161–170 of 188 posts
Lol @ the Facebook army astro-turfing the comment section. "But it's not nefarious..." "But everybody else is doing it too..." "It's not for surveillance, profiling and shadow profiling, pinky promise, trust us..."
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Is it like this in Android, iOS or both?
I’m pretty sure iOS doesn’t let you access either the camera or the microphone without displaying a banner.
I have always assumed that Facebook uses heat maps to track what is under your pointer. Doesn't every serious site do that to gauge user behavior, interest and interface utilization? I guess the difference is FB is putting it in an available data set along with everything else about consumers' individual lives. More interesting is "a patent held by the company states that the Facebook app uses voice recognition algor…
Does the patent really state that Facebook does that, or Facebook spammed the patent office with obvious ideas about how they could do that. Big tech companies have loads of trivial patents on stuff they have no firm plans to build, just to stake out IP territory.
> I believe they claimed it it was so they could recognize the music you were listening to, and know something about your mood.
When did this happen, and why wasn't it frontpage on HN and all the news sites?
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I still call maximum shenanigans on that whole concept. You'd think there'd be one hacker out there with a packet dump or disassembly of the application (yknow.. concrete evidence) rather than lame anecdotes that reek of confirmation bias. Furthermore, I don't believe that Google and Apple (well.. less Google, more Apple) are in cahoots with Facebook to give them a backdoor to device permissions.
> (well.. less Google, more Apple) That's funny, because very recently, there was a discovery that fb gave most of the device makers deep access to user data, including Apple. Against all evidences, Apple still gets a pass.
What they mean by deep access is that the Facebook sharing system extension built into some OSes (including iOS pre iOS 9) had the possibility of accessing a lot of information from the connected Facebook account, which is not really anything to worry about (if your device’s OS is malicious you have way more to worry about).
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If you attempted to record a video once with the Facebook app, it then has the microphone permissions forever.
This is just truly bad if they use the this permission to then record you without knowing! You gave the permission to take a video when you wanted to, not when they want to.. I wonder if the apps and browsers will get a "grant access for 5 minutes" setting, so that one can feel safe with the services of these services. EDIT: Or maybe lock-screen/pulldown-screen (or whatever it's called) notification that has a "remov…
Does Facebook just grab everything they can? Does anybody know if they grab your device's battery status, or gyroscopic data about how you are tilting/holding your device?
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How did you use this data? Well, except for bot detection that is. I can't think of a particularly useful way this data can be utilised.
For a non-nefarious use case, it can be used to iterate on the UI to create a better user experience because it can expose areas that people aren't seeing on the webpage. Your site might have the important content or useful navigation in a place that users aren't noticing which causes them to leave the site in frustration.
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Like heat mapping a visual UI, there are a lot of people out there recording audio. However, I think that I disagree with you on whether or not sharing the data is important. If you are heat mapping me, like facebook and probably everyone else from Microsoft to CNN and FoxNews does, or you are recording me like everyone from Facebook to Samsung does, I'm sorry, I've got a problem with it. I don't care if you don't sh…
May I ask what model of television that was? Might be worth getting one myself.
You need to be careful though because the microphone is in the remote control instead. So buy the remote control WITHOUT voice control, get rid of the remote that comes with the TV, and you're good. There will be no mic's in your tv setup. (This will cost you a bit extra. About 20 or 30 bucks for a generic one.)
A second problem is that it is a smart tv, so you have to make sure to NOT connect it to the internet and get your smart services via a box you control. (I haven't been able to prove that Sony siphons smart data usage from its tv's the way the Samsung Android tv's do, but it is technically possible for them to do so.)
In any case, under no circumstances should you get a samsung. You can't even use those tvs without the privacy invasion equipment activated.