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Facebook denies 'listening' to conversations

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Re: Facebook denies 'listening' to conversations

#381

Post by maccard »

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…

Not sure I agree r; Netflix and Spotify. Both have curated home pages with questionable amounts of accuracy. Netflix in particular, places all of their own content on the top row of the selection. My fire tv stick home page is jammed with ads for content on the landing screen. Amazons website is a gigantic ad. My online shopping now has suggested items based on what I’m ordering( ordering strawberries - now you get suggestions for branded cream in the same search)

Product placement also appears to be rampant (despite you mentioning it explicitly in your post) - many shows highlight specific vehicles and brands, or specific phones, brands of food...

Another one I’ve found is lots of blogs (particularly food ones) have sponsored entries. So you have someone writing about food ad having recipes that use a particular brand of harissa, or a particular food processor.

All these things are advertising, and are mostly heavily targeted too.

Re: Facebook denies 'listening' to conversations

#382

Post by EADGBE »

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…

I was the audience to at least a hundred advertisements on my way to work today.

Do I mind? Not really. Probably because I can't point out a single one.

Re: Facebook denies 'listening' to conversations

#383

Post by EADGBE »

46922010 wrote: post #376
isostatic wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

It definitely depends where you are living, and how you travel. If you haven't been to London recently I understand you might say there are a few ads, but lately I have really begun to notice just how prevalent they are. The tube is absolutely plastered with them - in the train carriages, the escalators, the tunnels between platforms. Construction work fences are covered in ads. And this is for thousands of people wh…

Even tiny cities in comparison will give you a similar experience. You just have to look. There's probably a lot of people looking right through them.

Re: Facebook denies 'listening' to conversations

#384

Post by EADGBE »

widforss wrote: post #325
squarefoot wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 expecte…

What's the reason for keeping your address a secret? Genuinely curious, as where I live (se) almost all peoples addresses are public information, and it's really practical.

Lookup address-by-name seems much more damning than lookup-name-by-address.

Much less is to be assumed about you, like just your name.

Versus the country you live in, state/province/territory, city/village/township, neighborhood, etc.

Re: Facebook denies 'listening' to conversations

#385

Post by underwoodley »

IanCal wrote: post #375
underwoodley wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problems with this 'psychological explanation' 1. It is just as unscientific as saying that Facebook MUST be listening, without finding any evidence in the workings of phones, app source code, etc. Almost by definition, there is no experimental evidence for the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon. 2. It posits that everyone who has experienced this is unsophisticated and ignorant about cognitive distortion. Clearly, some p…

> 2. It posits that everyone who has experienced this is unsophisticated and ignorant about cognitive distortion. Not really, it just suggests people aren't perfect statisticians and perfect at recording information. Which we aren't. > People also have experiences of unlikely events but which have well understood or easy-to-estimate probabilities The probability of seeing a relevant advert is not something we can eas…

What is the strong evidence in support of the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon?

Re: Facebook denies 'listening' to conversations

#386

Post by jpalomaki »

underwater wrote: post #199
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…

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…

Think smaller. They don't need to consider billion users at once, for modeling you can start with hundreds of thousands or few million. Trillion pieces of metadata can be reduced to tens of thousands of features (eg. instead of feeding in the raw status updates, assign each update to some class, put in some mood measurement etc). This reduction does not need to be fully automated, it can be human assisted (humans coming up with ideas on what kind of features to extract). Instead of considering all possible ads, you can start by taking out the long tail of ads with very little interaction data and focus on some specific categories.

Building this kind of predictive models is not black magic. This is what companies do to figure out who they should target on direct marketing campaigns. Applying some magical deep learning dust can quite likely improve the results (in Facebook scale), but it's not mandatory. Computationally the hardest part is building the models. Once they are done, applying them to millions and millions of customers is more straight forward.

When considering what is possible, you need to also consider the stakes. Facebook ad revenue is something like $10 billion per quarter[1]. To make more money, I can think of three ways: add more users, make users spend more time looking at their feed or make more money per ad slot. Better targeting means more money per ad slot since some customers are paying directly based on the clicks. Since improvements lead to better revenue, extra hardware costs are easy to justify.

[1] http://www.adweek.com/digital/facebook-raked-in-9-16-billion...

Re: Facebook denies 'listening' to conversations

#387

Post by datavirtue »

null0pointer wrote: post #227
brad0 wrote: post #97

> "At work, happened to me though earlier this year. Working as a barista, got a burn, talked to my partner in person about it, went to Target, bought the burn cream, and saw an ad on FB for the exact product I purchased. Never searched for product either," wrote Brigitte Bonasoro. Facebook has data sharing agreements with many, many companies. It's most likely that the cream was bought with a card then linked togeth…

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…

Credit card information is not tied to the products that are purchased. It is an aggregate purchase amount tied to a store location, that is it. Whatever is going on here needs to be investigated and brought to light.

Re: Facebook denies 'listening' to conversations

#388

Post by datavirtue »

rimliu wrote: post #340
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…

Do credit card companies get the list of items you purchased, not just amount and the place?

No, they do not not. I have access to many billions of credit card transactions. Aggregate amount, date/time, maybe merchant location, merchant name, and a merchant classification--plus some other things but not much that is interesting.

Re: Facebook denies 'listening' to conversations

#389

Post by corvallis »

widforss wrote: post #325
squarefoot wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 expecte…

What's the reason for keeping your address a secret? Genuinely curious, as where I live (se) almost all peoples addresses are public information, and it's really practical.

I work with prisoners. I have a unique name. My family members and I are the only people with our names in the country, and possibly the world.

If you google my name, you will find my family (parents, sibling), their home address, phone numbers, ages, occupations. It is local.

Upon release or through veiled communication, I or my family members could easily be targeted for harm by inmates or former inmates.

This is a very real concern for me. I have found no way to permanently remove this information from search results.

I encourage people to think more creatively when they cannot think of potential disadvantages of easily searchable personal information.

Re: Facebook denies 'listening' to conversations

#390

Post by RoyTyrell »

null0pointer wrote: post #300
RoyTyrell wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> National chain pharmacy so they certainly have some kind of data sharing scheme.

I don't know if you can say that for sure or not.

Regardless of whom shares customer data with whom, this whole issue has a number of legal/compliance issues beginning with HIPAA. The pregnancy test purchase, when anonymized, is just a sales data point, sure. When combined with identifying your girlfriend, and then giving that data to a third party (especially for non health-care treatment or paying claims needs), is most certainly illegal. If she had purchased a Coke, then no, but given she purchased a health-related product it falls into a myriad of laws that govern health care privacy.

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