6 ms·
Source?
by thehappypm 4y ago
Source?
- netsectoday 4y ago
- nindalf 4y agoSo if were walking past a playing blaring the piña colada song, I’d see ads for alcohol and umbrellas? If coworkers around me are talking about activities I’m not interested in, I’d see ads for those? They have far better information that shows I’m not interested in alcohol or extreme sports. Audio in the background is so low-signal that it isn’t worth showing ads based on it. Even just transcribing speech something accurately is not something that was possible until the last couple of years. Yet this conspiracy theory has been around for a decade or more.
- thehappypm 4y agoThis isn’t evidence. Even if Facebook was not listening to your conversations, there would be some rate in which you would just randomly be served an ad related to a topic you were discussing. There needs to be evidence that it is happening at a rate too high to be attributable to chance.
- netsectoday 4y agoSounds like a good way to engineer it... anything to improve the bottom line even if insanely-targeted ads only trickle out to users. How about limiting who sees this feature to also limit the risk of being detected? Maybe just do it once a year to everyone, or never to specific "tech-savvy" users that they have completely profiled.
- procinct 4y agoDon’t iPhone have an indicator when the mic is recording? Also, this feels like it would be insanely easy to test by capturing the payloads sent to FB; you could even use something like Charles Proxy to do it. FB having access to microphone makes sense for plenty of other completely innocent reasons (for example, if you can record a video from inside the app). If this was actually true, I can’t help but feel that someone would have proven it technically by now instead of relying on these types of self experiment and anecdotes, especially given how commonly this is touted.
- titaniczero 4y agoAnd don’t forget the battery. A mic recording 24/7 would drain the battery much faster and would not go unnoticed unless specialized hardware is used like the one for “hey siri” and “ok google”.
- netsectoday 4y agoDoesn't the Facebook app drain your battery?
- titaniczero 4y agoTry any voice recording app for a few hours, now use the facebook app for the same number of hours. The impact on battery life of a mic actively recording alone is very noticeable, so noticeable that your phone has a special chip just to recognize patterns similar to “hey siri”.
- netsectoday 4y ago
- titaniczero 4y ago> This way too I can troll people on the internet when they suspect this is happening and I can say "bUt ThE bAtTeRy LiFe!" to defend Meta: my corporate overlord business daddy. Please, stop with the sarcasm. Okey, let’s say they manage to record us without a huge impact on our battery life. Now, how do you send these recordings or even the extracted keywords from a popular app, a client installed on devices controlled by the users and susceptible to reverse engineering and network traffic analysis without anyone noticing it? It’s just too much risk and they don’t even need it, see my relevant reply here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32950204#32953216 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32950204#32953216.
- 4y ago
- Hamuko 4y ago>Zero coincidence Yeah, it's probably not a coincidence that your wife is talking about X and is recognised by Facebook to be in a group of people that are interested in X.
- ac2u 4y agoIt's ironic that you're asserting this by replying to a parent message which explains why this probably isn't the case.
- criddell 4y agoWe did an experiment. We talked about how hard it is to find highlighter yellow nail polish. Nobody in the house is a purchaser of nail polish nor did we do any searches for highlighter or yellow or nail or polish. A day or two later my wife got an Instagram ad for highlighter yellow nail polish. It could have been a coincidence or maybe they were listening. Or maybe some combination of things we did previously led naturally to thinking about that yellow nail polish. I'm thinking about something like the trick where you ask somebody a bunch of addition problems that have 14 as the answer (what's 10+4? 2+12? 3+9? etc...) then ask them to name a vegetable and they will almost always say carrot.
- paulrouget 4y agoAm I missing something? Why carrot?
- 4y ago
- whimsicalism 4y agoAh yes, a bunch of anecdotes in reply.
- netsectoday 4y ago
- thehappypm 4y agoyou’d think that a educated group like this would understand that anecdotes are not sufficient evidence for something like this.
- netsectoday 4y agoThis is a message board about tech... comments aren't welcome anymore - we need evidence to participate? I think it's interesting when a bunch of people chime in and say "Hey, yeah, I had some crazy thing happen to me, I'm in tech and understand how this stuff works, and there's a very small to zero chance this happened through some other parallel construction by the tech company, they just straight up listened to my conversation and showed me an ad". This is what kicks off a handful of you to go packet sniffing and write up a blog post looking for this behavior. So yes, evidence is welcome but it doesn't seem like we are quite there yet.
- whimsicalism 4y agoIn general I agree, but I think when you are being explicitly asked for a "source" in response to an allegation that it is settled that FB has been "caught recording people," I would prefer to not have anecdotes in reply.
- netsectoday 4y agoI'd prefer to say whatever I want. Must have filed it in the wrong place.