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Facebook denies 'listening' to conversations

bbc.com

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Re: Facebook denies 'listening' to conversations

#351

Post by mathw »

branchless wrote: post #196
tfinniga wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you look at the history of the Tesco Clubcard (one of the early ones to appear in the UK), the data they mined from their new ability to tie purchasing trends to customers more than made up for the cost of the rewards being offered to get people to use it.

There's a reason they got so dominant over here - they were simply way ahead of the game on offering what their customers actually wanted, because they were the only people who actually had a clue.

That has of course changed now.

Re: Facebook denies 'listening' to conversations

#352

Post by SmellyGeekBoy »

bearbearbear wrote: post #274
patientplatypus wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ummm.... https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/79i4cj/youtube_user... It's a pretty easy test - they just said "cat food" a bunch of times and ads for cat food came up in their feed the next day. I'm sure if you were interested you could probably do the same experiment with some other product you've never posted about or talked about online and come up with similar results. It seems strange that you would just ass…

Hi, first comment so please be gentle. I'd like to point out that this video doesn't actually provide any evidence that Facebook was listening. They said they talked about cat food all day, then they showed an ad on Facebook for cat food. There's no way to verify that they didn't make the video of the cat food ad on Facebook and then talk about cat food all day. Nor is there any evidence that they talked about cat fo…

> I'm not a programmer so I don't know, but: Wouldn't it be trivial for someone who knows how to write Android software to monitor if an an application is accessing the audio input device?

Or even by MITMing the connection and looking at the network packets. But yes, it's not outside the realms of possibility to hook into the microphone driver on a rooted Android phone and check when it's being activated.

I'm not one to leap to Facebook's defence and if this is happening it needs to be shut down ASAP, but I suspect that there would be at least some credible evidence out there if it were indeed the case.

Re: Facebook denies 'listening' to conversations

#354

Post by Feniks »

isostatic wrote: post #338
gnulinux wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The difference between us and 1984 is only really one of intent I'm not convinced intent isn't there; I'm also confused why'd you assume that. As a free software activist, I wonder have you every checked EFF or FSF websites. I'm not saying EFF and FSF are saving the world (no, they are not) but if you browse what they're dealing with, you can easily see the intent is there. It is simply hard to do all these without…

> ads are such an integral part of our lives I'll skip the futurama reference for now, but for me ads are far rarer than in the 90s. Adblock handles most things online, iPlayer, Netflix and amazon don't really have adverts on TV (they have a graphical menu but I would call that an advert), Spotify doesn't have adverts. Sure there are a few adverts if I go to somewhere like london, and Sainsbury's advertise their own…

Absolutely. Ublock origin scrubs every page clean of ads and trackers.

It's really not THAT hard to stay off the grid.

Re: Facebook denies 'listening' to conversations

#355

Post by dnate »

bearbearbear wrote: post #274
patientplatypus wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ummm.... https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/79i4cj/youtube_user... It's a pretty easy test - they just said "cat food" a bunch of times and ads for cat food came up in their feed the next day. I'm sure if you were interested you could probably do the same experiment with some other product you've never posted about or talked about online and come up with similar results. It seems strange that you would just ass…

Hi, first comment so please be gentle. I'd like to point out that this video doesn't actually provide any evidence that Facebook was listening. They said they talked about cat food all day, then they showed an ad on Facebook for cat food. There's no way to verify that they didn't make the video of the cat food ad on Facebook and then talk about cat food all day. Nor is there any evidence that they talked about cat fo…

That's been done, and no one has found any evidence that this is happening. Hence it's status as a conspiracy theory.

As soon as you start assuming that the OS is giving the facebook app access to the microphone regardless of whether you allowed it in the settings, things start to get absurd

Re: Facebook denies 'listening' to conversations

#356

Post by londons_explore »

ravenstine wrote: post #289
imron wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Advertisers are suckers. Facebook and YouTube are selling ads to people who have already bought their product.

In a sense, they are suckers. Plus, as another story on HN suggested, their abandonment of advertising you things you don't need right now(but you may find you want later in life) proves counterproductive. A heck of a lot of things advertised to me on Facebook are things I already searched for and either purchased or already decided wasn't worth buying. I don't believe that modern internet ads are as valuable as the…

Internet ads are far more measurable than most other forms of advertising.

The advertiser certainly has all the data necessary to see if it's profitable or not to do those seemingly counterintuitive ad campaigns.

Re: Facebook denies 'listening' to conversations

#357

Post by rando444 »

Vinnl wrote: post #320
cvwright wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

It's not unimaginable, but the frequency of these stories should make you wonder.

I had this happen personally. Had a conversation about my work with this girl I know which ended up being mostly about project management. The girl told me later she started getting ads for project management stuff.

It's not a subject she's interested in, has ever searched for information on, and has no relevance to her job working the counter at a sandwich shop. We have no social media accounts in common and don't even talk that often.

Re: Facebook denies 'listening' to conversations

#358

Post by userbinator »

slashcom wrote: post #281
StanislavPetrov wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>In a statement issued on June 2nd [2016], Facebook said it "does not use your phone’s microphone to inform ads or to change what you see in News Feed." >That's pretty fucking clear to me. Said nobody who understands law, language, or politics. It's absolutely fucking clear to everyone who reads with discrimination what this means. It means they are using your microphone to vacuum up your information. That they added…

They can’t say that though, because recording a video involves accessing the microphone. Otherwise Facebook Live and Stories couldn’t exist.

..."except when Facebook Live and Stories are explicitly accessed by the user."

Re: Facebook denies 'listening' to conversations

#359

Post by kagamine »

Buge wrote: post #308
patientplatypus wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ummm.... https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/79i4cj/youtube_user... It's a pretty easy test - they just said "cat food" a bunch of times and ads for cat food came up in their feed the next day. I'm sure if you were interested you could probably do the same experiment with some other product you've never posted about or talked about online and come up with similar results. It seems strange that you would just ass…

That could easily have been a random ad, combined with something like the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon. To be a scientific test it needs a list of products, and then randomly assign half into a study group and half in to a control group. Then talk all the time about stuff in the study group but not the control group. And see if there is a statistically significant difference between the ads shown for products in the stu…

IN the video he claims not to have owned a cat or talked about cats for 20 years. they chose a subject that they are certain they have, as a couple, never exchanged words on.

Explaining away doesn't explain. For an average, normal FB user, this was as scientific as they could get. It would be nice to see someone repeat the experiment with a pro-hacker type on hand and a packet sniffer ++.

There are too many people giving a company like fb, who have form on the implementation of morally and ethically dubious practices, the benefit of the doubt, all the while dismissing any and all claims of users. It looks fishy at best, and I'm not name calling, it isn't allowed on this forum, but there are a disproportionate number of FB defenders popping up wherever this story surfaces.

Re: Facebook denies 'listening' to conversations

#360

Post by qrbLPHiKpiux »

aembleton wrote: post #349
cyberferret wrote: post #149

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…

Why do you give the Facebook permission to access your microphone?

People with smartphones do a lot of things they shouldn’t. Unknowingly.
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