Company Says It Uses Your Phones Mic to Serve Ads for Facebook, Google, etc.
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Re: Company Says It Uses Your Phones Mic to Serve Ads for Facebook, Google, etc.
#2I’ve noticed that my ads get far more specific when I have mic and camera access enabled for Instagram (which is required in order to post stories with certain features). In fact, I’ve often (correctly) realized I accidentally left access on after posting due to a hyper-specific ad relating to a recent conversation.
Re: Company Says It Uses Your Phones Mic to Serve Ads for Facebook, Google, etc.
#3I am absolutely glad that, I disable Siri immediately on all of my devices and grateful for the ominous mic-in-use indicator on all apple devices. Android also has a mic in use indicator too, but own only a Pixel to comment on Android in general.
The referenced articles are light on details and appear to be “he said she said they said” and pointing to the same archived blog post from CMG.
That being said, I see a rising popularity of Alexa all over my circle, so no high hopes. Even if I can battle my devices, I can’t battle my family, friends and neighbors from adding Amazon Echo devices everywhere and mindlessly talking to it all day.
Edit: redundancy and typo.
Re: Company Says It Uses Your Phones Mic to Serve Ads for Facebook, Google, etc.
#4I remember the official Facebook app would turn on the microphone for a few seconds every time you made a post.
Do they still do that?
Re: Company Says It Uses Your Phones Mic to Serve Ads for Facebook, Google, etc.
#5Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41404229 There are reasons to be skeptical of this.
Re: Company Says It Uses Your Phones Mic to Serve Ads for Facebook, Google, etc.
#6I don’t see confirmation of anything in particular here, other than some ad sales company made some rather vague and dubious claims. Does anyone know what specifically they were talking about and if there’s anything to it?
Re: Company Says It Uses Your Phones Mic to Serve Ads for Facebook, Google, etc.
#7I remember the official Facebook app would turn on the microphone for a few seconds every time you made a post. Do they still do that?
No they killed the project a while ago. The goal was to identify if you were watching a video based on the audio.
I assume that the feature was not worth privacy implications and potential fallout.
Re: Company Says It Uses Your Phones Mic to Serve Ads for Facebook, Google, etc.
#8I don't doubt that this technology exists, but I do seriously doubt Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc. use it. They don't need to.
Re: Company Says It Uses Your Phones Mic to Serve Ads for Facebook, Google, etc.
#9Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41404229 There are reasons to be skeptical of this.
Yeah. This submission is a clear dupe of that.
Re: Company Says It Uses Your Phones Mic to Serve Ads for Facebook, Google, etc.
#10On Discord many years ago I spoke to someone about my "big belly".
The next day I received ads about exactly that topic everywhere Adsense Facebook everywhere.
So the technology is at least 10 years old and I totally believe that the story is true.
The key issue here is that we don't own our phones. We have little control over what those apps do and often apps are hidden and can't be uninstalled.