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Facebook denies 'listening' to conversations

bbc.com

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Re: Facebook denies 'listening' to conversations

#111
post #81

Couldn't somebody decompile the android or iOS app and try to find evidence for one way or the other?

I'm sure many people have tried to do that and have found nothing. But having found nothing is not a definite proof of such a thing not existing so nobody published their results.

Re: Facebook denies 'listening' to conversations

#112

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…

This is what I came here to say. They may or may not be listening, but the end result is the same.

Re: Facebook denies 'listening' to conversations

#113
I was skeptical until I experienced an ad in my feed which in my estimation could only attribute to data captured by a conversation had hours earlier. Of course there is the possibility of coincidence but I find it hard to believe.

I took advantage of the option to see why I was shown the ad, and was told demographic information, as well as a data partnership with DLX. I would like to know if others who see and ad they suspect was displayed due to microphone captured data have this DLX data supplier source in common.

Re: Facebook denies 'listening' to conversations

#114

> "I run ads product at Facebook. We don't - and have never - used your microphone for ads. Just not true," Mr Goldman wrote. Personally, I am so used to corp speak and word play by major companies that it is difficult to take anything at face value. Therefore, I think the nature of the question asked to Facebook should be different. It should be on what they do rather do they do X. So, here's my question - "What doe…

I was about to leave an extremely similar comment, but I was going to frame it in terms of the NSA "direct access" story. I got the impression from that story that immediate denials from tech companies, which seemed categorical, turned out to hinge on which magic words were used. In this case, when I read a sentence like "We don't use your microphone for ads" I end up doing that game where you re-read the sentence ov…

"We don't serve you advertisements through your microphone."

Re: Facebook denies 'listening' to conversations

#115
From a technical perspective, it is not very likely that they will listen to people's voice to push advertisements. They needs to listen to you ALL the time, collecting your voice from all kinds of noisy environment, uploading to their server for further analysis. And in order for this service to be profitable, they need to train model to extract the part of your conversation that hints a shopping intention.

This requires infrastructure at a really large scale I don't think even FaceBook can sigh up for that. And if they have a legal department, which I assume they do and a functional one, those ideas would be killed before it moves to implementation.

Re: Facebook denies 'listening' to conversations

#116
post #107
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"We don't gather data using microphones"

But they most likely do. Voice corpora are extremely useful to train voice recognition systems, for one.

And people have a problem with it, and so the companies use Corp speak to try and make it seem like they aren't doing what you asked. The poster higher up asked how they could remove all doubt, and it's really easy. The problem is that they are trying to remove all doubt while continuing to do business as usual

Re: Facebook denies 'listening' to conversations

#118
Regardless of whether or not they are doing it purposely, the capability is certainly there. But the other data they have from cross referencing other web traffic, financial data, etc is probably much more powerful than what they could get from listening in to our conversations.

However, I still turn off microphone access for facebook and instagram. It's probably not fool proof, but it can't hurt.

Re: Facebook denies 'listening' to conversations

#119

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…

"all of our data" includes recorded audio.

Re: Facebook denies 'listening' to conversations

#120
I am not sure if this is real. However, there are people on YouTube talking about topics they have never typed, never cared about, or never shared on Facebook and sure enough, the ad appears.

It would be great to really inspect the traffic and see if this is really the case. Independent of what Facebook claims.

Either way, I am happy I have deleted it off my phone. I have never been happier each day not reading garbage and actually focusing my time on apps that improve my life and move my life forward.

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