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It's a shame this kind of thing is so hard to prove, otherwise it would be all over the media. People will write it off as 'coincidence'. "Perhaps you looked fo

It's a shame this kind of thing is so hard to prove, otherwise it would be all over the media. People will write it off as 'coincidence'. "Perhaps you looked for or discussed it elsewhere". What happened with Skype before was that Microsoft would ping any links from their servers, so it was really easy to prove it by generating a new web server, publishing it nowhere and then mentioning it in a chat. This caused some publicity and they stopped the practice. Skype didn't guarantee E2EE at that time though. But perhaps you could do a similar 'clean room' excerise to prove it. I don't think they would break the E2E by the way but perhaps there is something calling home in the app itself.

3pt14159 4y ago
It's not hard to prove at all. Randomized controlled study organized over the phone so it's subject to legal protection from surveillance, unlike random FB messages. If 200 people send preselected product communique over brand new devices and are 800% more likely to be targeted by ads for those or related products by the control group of the same size then we have enough for a legal case and discovery.
- GekkePrutser 4y ago
  That's still a lot harder than to send 1 link by 1 person and immediately find it grabbed :) It really should be airtight if they're not going to weasel out of it. I kinda doubt Meta is doing it but on the other hand they do seem to be in heavy weather right now.
Handytinge 4y ago
It's incredibly easy to prove. You could prove it by setting up clean devices. Plenty of people have attempted to prove it, and gone radio silent after trying. There are billions of users, and tens of millions of them are technical, and tens of thousands of them work for these companies. Yet there's 0 evidence of this ever actually happening. Does this not seem strange to you?
crazygringo 4y ago
It's incredibly easy to prove. The reason it's not all over the media is precisely because it doesn't hold up. Anybody who's dedicated to this can select truly obscure terms, fully document their private chats and full internet usage and ads shown, and show whether this effect is actually happening. The reason we don't hear about this is because the snooping doesn't appear to be happening. So you just get a bunch of people sometimes claiming it "seems like" ads are coming from private chats, because coincidences do happen statistically so it will always happen to some degree to some people. The reason it's not all over the media is simply because the phenomenon doesn't appear to exist, not because it's hard to prove.

3pt14159 4y ago

It's not hard to prove at all. Randomized controlled study organized over the phone so it's subject to legal protection from surveillance, unlike random FB messages. If 200 people send preselected product communique over brand new devices and are 800% more likely to be targeted by ads for those or related products by the control group of the same size then we have enough for a legal case and discovery.

GekkePrutser 4y ago
That's still a lot harder than to send 1 link by 1 person and immediately find it grabbed :) It really should be airtight if they're not going to weasel out of it. I kinda doubt Meta is doing it but on the other hand they do seem to be in heavy weather right now.

Handytinge 4y ago

It's incredibly easy to prove. You could prove it by setting up clean devices. Plenty of people have attempted to prove it, and gone radio silent after trying. There are billions of users, and tens of millions of them are technical, and tens of thousands of them work for these companies. Yet there's 0 evidence of this ever actually happening. Does this not seem strange to you?

crazygringo 4y ago

It's incredibly easy to prove. The reason it's not all over the media is precisely because it doesn't hold up. Anybody who's dedicated to this can select truly obscure terms, fully document their private chats and full internet usage and ads shown, and show whether this effect is actually happening. The reason we don't hear about this is because the snooping doesn't appear to be happening. So you just get a bunch of people sometimes claiming it "seems like" ads are coming from private chats, because coincidences do happen statistically so it will always happen to some degree to some people. The reason it's not all over the media is simply because the phenomenon doesn't appear to exist, not because it's hard to prove.