Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Is Facebook eavesdropping on phone conversations?

news10.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 250 posts

Re: Is Facebook eavesdropping on phone conversations?

#71

Post by TryAgainMaybe »

dave2000 wrote: post #11
tuxracer wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you RTFA you'd see the claim is that Facebook is activating the microphone to listen to non-electronic verbal communication you're having nearby your phone.

You're missing the point. It doesn't matter at all if there's any evidence that a given claim about a particular version of an app is being tapped; you have to assume that they all are, all the time, and act accordingly. You're never going to know, and certainly not ahead of time; best to assume they're all tapped. Which, as we all know post-Snowden, is the only reasonable assumption.

Cringe.

Re: Is Facebook eavesdropping on phone conversations?

#73

Post by jgalt212 »

HappyTypist wrote: post #59
tdkl wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what they say. One of the urban legends was also that USA government agencies don't collect data at bulk and they were lying about it. We know the truth now. Facebook has been caught with the hand in the cookie jar too many times already and got away with it. Fuck Facebook.

No. I work for Facebook. This doesn't happen.

> No. I work for Facebook. This doesn't happen.

You work for a company with 1000s of employees. How are you exactly in a position to confirm this doesn't happen?

Re: Is Facebook eavesdropping on phone conversations?

#74

Post by therealmarv »

drcross wrote: post #45
therealmarv wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about the program. It's about the network... you cannot switch a network when all your friends and colleagues use WhatsApp and their groups. But I'm happy WhatsApp is more secure than most of the alternatives with good E2E encryption support.

> with good E2E encryption support. They say there is good E2E encryption. Great claims require great proof.

https://translate.google.de/translate?sl=de&tl=en&js=y&prev=...

Re: Is Facebook eavesdropping on phone conversations?

#75

Post by chris_wot »

lunula wrote: post #27
onewaystreet wrote: post #5

No. This is one of those tech urban legends that keeps popping up. Facebook does have an opt-in feature that can identify what music, tv show or movie you are listening to or watching, but that's it. http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2014/05/a-new-optional-way-to-sh... https://www.facebook.com/help/iphone-app/369513256545845

This could be rigorously studied. A group of people could attempt to plant false advertising opportunities in their speech and then measure the frequency at which related ads/posts arrive in their feed. I would trust something like this more than an assertion by FB that this is not happening.

I think that if Facebook was caught doing this after they specifically denied it, then executives would probably be going to jail.

I think if Facebook say they aren't doing this, then they aren't doing it.

Re: Is Facebook eavesdropping on phone conversations?

#77

Post by witty_username »

dontstealmyname wrote: post #47
capitalsigma wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

99% sure this is not a coincidence, here's my theory: people's IRL conversations can be pretty reliably predicted by their Facebook conversations, so targeted ads based on messages tend to be surprisingly relevant to the next thing they talk about IRL. Example: my girlfriend was given a box of Flonase by her parents and immediately got a Facebook ad for it. She had not mentioned Flonase anywhere on Facebook ever. Spo…

See this seems reasonable.. however I was once playing Battlefield Hardline raving about how awesome the camera's were for whatever I was doing and was then presented with security camera ads shortly after while browsing Facebook on my desktop. I have no interest or need for security cameras or even any reason to source information about them online. I double checked my web history and couldn't find anything related…

See frequency illusion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases#Frequ...

Re: Is Facebook eavesdropping on phone conversations?

#78

Post by chris_wot »

x5n1 wrote: post #38
petr_tik wrote: post #35

As one of the people said below, there is an easy way to test the validity of that statement – take 30+ participants with randomly selected backgrounds and friend networks and break them into 2 groups for different ‘trigger word’ and then study their newsfeeds. It seems that there is a subgenre of geek-oriented clickbaiting, which has a strong claim about something tech-related like AMAZGOOGBOOK with little proof or…

I think the days of giving corporations benefit of doubt are long gone. Now if outrageous claim is made by any sort of reasonably credible source, you can be sure there is an ounce of truth to it. So yes FB probably does do this, and people claiming conspiracy to discredit this are the crazy ones.

That's a fallacy. Just because a credible source says something does not necessarily mean it actually happened. What if they truly believe that what they say is reality but then find they are completely wrong?

Re: Is Facebook eavesdropping on phone conversations?

#79

Post by hackney »

khedoros wrote: post #19
tiplus wrote: post #15

It sounds like a creepier version of google now which listens for many keywords instead of just one, is it not? Question for the experts: How much battery would it actually drain if the mic was constantly activated and the app was scanning for keywords. I mean, you could limit the scanning to times were someone actually speaks and otherwise remain in a sleep mode. The keywords are then synced only when the user opens…

Some devices are always listening for "OK, Google", if you turn that feature on (Nexus 6, Nexus 9, and Samsung Note 4, according to a Google help page [0]). I vaguely remember reading something about a subprocessor in those devices, looking for that phrase, to cut down on battery usage. Most of the speech recognition processing happens remotely on Google's servers, though. [0] https://support.google.com/websearch/ans…

I disable and block from the net everything google on my phone. Recently I did install XDA Labs from: http://www.xda-developers.com/xda-labs/ I installed MS's Cortana via the labs apk and it works great btw. You could not pay me to use facebook though I do have whatsapp (via labs) installed. Never even used it either-lol.

Re: Is Facebook eavesdropping on phone conversations?

#80

Post by _yvjs »

abalone wrote: post #41
MichaelGG wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saying that there was no bias in their news selection, when it should be readily apparent that having humans select thing would introduce bias. Not quite outright lying, as you might possibly think they're naive enough to think humans are unbiased, but I don't think they get the benefit of the doubt here. IIRC they also started off saying it was all algorithmic.

Can you cite where they said it was "all" algorithmic? Their investigation found "no evidence of systematic political bias." So, not sure where the very dishonest statement is here.

The point he's making is that Facebook can't be trusted to self-regulate (in the context of privacy). With that assumption you probably wouldn't accept their opaque self-investigation so placidly.

I think the point is that a casual observer would not have guessed trending tropics were so influenced by human intervention, and might have taken them to be an actual reflection of the Facebook hivemind. Further the statement of "no evidence of systematic political bias" is a bit hard to swallow given reports of Facebook employees asking "what Facebook can do to stop Donald Trump" at their all-hands (one of the top 5 questions in a poll [0] not just a lone employee walking up to the microphone). Further, the people curating these feeds are probably underpaid and young, and hence are probably going to skew left of the average journalist. Bias doesn't have to be explicit to be systematic.

Anyway I find Donald Trump + much of the rest of the GOP field pretty reprehensible politics-wise, Facebook seems to be handling things well [1], and we shouldn't worry about a conflict of interest as much as w/ advertising+privacy [2], but some amount of vigilance seems wise given how much influence these platforms can have over political outcomes [3]. Twitter in particular seems to have made a few fairly illiberal moves lately from my POV.

[0] http://gizmodo.com/facebook-employees-asked-mark-zuckerberg-...

[1] https://medium.com/@glennbeck/what-disturbed-me-about-the-fa...

[2] One shouldn't discount the H1B angle completely though.

[3] http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/08/how-google-co...

Post reply on HN