Ask HN: Has anyone tried to debunk the myth that Facebook is listening?

For weeks and months, there has been the same conspiracy about Facebook listening to their 2 Billion users to serve targeted ads.

Countless questionable youtube videos, reports of all sorts by people who have no idea what it would entail to perform such a stunt on a large scale.

After googling extensively, I still can't find any real scientific proof that it's either true or on true. It's mostly about some people relating their funny experience and mostly about Facebook saying "No we don't"

Anyone familiar with Charles Proxy would know it's pretty easy to spy on the traffic going from an app to the backend. I work in Facebook advertisement and I've been doing it for various reasons already many times. I've never seen anything that would like a speech datagram, but then again, it wasn't what I was looking for when listening to the Facebook app.

I would expect that given Google and Apple should be scrupulous about what the Facebook app does and doesn't, there should be a host of people who've been looking into that urban legend a number of time. Also the data plan of many people would simply explode too quickly for this to be true.

With my colleagues, we've been wondering if it would be possible to rely on a local text-to-speech engine running on the phone. Needless to say that would drain the battery pretty quickly and the dataset needed in the app would be pretty huge... But is it? And would it really drain the battery? More than Pokemon or the Facebook app...?

Who among you guys is a seasoned user of Charles and could run the experiment a tad further?

This is pretty much impossible to debunk because:

A) Given Facebooks policy of A/B testing, it almost certainly isn't listening all the time.

and more importantly,

B) Now that everyone is talking about it, Facebook would have been stupid NOT to turn it off at least for now.

Without hard evidence (speech processing code, or evidence of the recordings over the wire), it’s reasonable to take the official account at face value. Frankly that account is far creepier. They’ve built AI so smart that it knows what you’re talking about.

Think about it for a minute. Fb and others have so much data on people and have trained algos so well, even they don’t understand how they work so well. It’s not difficult to imagine this is the case; a computer, especially one with extensive data on the lifes, behaviors and thoughts of billions of people, is far smarter and better at predicting behavior than any human could.

Scary is that it’s just the beginning. I fall squarely into the alarmist camp on the AI issue. Not now, but in the long run. One can see how this scenario with the fb ad microphone spying paranoia thats actually 1 million IQ AI flexing its muscle is but the beginning of a slippery slope.

Would they even take a chance on this with anyone knowing it’ll eventually be discovered or reverse engineered? Why not take their account at face value? (We’ve built AI that is so smart that it can predict your conversations).

I personally find the alternative far creepier: that Facebook can figure you out and predict your behaviors even if it doesn’t actively listen.