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Facebook denies 'listening' to conversations

bbc.com

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Re: Facebook denies 'listening' to conversations

#291

Post by katastic »

paloaltokid wrote: post #231
Cacti wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I think people really underestimate how much data they leak all day long, and how strong the pattern is. Simply emitting bluetooth and wifi, nevermind cellular, all day long can expose an incredible amount of stuff, provided someone can piece it all together (which is exactly what Facebook and other ad companies do). We like to pretend we're unique and powered by free-will but the reality is most things you do a…

We _are_ in 1984, but unlike the book, it's not imposed on us. We signed up for it. And those of frequenting HN most likely are the ones helping to build it. Think about it: tomorrow is Monday. How many folks on this board will be working on analytics and tracking once they get in to the office? A lot of us, guaranteed. And how many of us will take a principled stand, swearing not to work on products until surveillan…

>We _are_ in 1984, but unlike the book, it's not imposed on us.

We're living in both 1984 and Brave New World.

See this illustration between 1984 and Brave New World.

https://i.imgur.com/vRBtL.jpg

Re: Facebook denies 'listening' to conversations

#292

Post by Sargos »

ehsankia wrote: post #86
0x0 wrote: post #81

Couldn't somebody decompile the android or iOS app and try to find evidence for one way or the other?

Or just have a proper methodology with many samples, control group, etc.

The kind of people who believe these conspiracy theories about Facebook are not the kind of people who believe in scientific methodology. Fuzzy bigfoot syndrome and all.

Re: Facebook denies 'listening' to conversations

#293

Post by jeffdavis »

Cacti wrote: post #283
jeffdavis wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody knows what stand to take. We stood and fought for open source everywhere, thinking that would be our salvation. But apperently there is more to it than that, and we aren't exactly sure what.

Sure we are sure, we just don't like it. RMS gets a lot of flack, but he's mostly right---this is not a technical problem with a technical solution, it's a political problem with a necessarily political solution. Most of us live in democracies, so if you want to fix the problem, it's actually quite straight-forward, it's just that people don't want to give up their nice job and nice hobbies.

If you know what the law should be, please tell us.

Re: Facebook denies 'listening' to conversations

#294

Post by artificial »

tenpies wrote: post #142
qbrass wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how it's beneficial to the advertiser when the person has already bought the product before they've seen the ad? It sounds like someone is trying to game the advertiser by correlating ad views with sales.

> It sounds like someone is trying to game the advertiser by correlating ad views with sales. Shhh. If advertisers realize how utterly wasted most of their advertising spending is you'll destroy about 80% of "tech" companies and plunge the world into a global recession.

For example in the Automotive industry a mail piece with a tracked phone number is used and that is cross referenced with Dealer sales data. The pieces are mailed to targeted lists of people qualified by credit score, postal code and recent purchase of vehicle make. Should the site be accessed via a personalized URL the user now appears through a variety of methods, same if they come from FB they’re claimed through offline conversions where sales data is compared to audiences. Using this readily sold and available data it’s easy to calculate spend and determine response. Even with single digit response (not uncommon for email) industries thrive.

Re: Facebook denies 'listening' to conversations

#295

Post by artificial »

crucifiction wrote: post #128
diego wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But they most likely do. Voice corpora are extremely useful to train voice recognition systems, for one.

Its only useful to train if they also have the transcript by a human. Eavesdropping conversations and having armies of people transcribing them seems like a very expensive and illegal way to get that data when there are probably millions of available samples, TV shows, etc that have both voice and transcription available already off the shelf.

The 2017 F8 developer conference featured a lot on Machine Vision. Processing images and video for objects, such as for automatic close captioning, is where vast resources are focused. I highly recommend watching a few of the videos, they’re specially aware as well and can infer orientation of obscured things like limbs. Microsoft has real-time audio translation, doing machine transcription at scale is totally feasible.

Re: Facebook denies 'listening' to conversations

#296

Post by artificial »

cyberferret wrote: post #228
callumlocke wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be weird if that sort of coincidence never happened. Two incidents of this happening to you ever doesn’t sound like much. Maybe even a bit low. If they really are using audio for ad targeting like they do with search history, then it should be easy enough to prove it by experiment.

Sure. I am used to, nay, I _expect_ ads for software tools and music gear given my work and hobbies in my life, as I frequently talk about those things to my friend on FB and IRL all the time. But wiper blades is so off the charts for me, that I was totally surprised to see about 3 ads for them the day after I had a discussion in the car. I don't even go to sites remotely associated with the automotive industry. Not…

I read that you do web app work and like to keep browsers stock, if it’s not too forward consider debugging in private mode in a pinch.

Re: Facebook denies 'listening' to conversations

#297

Post by Dylan16807 »

sosborn wrote: post #238
denzil_correa wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My question was NOT "Does Facebook use the phone's microphone to inform ads or change what we see in the News Feed?". It seems you have misunderstood my question. Let me repeat my question again : "What does Facebook use data gathered from user microphones across any devices for?"

"When did you stop beating your wife?"

No, it's not a loaded question. It's much more like "list everything you've punched". Maybe with "in my house" appended as an analogy to it being user microphones.

The question does not presume any misuse. It just leaves no room for implications.

Re: Facebook denies 'listening' to conversations

#298

Post by Dylan16807 »

cooper12 wrote: post #257
alehul wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Just because it was when he was young, does it diminish the truth of his statement or that he actually felt that way?

Assume it was perfectly true at the time. Is that relevant to the current state of Facebook, with 20k employees, public stock, and a 33-year-old Zuckerberg?

Re: Facebook denies 'listening' to conversations

#299

Post by jhasse »

mirimir wrote: post #278
batiudrami wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is easy also to fake, and I trust some random YouTuber much less than a public Facebook statement. It would be intensely stupid for the head of ads at to deny this if they were doing it.

Well, she wasn't under oath, so there is no firm legal requirement for her to be truthful. Or maybe, being a public representative, she's not been briefed about this. Legal security through compartmentalization is pretty common in the corporate world.

> Well, she wasn't under oath, so there is no firm legal requirement for her to be truthful.

The same is true for the random YouTuber ;)

Re: Facebook denies 'listening' to conversations

#300

Post by null0pointer »

RoyTyrell wrote: post #269
null0pointer wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a similar anecdote. Girlfriend was having some symptoms, we briefly talked about it then walked to the pharmacy and bought a pregnancy test. Maybe 30 minutes after purchasing the test we watched a youtube video on her phone. The ad on the video was for the exact test we bought. I figured that youtube got the credit card info from the purchase but I was shocked at how quickly that translated into something show…

It's certainly a technical possibility but my bets are on your girlfriend's recent searches. Was the yt video on anything to do with being pregnant? Was the pharmacy a national chain, regional, local, or one-off? In my experience in data exchanges with other large companies, data is usually shared and processed in batches where even an hour lag would be considered "very quick".

It's possible she had done some searches before talking to me, I'm not sure. The video was unrelated though. National chain pharmacy so they certainly have some kind of data sharing scheme.
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