You and your wife can both install Signal and play the same game. Then you can discard that Facebook is snooping on your messages. And you can think of bigger conspiracies which is always fun.
Ask HN: Ads triggered by WhatsApp “end to end encrypted” messages?
391–400 of 473 posts
Re: Ask HN: Ads triggered by WhatsApp “end to end encrypted” messages?
#392make something up.
send messages extolling the utility of brrlftz discuss how every body not taking advantage of brrlftz will miss out. let your SO know that you need as much brrlftz as can be produced and delivered.
keep your eye out for cheap imitations offered to you.
Re: Ask HN: Ads triggered by WhatsApp “end to end encrypted” messages?
#393I would love to see a control channel in this experiment here.
Pick two topics every time. Send one topic to your wife on Whatsapp. Write paper messages to your wife about the other topic and give it to her.
Track how often you see advertisements for topics in both channels. A significant difference in any one channel will be worth sharing.
Re: Ask HN: Ads triggered by WhatsApp “end to end encrypted” messages?
#394Earlier quoted context omitted.
An important thing you’re missing is the control. You should record every ad. You need to know if you got 3 topics of ads every day and 1/3 of them are related to that secret topic, OR if you get 300 topics every day and 1/300 are related to that secret topic. If it’s the former, it’s suspicious, if it’s the latter, it’s way less suspicious.
The control is the topic you pick that you don’t discuss on WhatsApp or messenger. The idea is random differences between topics should average out over many trials.
I still think it’s important to consider the volume of topics that show up that aren’t being explicitly looked for.
I’ve gotten Instagram ads for ketamine and I absolutely am not discussing or searching for it. I probably wouldn’t even notice a random topic if it’s not so absurd. I’m sure there’s tons of topics I don’t even realize I see.
Re: Ask HN: Ads triggered by WhatsApp “end to end encrypted” messages?
#395Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's still Facebook's problem, no excuses. Facebook absolutely has the power and resources to lobby google and congress. Security teams at both companies will unequivocally agree that keylogging presents an extremely grave security risk that consumers are unlikely to understand the consequences of and therefore need to be protected from. Imagine a hapless military professional/politician downloading one. The proble…
I don’t agree that it is Facebook’s problem but I do think this is probably where a lot of data gets leaked that people don’t realize or think about. In a perfect world sure Facebook has the power and money to do a lot of things. So do the other megacorps. They don’t do them, and you’re correct it is the misalignment of incentives to due so. But Facebook doesn’t control what keyboard you use on your phone and if the…
In the other post in this thread, I link to a website that ostensibly has a method of warning for non standard keyboards. If "e2e" communication is part of a products marketing, do you think they have a responsibility to warn when that expectation might be violated? What about warning that text sent to giphy may be used for advertisement purposes?
If I were to summarize my entire thoughts on WhatsApp, it's that it advertises security (e2e), while they only make money from violations of the security. The behavior OP expects is exactly the behavior a person would expect from this set of alignments.
If a leak is able to be monetized (even if it is google harvesting keyboard data and selling it back to FB) do you think that would be punished or rewarded?
If this very same post were for signal, I think the response we might expect is concern and investigation, not a response of defense and deflection.
There was an article several weeks ago about how a "special master" tasked with understanding what data Facebook collects on you was stonewalled because "even Facebook don't know what data Facebook collects."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32750059
"we don't want to be accountable for any data except the data that's part of the download your data":
> Facebook contended that any data not included in this set was outside the scope of the lawsuit, ignoring the vast quantities of information the company generates through inferences, outside partnerships, and other nonpublic analysis of our habits — parts of the social media site’s inner workings that are obscure to consumers. Briefly, what we think of as “Facebook” is in fact a composite of specialized programs that work together when we upload videos, share photos, or get targeted with advertising. The social network wanted to keep data storage in those nonconsumer parts of Facebook out of court.
> Facebook’s stonewalling has been revealing on its own, providing variations on the same theme: It has amassed so much data on so many billions of people and organized it so confusingly that full transparency is impossible on a technical level.
> The remarks in the hearing echo those found in an internal document leaked to Motherboard earlier this year detailing how the internal engineering dysfunction at Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, makes compliance with data privacy laws an impossibility.
Facebook doesn't even want to know if the WhatsApp is leaking data.
Re: Ask HN: Ads triggered by WhatsApp “end to end encrypted” messages?
#396I think you partly may just be biased by happening to notice ads more if they fit the topic you sent to your wife or being lenient in deciding if ads meet the categorization. And if you dwell on an ad because it seems to match, you may get more similar ads. Here is how I think you could design a more robust (but less fun) experiment: - Come up with a bunch of topics, write them down on slips of paper, put the paper i…
This is facebook. They've been caught recording people and selling that for advertising, they deny it because technically your audio is transcripted not recorded and they can send only some keywords back so whole conversations aren't sent back to them.
Would they argue that the message goes first into a neural network that outputs potential product labels based on the message and that it all happens client-side? That's the only way I see it possible for them not to violate the E2EE.
Re: Ask HN: Ads triggered by WhatsApp “end to end encrypted” messages?
#397Re: Ask HN: Ads triggered by WhatsApp “end to end encrypted” messages?
#398(wrt some comments in this thread) Is it so hard to believe that Meta is snooping on WhatsApp conversations? Meta, a company of unprecedented size that was built over monetizing your private data? A company who's been caught in plenty of scandals (like Cambridge Analytic) about this exact sort of thing (violating their users' privacy)? Someone from this community, which generally means educated, tech-literate and sen…
For anyone who has ever worked at a FAANG like company in the last decade, yes, this is actually very hard to believe.
Despite the shady image they have, these companies go to great lengths to avoid doing shady things (because ultimately it’s bad for business). Not to mention the hundreds of tech employees that would have to be involved and keep quiet in this type of “conspiracy”. It’s incredibly unlikely, I truly believe that.
Re: Ask HN: Ads triggered by WhatsApp “end to end encrypted” messages?
#399Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, my wife sent me a picture of my daughter working on a puzzle. Less than 24 hours later, her Instagram was showing ads for a store that was selling the same type of puzzle as the one my daughter was playing with. So it's not just terms but images too.
That doesn’t even make sense. Why go through the trouble of retargeting based on images? If you took a photo of something you likely already own it.
Mindlessly retargeting you based on things you own or have already bought is standard practice in the online ad industry.
Re: Ask HN: Ads triggered by WhatsApp “end to end encrypted” messages?
#400Earlier quoted context omitted.
As creepy as this is whenever it happens, I remain convinced it’s observation bias. Because of how often it doesn’t happen. Quoth Richard Feynman: > “You know, the most amazing thing happened to me tonight... I saw a car with the license plate ARW 357. Can you imagine? Of all the millions of license plates in the state, what was the chance that I would see that particular one tonight? Amazing!” You were gonna see ads…
I'm sorry, but the Feynman reference may be a little misleading. With respect, it is difficult to imagine Richard Feynman putting "I sent the information to the recipient via the internet, but I hope they didn't read it" in the same category as "no way they could know; must be telepathy."
It’s not “I hope they don’t read it”. It’s:
— they say they don’t. — developers who work on it say what they’ve worked on doesn’t. —dispute this conversation being a decade old, no one has reverse engineered the client or network traffic to prove it does afaik.