Dildos, lots of dildos! I’m just gonna repeat that while I’m driving to see if I start getting Google ads for dildos.
I’ve tried that, it didn’t work…unfortunately.
Keep us updated!
Hold on, I just tripped on another goddamn dildo, you don’t wanna know where I fell.
I tried that. Didn’t work. There may be some filters so they don’t serve inappropriate ads to people with families or some such.
If that works, you should try it with a product that you aren’t interested in too and compare the results.
A market agency claiming they do something of the sort isn’t proof that conversations are being monitored en masse. Security researchers can and probably have tested for this and found no clear, verifiable evidence, otherwise we would have known. Also, this stuff can be blocked at the OS level and I find it hard to imagine (esp. without solid proof) that Google or Apple would jeopardize their reputations to this extent by enabling such unauthorized listening in on users’ conversations.
Of course it’s good to keep watching this space but we shouldn’t jump to conclusions.
Anybody that’s ever spoken to a salesperson knows that they’re talking out of their arse most of the time, and I doubt this is an exception.
He’s said this because he thinks that the people he’s talking to will give him more money if he does.
If it was happening at all you’d have seen proof by now. Like people pulling apps apart and finding proof, not just “I spoke to Bob last week about cameras and now I’m seeing ads for cameras”.
The truly terrifying part is they don’t need to listen to your conversations to know what you want.
Security researchers can and probably have tested for this and found no clear, verifiable evidence, otherwise we would have known.
Facebook snooped on users’ Snapchat traffic in secret project, documents reveal
Interesting. And shady. Though not about recording conversations.
Aye. Facebook has been proven to be shady af over and over again.
By paying people $20 / month in exchange for installing a VPN that will snoop on your data so they can market research their competitors.
It is unacceptable, but it wasn’t in secret from the users. They agreed to get paid in exchange for the usage data of competitor apps.
So it’s a completely different situation to any “secretly spying” claim. The users had to go out of their way to get it setup.
it wasn’t in secret
Did I misread something? It even says in the title of the linked article, that it was a “secret project”.
Yes, it was secret in the sense they didn’t want their competitors knowing about it.
It wasn’t secret to people who were invited and signed up for the program.
It was already ruled that they failed to sufficiently disclose which information was used and how.
Yep
Nothing to do with your microphone.
Yes. Just another malicious thing facebook does. Surely, they are totally trustworthy in all other regards. /s
This has nothing to do with trust and everything to do with facts and evidence.
The evidence is: among other things, facebook has repeatedly violated user’s privacy. It would be no surprise if they would also monitor conversations via the microphone. Sure, currently there seems to be no evidence for that. But I wouldn’t be so naive to just trust them on that.
The evidence is: among other things, facebook has repeatedly violated user’s privacy
This is not evidence that they’re using your microphone, and you know it’s not.
It would be no surprise if they would also monitor conversations via the microphone.
Honestly, I would be very surprised. Not that they would, but that they were able to. And that they were able to without ever being caught, somehow bypassing Google and Apple’s mic usage notifications.
But I wouldn’t be so naive to just trust them on that.
I don’t know why you keep coming back to trust. I’ve already addressed this. No one is suggesting that you should trust them. You shouldn’t trust them. And you shouldn’t use their services. That’s not the point.
This is not evidence that they’re using your microphone, and you know it’s not.
I didn’t claim it to be evidence for that.
somehow bypassing Google and Apple’s mic usage notifications
Unless some form of hardware notification is hardwired into the device, which indicates cam or mic usage, I’m on the rather paranoid side regarding software notifications. Software is usually much easier to break. I’m leaning a lot out of the window now, as I don’t know how secure those notifications are implemented. However, even then there is reason for concern, given that facebook had / has questionable deals with device manufacturers. If they were willing to share personal data with device manufacturers, there is reason to suspect this went or can go the other way around as well.
I don’t know why you keep coming back to trust. […] That’s not the point.
It is mine. Even though there is no evidence for a surveillance using device microphones itself yet and it could be surprising if they were able to, given the history of facebook, they participated in a lot of rather surprising shit.
They have it’s very easy there are free programs that monitor all data traffic.
This claim that Facebook listens to you on your phone has been around for years. It has been investigated numerous times and has never turned out to be true. Until recently the processing capacity required would have been insane and you would have an incredibly high noise to signal ratio. It’s just not an economical way of gathering data for advertising.
Why bother anyway when people put their entire lives on Facebook, for free, in easily processable text?
Your phone/plan carrier using voice data to make a marketing profile is well documented actually. This data is purchased and verified and resold by meta, or in some cases bought and used by alphabet for GAS. Cacti can show you outgoing data for every device on a network, and you can see data being sent from a phone in signed packets going to your carrier when you’re not “actively using” it. It seems like you know about network monitoring tools but you haven’t actually used them, just talked about them in reference to data collection.
“Why buy the cow” here is also easily answered: not everyone uses Facebook, a fair number of users will deactivate their facebook page but continue to use messenger.
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Can you share this well documented documents?
The july 2017 verizon data leak was made public.
Yeah, with lots of leaked customer data. Nothing about using voice data to make a marketing profile. Unless there is a second leak I don’t know about.
But judging by your inability to link it you just made it up.
Please think about what you’ve just confirmed about yourself
I confirmed you made it up and can’t link a source.
So what you’re saying is the biggest companies like Amazon, Google, ChatGPT, etc… can’t perfect voice dictation when I’m talking directly and clearly to my device, but this company has been able to figure it out. And doing it while hiding from the smartphone OS that it’s doing it. While the device is at a distance/hidden in my pocket. And is using it just to sell ads.
👍
Is this copypasta
Your comment? I’m pretty sure yeah it was, and a really old one
I asked because it was nonsensical and could have been funny if you were imitating the typical internet child comment but here we are with you making no sense and me disappointed
Really?.. Wow, not only did you copy pasta one of the oldest trolls online but you can’t understand how illogical the troll is. And you want to accuse me of being a child?
Your comment was disproved here… In 2018. And it wasn’t a new idea then either.
Because people’s (presumed private) conversations on Messenger are not the same thing as things people post publicly.
Personally, I would never install that malware on my phone. But if you even have FB Messenger installed on your device, chances are that it’s constantly sending your data to Facebook. Go take a look at what permissions it “needs.”
We can see what it’s sending to facebook though, and it’s not constant. There’s a bunch that it does send and receive, but this isn’t hypothetical speculation, like, we can just see that it’s not using your microphone for that, or sending anything like audio data. You can check this yourself, wireshark is free and packet specifications are available.
I get that, but it just happens far too often to be coincidence.
I’m not going to claim to know how, but it’s naive to take the word of corporations when we have so much circumstantial evidence that shows these firms are targeting people with ads for things that they had never shown interest in, but happened to mention once in the presence of a device with a microphone and internet connection. There have been people who have tested this, and have gotten results that indicate that this just cannot be a coincidence. It has happened to me personally on several occasions (before I started keeping my mic off at the OS level, hasn’t happened since).
I’ve been around long enough to know that, just because the general public doesn’t know how some proprietary tech that corporations spend billions on R&D for might work, doesn’t mean it’s impossible. People have come up with insane shit, and that’s just the stuff that people have voluntarily (usually) disclosed. God knows what kind of proprietary shit is out there that we have no awareness of.
I mean, for fuck sake, you can now steal a person’s password by listening to their keystrokes:
Not to mention the fact that the NSA likely has back doors in every major piece of software and hardware in the US…
I know that stuff isn’t directly related, but the point is that these things always seem impossible, until it gets leaked that it’s been possible for years now.
easy to test. men can say “tampons glitter lotion” several times a day. women say “garage exhaust cable”.
Until now it was really annoying to collect audio and then use it. The app needs to constantly record, send out the datas and then lastly process it to be useful. Today the cost versus benefits are really not to their advantage.
But tomorrow this might change, if they find a way of using the mic to serve ads be sure that they will. The only question today is how? The only option at this time is for me to process the stuff offline. As they do today with “ok google”. Within the next months-years we are going to see more and more phones and it stuff using dedicated or specialized AI chip, they will be great with really low consumption to run 24/24. They could analyse offline the speech, make a resume and lastly when the connectivity is sufficient and enough datas are collwcted, the phone sends out all the infos to the companies servers.
I’ve seen some comments about the fact that others companies that Google cannot really use the mic in this way, this is right…today. But in the future make sure that when they will have developed correctly this concept, Google (and Apple) would surely be okay with this approach (maybe in exchange with some bucks).
Today phones are surely not listening to us, but they know so much things that we are actually thinking that they are. But this way is maybe not enough profitable for them, so they want to invade even more our privacy to gain more of this fucking thing called “money”.
Shocked, I tell you!
Most of the non tech people reaction
But before that, when it was not acknowledged by social media, it was more like ’ you’re paranoid. And you think you’re that important that they listen to you? Common, get back to reality ’
I feel like we’ve been gaslighted so bad about this that we were even denying each other’s reality.
I knew they had to be doing this so I turned off all mic permissions. One day it pissed me off so much I started keeping my phone off completely unless I needed to use it.
The only good thing that came out of it was I learned about ad blockers. Fine, listen to me since I can’t fucking stop you(keeping phone off was inconvenient), but it’s futile now and you wasted money since I won’t see your stupid fucking ads anymore.
I knew they had to be doing this so I turned off all mic permissions. One day it pissed me off so much I started keeping my phone off completely unless I needed to use it
It might be an easy to just stop using Facebook really.
I’ve had enough time to work out which of my relatives are racist, so I don’t really need it anymore.
I don’t have fb or the youtube app and haven’t for years… so I’m not sure what was doing it. I have ublock origin now, so if it’s still happening I wouldn’t know.
Honestly the thought of them pouring that much money into r&d and launching that spyware just to have us plebs block the end result(ads) does feel kinda good at least.
Yeah, being not paranoid is hard in XXI century.
TBH the same scenario has been mentioned in the “ex machina” movie from 2014 when colleb has been asking how the humanoid robots work. The deep blue was AI of search engine taking data from listening to the phone calls
It’s the reverse. Non tech people believe the snake oil, tech people know this is snake oil.
I highly doubt that they actually managed to do this, at least any time recently.
As another commenter noted, Android alerts you when an app is accessing the microphone in the background, and it would also absolutely destroy the phones battery life more than the FB app currently does. The only way that we have the “Hey Google/Siri” command prompts active all the time is with custom hardware not available to the apps, and certainly not without Android knowing about it.
Maybe they actively listen while the app is open, but even then I think recent Android/iOS would let you know about that.
Google’s “Now playing” feature constantly listens to what’s going on in the background to show you what songs are playing. They claim this is done with a local database of song “fingerprints”. The feature does not show the microphone indicator because: “…Now Playing is protected by Android’s Private Compute Core…”
I’m not saying that other, non-google, app do this to my knowledge; but the fact that this is a thing is honestly a bit scary.
As someone relatively ignorant about the mechanics of something like this, would it not make more sense that the app would be getting this data from the Android OS, with Google’s knowledge and cooperation?
The place I see the most unsettling ads (that seem to be driven by overheard conversation) tends to be the google feed itself, so it seems reasonable to me that they could be using and selling that information to others as well, and merely disguising how the data were acquired.
The place I see the most unsettling ads (that seem to be driven by overheard conversation)
There’s a simpler explanation – you’re in the same geospatial region or you’re connected to the same networks as the people you’re having conversations with, and those people also looked up the things they have conversations about.
If you have GPS, Wi-Fi, or (possibly) Bluetooth, then that’s how they can pretty easily associate you to those people.
It’s a reasonable explanation, and what I typically assume to be true. Still, I’m curious about the actual mechanics, and if it potentially could be being done by Google without the larger tech industry being aware of it.
I believe technically-inclined people could monitor the traffic that exits the phone, or at least passes through the router.
Audio recordings would be larger than the kinds of stuff that’s just sent passively.
They can and do. Nobody has shown evidence of this happening.
It would take a lot of data. On device voice processing is not very advanced. That’s why most voice stuff doesn’t work without a signal.
That makes sense, but isn’t it assuming they’re processing data on the device? I would expect them to send raw audio back to be processed by Google ad services. Obviously it wouldn’t work without signal either, but that’s hardly a limitation.
As someone else pointed out, how does the google song recognition work? That’s active without triggering the light indicating audio recording, and is at least processing enough audio data to identify songs.
If they were sending that much audio back, people would see the traffic. You could record it and send it at a different time, but the traffic would exist somewhere. People have looked and failed to find any evidence of such traffic.
It’s something that could happen on device in the nearish future if there’s not anything now, but it would probably still be hard to hide.
Thanks for the info! I guess that’s ultimately what I’m looking for more about: how much do we know about cellular traffic? Obviously with encryption we can’t just directly read cell signals to find out what’s being sent, so do people just record the volume of data being sent in individual packets and make educated guesses?
It seems plausible to run a simple(non-AI) algorithm to isolate probable conversations and send stripped and compressed audio chunks along with normal data. I assume that’s still probably too hard to hide, but if anyone out there knows of someone that’s looked for this stuff, I’d love to check it out.
People have looked and failed to find any evidence of such traffic
Source? I would like to read about that
Sorry, it’s been long enough and I haven’t saved any of the links, and the keywords are polluted as hell with garbage results. I can’t find anything specific.
You probably won’t find a source about something not happening.
It’s almost like they were asking about sources for people looking or something.
If you’re not going to contribute, why are you wasting people’s time?
They really need to name-and-shame beyond “Facebook Partner” considering we’re talking about fucking Cox Media Group.
Fuckers got my entire complex’s Internet shut down (I am a renter not the owner)
What’s the last “bombshell scandal that would ruin a company” that actually ruined a company?
Unroll.me was a service that would scan your email and clean up your inbox. The New York Times reported that the company was gathering sales receipts emails, anonymizing them, and selling them to rival companies; for example Uber paid them to hand over all the sales receipts they could on Lyft rides in people’s mailboxes. The bad press made them eventually sell the company to Slice, mainly for the email archives they amassed.
Slice like… the pizza website?
That’s what I assumed too but it appears to be a package tracking website
Enron? Maybe the SBF thing? Seems like financial scandals are the only thing that matters.
Cambridge Analytica, but only because what they were doing was so monumentally illegal. I’m sure the government would have let them get away with it if they could have thought of a way out for them. A lot of them mates were involved in that scandal.
As a business you can be a maverick against many laws, just not the laws regarding finance.
Turn off microphone access to all social media and tell your friends the same. I’ve disabled mine for years and all ads are generic or from prior sites visited.
Do you one better - My mini-desktop is plugged into a monitor with no microphone or camera.
Title is basically clickbait given it’s Cox Media Group doing this, not Facebook. They’re partnered with a bunch of companies.
Wonder what it’ll get out of ‘Kill Zuckerberg’ and other things.
I am so numb to outrage that this just seems… Meh. What happened to me.
Normative nihilism is going to get us all.
This is such a strange reality to live in. All of the futuristic, dystopian fiction I have consumed has the same premise that people living in the dystopia know it and know it’s bad. Somehow reality is worse.
yeah like tell me something I don’t know.
“This just in: to the surprise of no one, your phone has, in fact, been spying on you from day 1. Now we go to Jim with sports. Jim?”
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It’s the world we live in. It’s very much intentionally designed to make you complacent.
They spent decades gaslighting you so you thought you were crazy for even imagining it.
It is pretty easy to verify whether you’ve granted Microphone access to Facebook. If you have, revoke it.
The problem with closed source apps is you don’t know what else is going on in the background and what else it might have installed or connected to, unless you have debug logs for everything it did and know how to interpret all of that. I wouldn’t install any app from the facebook company on any device I use
I’m pretty sure that iPhone have the same security but on Android, apps cannot install other apps. When you think about it that would be a pretty basic security vulnerability so it’s not that surprising that it’s blocked.
It’s not Facebook though, it’s just used in the clickbait headline as an advertising partner of the actual company the story is about.
But if you need to revoke the microphone permission from the Facebook app then something is wrong anyway, because it means you have the Facebook app installed for some reason.
Thought this was common knowledge by now
Yeah, there was a viral video years back about a couple that thought this was happening to them, so they started talking about cat litter for 1 day, only inside their house, and then within 2 days they were being served cat litter ads for the first time in their lives.
They didnt own a cat.
How many other novel ads did they see that they didn’t talk about?
I’d be incredibly skeptical of the claim that they’ve never been served a cat litter ad. Everybody gets served ads that are misses. They’re obviously easy to ignore which makes it difficult to recall what they were about. But I have no doubt that they would’ve been served cat-related ads plenty of times before. Cats are, after all, one of the most common pets.
I’m not saying they didn’t get an ad for cat litter. I’m saying they probably also got ads for other random products that they didn’t talk about, but they didn’t pay attention to those because they weren’t talking about them. It’s not a valid experiment design.
I know. But we’re both talking about the same thing. Everyone gets irrelevant and ostensibly novel ads all the time. Cat litter, beauty products, diapers, whatever. They just so happen to have focused their attention on cat litter when they just as easily could have focused on dozens of other products and noticed the same result. And, in truth, it’s unlikely that they are actually novel, just unnoticed before.
I used to pick up things for a friend at the supermarket and they moved over five years ago. To this day, I still use the savings card, and still get coupons for baby formula and diapers. Even if I had an infant at the time, does the supermarket think my now six year old would still be using formula and diapers?
Did they mention cat litter in any messaging app? Upload a video announcing their plan?
I’m skeptical, lol
Yea they can deny it all they want, but I’ve had similar happen to me countless times.
Even better, last time I tried to buy something from one of their adds it turned out to be a scam. I reported the post (add) and they said they wouldn’t remove it because it didn’t break any policies. lol.
Can something that’s not true be common knowledge?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Obsolete_medical_theories
And that’s just in medicine.
god?
