however many ML algorithms to know what ads will be relevant to us. I'm also convinced location data is thrown in there too; after I recently started spending more time in a new area, I stared getting ads for one of the adult braces companies that I've only ever seen there a block away. In those cases there's a decent probability someone will mention it because it's new to them, only for the algorithms to also figure: 'this is probably the kind of person that would be interested in this, and they're nearby now!' It happens frequently enough to almost everyone I know that the random argument loses its credibility to me.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

max_ 5y ago

You have started with a conclusion and filled in the blanks with your personal opinions. And you have not actually answered the question. Which is, "have you actually VERIFIED that popular apps are not recording your conversations?"

jatins 5y ago
Depends on what level do you trust. For me, I'd generally trust OS indicators. So, if iOS doesn't show me a mic on indicator when Facebook is not open I'll consider thar verification. A potentially better option would be if some independent non profit security firm audited major apps every once in a while, monitoring network traffic and such.
polote 5y ago
"If there was an API for uploading your secret conversations, it would be the holy grail discovery for a security researcher. Someone would have found it."
- axiosgunnar 5y ago
  "That 20 dollar bill lying on the ground in front of me clearly does not exist. Somebody would have picked it up already!"
- fragmede 5y ago
  Yeah the logic here is seriously lacking. Heartbleed shows that it's entirely possible someone might not find it for over a decade! Or the most recent Apple Bootrom exploit.
  - jb0x168 5y ago
    Or, y'know, the NSO group exploit. I think the difference here is that apps getting uploaded to the app store have static analysis run on them looking for unauthorized calls. Still doesn't rule it out, but adds an extra check to the process.

mahogany 5y ago

> Yes, many security researchers routinely examine traffic from these apps to see what’s being communicated with the servers. For my own learning, I'm interested in this and what methods are used. Do you have any resources (blogs, videos, etc of these security researchers who are looking at these apps) you were thinking about in particular when you wrote this?

mixologic 5y ago

The coincidences are generally amplified by the fact that apps generally do send location data, when you visit friends you generally talk about stuff you've been looking at lately, so it certainly plausible that linking profiles based on proximity and similarity of interests would mean that there's a much higher chance that advertising interests spread from one user to another, merely by geography.

abnry 5y ago

> The myth persists because coincidences will happen in high numbers at scale. I think the myth persists because Big Tech can learn more about you from browsing history and credit card purchases (from you and your friends and family) than most people realize.

linkandzelda 5y ago

I've had at least 10 situations where Facebook or YouTube recommend me an ad or video based on a real-life conversation which took place around 1 minute before.

solarkraft 5y ago

Confirmation bias, coincidences at scale, sure, certainly a part of it. But I had always thought big tech would just correlate interests of people it knows spend time with each other. E.g. my father gets an e-bike, I get e-bike ads. It could of course be due to me scrolling over one e-bike ad less quickly once.