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

Facebook denies 'listening' to conversations

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 415 posts

Re: Facebook denies 'listening' to conversations

#51

Post by firefoxd »

They do record your conversation [1]

> Here’s how it works: if you choose to turn the feature on, when you write a status update, the app converts any sound into an audio fingerprint on your phone. This fingerprint is sent to our servers to try and match it against our database of audio and TV fingerprints. By design, we do not store fingerprints from your device for any amount of time. And in any event, the fingerprints can’t be reversed into the original audio because they don’t contain enough information.

And my previous comment :[2]

> Notice how they say they do not store sound or recordings. But what if it is converted to text?

Notice below they say that the fingerprint cannot be reversed into the original audio because it doesn't contain enough information. Text cannot be converted to the ORIGINAL audio but it can be converted to audio.

This may be just me being paranoid, but I do know that legalese is designed exactly to say something without saying everything.

[1] http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2014/05/a-new-optional-way-to-sh...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=foxfired

Re: Facebook denies 'listening' to conversations

#52

Post by rand77763 »

sp527 wrote: post #15

Once happened while remarking on the Fruit Loops shake at Burger King. Opened Facebook minutes later and got a Fruit Loops ad. I assure you I don’t message, post, or in any other way remotely suggest an affinity for Fruit Loops. Commenting on it at Burger King was the definition of a one-off incident. I guess another possible explanation is some very sophisticated combination of location tracking and Kellogg’s target…

Delete both Facebook apps from your phone and just use it from Chrome. Haven’t had a problem since.

Re: Facebook denies 'listening' to conversations

#54

Post by objclxt »

throwaway613834 wrote: post #46
nilved wrote: post #43

There's an easy way to verify this: run tcpdump and record it happening. The fact that nobody has done this, instead only offering anecdotes, strongly suggests that these are coincidences or from other forms of targeting.

tcpdump? How do you record HTTPS connections (with pinned certificates, I might add) via tcpdump?

Regardless, it’s easy enough to dump HTTPS traffic (pinned or otherwise) if you have root access to the client, which in the case of Android is not difficult to get.

Re: Facebook denies 'listening' to conversations

#56

Post by quickben »

halflings wrote: post #25
quickben wrote: post #3

https://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.

IMHO this is irrelevant to what is being discussed here. > enables devices powered by Snapdragon 800 processors to be “woken up” by a custom voice command (beginning with a custom phrase set by the device OEM like “Hey Snapdragon”, for example) Because they are always on and have to use minimal power, these chips are used to recognise a very specific term (probably why these companies don't let you customise how you…

What minimal power? Phones are being charged at home all the time. Android apps can prevent sleep. Dsp to parse voice is there. There are sdks for all this.

Re: Facebook denies 'listening' to conversations

#57

Post by gaius »

zwtaylor wrote: post #22
Cacti wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

True, it seems far-fetched at first. We should keep in mind that a even few short years ago theorizing about the US Government operating a widespread domestic electronic surveillance dragnet was still the realm of delusional conspiracy theorists.

I remember the days when we thought archiving Usenet was technically impossible... Then DejaNews announced they'd been doing it for years already...

Re: Facebook denies 'listening' to conversations

#59

Post by thsowers »

rxever wrote: post #55

Once it happened to me that Facebook has shown me under "People You May Know" a person that was on the same WiFi as I was. We had zero mutual friends and no known connection prior.

Tagging users that have the same IP address seems to be a lot less sinister then what people are claiming

Re: Facebook denies 'listening' to conversations

#60

Post by warrenmiller »

zwtaylor wrote: post #2

Dozens 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.

Read up on the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon
Post reply on HN