Facebook denies 'listening' to conversations
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Re: Facebook denies 'listening' to conversations
#2Dozens of times in the past few years I've been served relevant ads on some topic instantly after discussing it in person in proximity to a smartphone. I've encountered countless other anecdotal stories from friends. When this happens I feel an acute sense of violation and vulnerability. It's hard to imagine a less sinister explanation for this phenomena.
Re: Facebook denies 'listening' to conversations
#3https://www.qualcomm.com/news/onq/2013/02/20/snapdragon-wake...
https://developer.qualcomm.com/blog/using-qualcomm-hexagon-s...
"Industry wide adoption"
2013
The rest is PR.
Re: Facebook denies 'listening' to conversations
#4Dozens of times in the past few years I've been served relevant ads on some topic instantly after discussing it in person in proximity to a smartphone. I've encountered countless other anecdotal stories from friends. When this happens I feel an acute sense of violation and vulnerability. It's hard to imagine a less sinister explanation for this phenomena.
Coincidence is a less sinister explanation. You never take note of the adverts if they weren’t immediately relevant.
Re: Facebook denies 'listening' to conversations
#5Its proprietary software, I have no idea if its malware or not, so I stick to the mobile website and do not install their apps.
Re: Facebook denies 'listening' to conversations
#6Dozens of times in the past few years I've been served relevant ads on some topic instantly after discussing it in person in proximity to a smartphone. I've encountered countless other anecdotal stories from friends. When this happens I feel an acute sense of violation and vulnerability. It's hard to imagine a less sinister explanation for this phenomena.
You can't imagine a less sinister explanation other than Facebook or some other entity is secretly recording your voice and the voices of millions of people, in violation of numerous state and federal laws, through their smartphone microphones, uploading it to their servers surreptitiously, performing voice analysis on it to determine who is speaking out of 350,000,000 possible cases (presumably they've already cataloged everyone in the country somehow?), and then use that to serve you more targeted advertising?!
I mean, really?
Re: Facebook denies 'listening' to conversations
#7Dozens of times in the past few years I've been served relevant ads on some topic instantly after discussing it in person in proximity to a smartphone. I've encountered countless other anecdotal stories from friends. When this happens I feel an acute sense of violation and vulnerability. It's hard to imagine a less sinister explanation for this phenomena.
Coincidence is a less sinister explanation. You never take note of the adverts if they weren’t immediately relevant.
But that's so much less entertaining to speculate about! Why should obvious truth get in the way of our fun?
Re: Facebook denies 'listening' to conversations
#8Dozens of times in the past few years I've been served relevant ads on some topic instantly after discussing it in person in proximity to a smartphone. I've encountered countless other anecdotal stories from friends. When this happens I feel an acute sense of violation and vulnerability. It's hard to imagine a less sinister explanation for this phenomena.
You can't imagine a less sinister explanation other than Facebook or some other entity is secretly recording your voice and the voices of millions of people, in violation of numerous state and federal laws, through their smartphone microphones, uploading it to their servers surreptitiously, performing voice analysis on it to determine who is speaking out of 350,000,000 possible cases (presumably they've already catal…
[deleted]
Re: Facebook denies 'listening' to conversations
#9Wouldn't it be possible to detect this?
If this is happening then it must require some amount of CPU and memory use on the device, which even if hidden from the OS can be detected via power use and heat dissipation. It should be possible to indirectly measure a phone's CPU load (including any hidden processors) by filming it in the infrared and/or by attaching it to power and measuring the wattage consumed from the supply.
If this is happening it must also require some network I/O. Something must be phoning home and reporting the data if the data is to be useful.
Note that there is an intrinsic trade-off between the heat dissipation angle and the bandwidth angle. If the device is doing parsing, speech recognition, AI, etc. locally then it must be consuming more energy and dissipating more heat. If the device does these things remotely it must upload more data. Compressed audio is far more bandwidth intensive than digested meta-data.
This seems like something security researchers can and should look into.
Re: Facebook denies 'listening' to conversations
#10Dozens of times in the past few years I've been served relevant ads on some topic instantly after discussing it in person in proximity to a smartphone. I've encountered countless other anecdotal stories from friends. When this happens I feel an acute sense of violation and vulnerability. It's hard to imagine a less sinister explanation for this phenomena.
I can add to that anecdote... I was discussing which podcast app was best for Android with a friend, and in the presence of her Android phone. The next day, she started getting served ads for podcast apps all over the place.
Keep in mind, this was someone who would have been completely new to podcasting and have never searched for podcasts or podcast apps before.
Made both of us highly suspicious.