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Facebook denies 'listening' to conversations

bbc.com

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Re: Facebook denies 'listening' to conversations

#61

Post by weaksauce »

quickben wrote: post #19
weaksauce wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has there been confirmation that a chip like that is inside any of these smartphones?

From the first link, they list Snapdragon 800 family. Early 2014, phones that used it were: http://www.freewaresquad.com/2014/02/18/phones-with-snapdrag... Today that CPU series is everywhere.

interesting. thanks... I wonder if they have something like this for ios devices? seems like they have similar capabilities via the "hey siri" or whatever it is but I am curious if there is a hack to allow it to use that all the time from userland.

Re: Facebook denies 'listening' to conversations

#62

Post by objclxt »

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.

> It's hard to imagine a less sinister explanation for this phenomena.

You just forget all the other signal you've giving. Funnily enough, last week somebody was trying to convince me that Facebook was recording their every word.

"I was telling a friend about a recent trip to Thailand", they said, "and I immediately saw an ad for Thai Tea". I asked if he'd used Facebook when he was in Thailand. He had.

Which is more likely: Facebook is recording every conversation of every user on their app and mini them for ads or the advertiser in question just targeted people who had recently been to Thailand.

Re: Facebook denies 'listening' to conversations

#64

Post by throwaway613834 »

objclxt wrote: post #54
throwaway613834 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

Hm, well okay, would you mind explaining the easy procedure that lets you capture Facebook traffic then? I have tried lots of different methods (Fiddler, Xposed modules, etc.) with root access and have failed. It's no problem in theory, but practice is another matter...

Re: Facebook denies 'listening' to conversations

#65

Post by jlgaddis »

eru wrote: post #37
jlgaddis wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. Really, I don't see why Facebook wouldn't monitor audio like this for targeting ads. If you make money from serving ads, that seems like exactly the kind of thing you would want to do. Like you, I have gotten pretty good at noticing "weasel words" and such in the government's statements (denials). It is clear that they take their time to make sure they word their statements ever so carefully.

> Really, I don't see why Facebook wouldn't monitor audio like this for targeting ads. Horrible battery life?

From another comment [0] in this thread:

> Remember the time they kept the app open in the background on iOS devices by sending an empty audio buffer to the phone for playback?

> People started discovering that after iOS introduced the battery/power usage section in the Settings app.

They couldn't do it 24/7, of course, but they could certainly take "samples" at regular intervals or in certain locations or something. From my own experience, it doesn't seem that Facebook has ever been worried about battery life or preserving it.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15580748

Re: Facebook denies 'listening' to conversations

#66

Post by objclxt »

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…

> then listen in through ANY one of the apps you have installed

If there was some third party ad library that was installed across multiple apps that streamed audio and/or performed local speech recognition on everything you said don't you think somebody would have a) noticed by now, b) a security researcher figured it out, or c) everyone's battery's would be running red hot all of the time.

Teams at Apple and Google reverse engineer and debug the top 100 apps on their platforms all the time (there are teams dedicated to doing it). Facebook is also not the NSA - people leak stuff from them all the time. You're suggesting that either everyone is complicit in this, or there's a conspiracy so large and technically complex that it's managed to be kept secret all this time with no technical evidence outside of anecdotes.

Re: Facebook denies 'listening' to conversations

#67

Post by Cacti »

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 don't see how that matters. Besides, people have been discussing widespread, domestic electronic surveillance for decades far outside conspiracy fringes. The Clipper chip, as just one example, was a big deal at the time and received widespread, mainstream coverage.

Re: Facebook denies 'listening' to conversations

#68

Post by saulrh »

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…

Facebook may not be recording audio, but they do pay attention to your cell phone, GPS, and wifi, so they know that you're at a particular fast food place. Then the brand-named shake is probably something they're trying to advertise, maybe even time-limited, so the fact that you're at that place is enough. Past that it's coincidence, the law of large numbers, and confirmation bias - you remember that instance and no others, and while a few people have their own anecdotes to share, HN's readership is large enough that FB could produce that population of anecdotes with a hit rate of "One time out of ten, advertise $restaurant and mention a single totally random item selected off their menu".

The "People you may know" anecdote below is, similarly, some combination of location, wifi sniffing, luck, and confirmation bias.

Re: Facebook denies 'listening' to conversations

#69

Post by starky »

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…

In my case I was talking about flying with some coworkers and mentioned the entertaining safety videos that New Zealand Air had done. Probably hadn't thought or talked about it for 3 years. Opened up Facebook and had an ad announcing their new video. The microphone permission was turned off on Facebook, Messenger, and Instagram on my phone too, so either Android isn't blocking permissions properly, or they are getting it from somewhere else which is even worse.

Re: Facebook denies 'listening' to conversations

#70

Post by hobofan »

nothis wrote: post #31

I used to dismiss these rumors as paranoia/conspiracy theories in a maybe naive application of Occam's razor. But concrete leaks and tech news of recent years made me a believer. I sure believe Facebook is capable of this, nowadays. The only thing that makes me skeptical is that there should be reproduceable cases someone has documented for concrete evidence. All I ever hear is anecdotes.

> The only thing that makes me skeptical is that there should be reproduceable cases someone has documented for concrete evidence.

I'll throw another layer on the conspiracy pile and say they deactivate that behavior for anyone they notice trying to prove it, similar to Uber's Greyball.

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