Facebook obviously doesn't do this, but I wonder how this will end. Lots of people wanting to regulate Facebook right now, maybe some ineffective laws will get passed.
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Facebook denies 'listening' to conversations
191–200 of 415 posts
Re: Facebook denies 'listening' to conversations
#192I was totally skeptical when I first heard stories about people's feeds being curated to suit what they were talking about in front of their computers, but then a couple of things made me rethink my views. I was in the car with my friend once (both our phones were in the car with us too), and we were driving and it started raining. His wiper blades were shoddy and doing a bad job of clearing his windscreen. We had a…
This is called the "Frequency Illusion" (also often called / a similar thing is called the "Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon").
I would disagree with that phenomenon. In direct contrast, my awareness of these ads kicked into overdrive after seeing them for the first time, so I was hyper aware and looking out for them afterwards, which is why I noticed they disappeared a day or two after popping up.
Since then, my feed has been a bland sea of adverts for mattresses, knives etc. that almost all of my friends complain about seeing.
I don't use ad blockers, due to my development work in web apps etc. I like my browsers to be as stock as possible, and I do actually at least glance at nearly all ads I see in FB etc. just to see how their targeting is being skewed by my search history or messaging online.
These were two quite distinct cases of ads that I've never seen before, which popped up within 24 hours of me talking about (but not doing anything else online related to them) and then disappearing soon after.
Sure, an anecdotal sample size of 2 could just be pure coincidence, but something about it still doesn't sit right with me.
Re: Facebook denies 'listening' to conversations
#193From a technical perspective, it is not very likely that they will listen to people's voice to push advertisements. They needs to listen to you ALL the time, collecting your voice from all kinds of noisy environment, uploading to their server for further analysis. And in order for this service to be profitable, they need to train model to extract the part of your conversation that hints a shopping intention. This req…
>in order for this service to be profitable, they need to train model to extract the part of your conversation that hints a shopping intention
So basically just listen for any time someone says a variant of "I need/want x"?
Re: Facebook denies 'listening' to conversations
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
I doubt it will make a difference to most people. The staunch pro-privacy stance really only exists on tech-savvy forums like HN. Go on reddit sometimes and observe how people will say "so what if Google has all my info, it's useful and free". If Zuckerberg calling his users dumb fucks for trusting him didn't get them off the platform, a "small" privacy violation like this won't either.
When did Zuckerberg say that?
http://www.businessinsider.com/well-these-new-zuckerberg-ims...
It was back when he was 19, so I think it's fair to cut some slack for that, but the quote is true.
Re: Facebook denies 'listening' to conversations
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
I doubt it will make a difference to most people. The staunch pro-privacy stance really only exists on tech-savvy forums like HN. Go on reddit sometimes and observe how people will say "so what if Google has all my info, it's useful and free". If Zuckerberg calling his users dumb fucks for trusting him didn't get them off the platform, a "small" privacy violation like this won't either.
This reddit post is the very top of /r/all right now: https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/79i4cj/youtube_user... And the general sentiment appears to be very far from what you claim. I think it's possible that this issue is going to come to a head this time around. I don't know what the outcome will be. Just saying it's confirmation bias (the likely real explanation?) may not be enough to satisfy people.
Reddit is a small vocal tech savvy minority. The moral majority just don’t care or are too busy working three shifts to care.
Re: Facebook denies 'listening' to conversations
#196They're listening, but not to your voice or with a microphone. Facebook is listening to your data--to all of our data, all at once. They have locations, searches, clicks, messaging, photos, hashtags, and any other form of browsing patterns for everyone in your country, everyone in your neighboorhood, everyone in the same room as you. They have enough data with such advanced analysis that on occasion they can get real…
Right, like the example from Target. It is possible that facebook has access to a stream of Target purchases or credit card purchase information. I'd be 0% surprised if there was a data sharing agreement with credit rating companies. Even if they just knew the price of the purchase, combined with the job (burn risk) and location data (traveled from work to nearest store with pharmacy during the day), it's possible th…
My suspicion on this is that stores offer "reward cards" so they can get you to sign something that allows them to gather and sell your data.
Re: Facebook denies 'listening' to conversations
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
Facebook doesnt request microphone access on iOS. https://imgur.com/a/ifaiT Edit: Actually, FB will ask for microphone permission if try to record a video. Based on every other app that records video also prompts for permission to record using the microphone, I'm lead to believe the microphone permission is required on iOS if you want to record video. FB Messenger does not prompt for Microphone until you record a vid…
> https://imgur.com/a/ifaiT I can see "Messenger" and "Instagram" with access to microphone.
Instagram can record video posts and Messenger can make video calls, both requiring microphone access. In either case the recording is obvious with a red bar for microphone access in the background, like all other iOS apps.
Re: Facebook denies 'listening' to conversations
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
If you have root access to one end of encryption, you necessarily can inspect and save it. The way I would do this is by issuing a certificate for facebook.com that I mark as trusted on the device. This will let you do a man in the middle "attack." But you can probably do this directly on the device: just look for where the encryption is taking place, and intercept it.
Re: Facebook denies 'listening' to conversations
#199They're listening, but not to your voice or with a microphone. Facebook is listening to your data--to all of our data, all at once. They have locations, searches, clicks, messaging, photos, hashtags, and any other form of browsing patterns for everyone in your country, everyone in your neighboorhood, everyone in the same room as you. They have enough data with such advanced analysis that on occasion they can get real…
Right, like the example from Target. It is possible that facebook has access to a stream of Target purchases or credit card purchase information. I'd be 0% surprised if there was a data sharing agreement with credit rating companies. Even if they just knew the price of the purchase, combined with the job (burn risk) and location data (traveled from work to nearest store with pharmacy during the day), it's possible th…
I'm sure Facebook would like to do what you're saying, but I think that they're a long way from having those capabilities.
They have billions of users, billions of ads, and trillions of pieces of metadata. Sifting through that to produce a guess like "User 1234 burned themselves and would be interested in product 5678" would be an amazing and scary piece of AI.
Not to mention that Facebook are limited by the ads they can sell. The manufacturer of the burn cream doesn't give Facebook a bucket of money and free reign. They choose how and where the ads are shown. There is currently no option for "Users who recently burned themselves".
Re: Facebook denies 'listening' to conversations
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
Modify their apps to not request microphone permission.
Apparently people think there's a secret backdoor that lets an iPhone app record audio without turning the status bar red. You could deny mic permission and people would still think it's the secret backdoor.
There was a backdoor that let the Uber iPhone app record the screen invisibly from the background that went unnoticed for years.