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're not in 1984 https://m.imgur.com/vRBtL
"that Huxley not Orwell was right"
Implies only one can be right. There doesn't have to be only one answer.
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
Everytime we avoid one possible dystopia, the possibility for another will surface. We just have to hold them at Bay faster than they can arrive
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…
Last year there were 29,000 categories that could be targeted. If an ad sales rep wanted to close a deal, how difficult would it be to add one more for recent burn victims, or people who recently bought a specific product? From the links that m_ke posted, facebook already has ties to loyalty card information, so it's very possible that they didn't need to do any inference, they just had the data directly. In any case…
What would the point be in advertising a burn cream to someone that just bought a burn cream? It's not like it's a common reoccurring purchase (like Toothpaste for example).
Like the article says, it's probably just the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon* at work. It's like when you buy a new car - you suddenly start seeing that same model of car everywhere.
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…
I 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…
I had a similar experience in June when I was on a car journey and we got a crack in the windscreen. My phone was out (was using it to navigate) but it wasn't touched at all. It was a Sunday, and I didn't bother researching how to get it repaired.
Later on when I checked my phone I started getting ads in the Facebook feed for windscreen repairs.
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…
When a person submits their email for free Wifi at a place with Zenreach, they pull from databases and build a profile on the person. I don't know which services provide this or how they gather data, but the thought of anyone being able to download a detailed file on you with only an email or phone number is scary.
A few months ago I did a Google search for my name as i do once or twice a year just to see what comes out. This time I had mixed reactions because among first results there was full text taken from a scanned old magazine dated 1978 or so with my name complete with street address. That was long before the Internet was publicly available and having such data into a magazine would not hurt anyone because people expected it could be useful to get in touch with others with similar interests (electronics in this case), and it surely worked for me because I got a free subscription and some job offers which I would have gladly accepted if I wasn't only 12 years old:)
But nearly 40 years have passed, the ubiquitous magazine called the Internet is read by anyone for free, and having your address and/or personal data there isn't that safe anymore. Luckily I relocated a few times since, but what if I didn't? Technically speaking it's great to see an old magazine brought back to life, but what about unfiltered personal information one would expect to remain buried that will instead remain available forever in other contexts?
I'm not bashing Google's bots crawling around to turn anything into searchable data, and I surely would never ever want laws to limit what can be searched, but pay attention if you shared personal data on printed material because if until yesterday we said "everything you put on the internet stays there forever", today there is more.
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.
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…
Not sure if it is so far fetched to do some lightweight voice analysis (client side) and store significant terms in the same way that you would store search history.
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.
I always thought they were up front about that being true. At least for the 1% off cards that supermarkets offer.
A few weeks ago, I went into a Lenscrafters because I needed some cleaning wipes for my glasses. I have Wifi, Bluetooth, and Location services disabled for Facebook. Someone messaged me on Facebook Messenger, I responded, put my phone back in my pocket, and finished the transaction, and then left Lenscrafters and walked down to the store that I was actually in the mall to see. Within the day, I started seeing context…
Is messenger an installed app or through the browser?
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 a…
> 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.
You are doing yourself a disservice. Have two users (or at least two browsers), one for work, which you keep ad-blocker free, and one for life, which you shouldn't.
They'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…
You make a very good point. However, in this case there is very strong evidence that Facebook is also listening to the microphone . Coincidentally, I recently had a friend convey a story where the Facebook app suddenly recommended a new connection immediately after certain information was spoken in a verbal conversation. This instance was particularly damning because, due to the sensitivity of the information that wa…
I consider it likely that this is merely just another example of people underestimating how much data they're leaking. I would wager to guess that there would have been far easier methods of deducing that new connection other than listening to your conversation and somehow inferring it from that stream of noise. You just don't know which, but it's not unimaginable that that certain information was leaked in another way as well, and probably in a more structured format than unlabelled audio.
