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Comment by mmjaa | Hacker News Reader

Its not just faces .. me and a friend had a little jam session recently and posted a picture of our cool little setup, consisting of a few pocket-sized machines (synthesizers and controllers) on our table in front of us. Just an innocent little picture of our jam setup.

Within seconds of posting this picture of the machines, my friend was getting targeted ads from the manufacturers of those devices - within seconds!

This was a watershed moment for us. We won't be posting much to Facebook in the future .. far too scary for us!

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I had a similar moment (and ironically I'm a musician too).

I went to a bar, where a band was playing on stage... After a while I realized I know the drummer. I played with him before, in another band, years ago. We had a beer, chatted a bit and went home.

Now, we hadn't posted any pictures, nor statuses, we have no mutual friends on facebook, no connection at all... Heck, Facebook DIDN'T EVEN EXIST when I last saw him.

The second I got home the app suggested him as a friend

Gosh this was scary.

(OP here)

Isnt this just location based matching?

But I didn't touch my phone that night... I'm not sure what happened exactly, the fact is - it made me super uncomfortable.

It looks like Facebook asks for Location: Always on iOS. (I've got mine set to Never.) I wonder if they feed this back to the servers.

I presume you didn't post anything about the "event" to facebook (I've seen "Person is going to attend Blah" posts before) or "check in".

I had once looked up someone I knew from college on Facebook, and their name appeared immediately, weeks later I realized they were trying to find me before I was trying to find them! The other person probably looked you up, and other factors pushed Facebook to suggest them.

Not to say this is definitely what happened, but he could have looked you up on FB which might tip off the suggestions algorithm.

That's a whole other can of worms, of course.

Occam's razor, I agree. I've heard several times these kind of stories.

Facebook suggests a lot of people to me. Overwhelmingly they're people I don't recognize. Are you sure this isn't just confirmation bias making it seem like they're more successful than they really are? I'm not saying Facebook doesn't do some creepy things, but even at worst this is innocuous enough, and this has enough other really innocuous explanations that this would barely make me think twice.

80% of those people are the next-door neighbor of someone I was in marching band with 30 years ago.

I used to play a phone game and utilized mock locations for area specific content. Later, Facebook would suggest friends from the specific location I had spoofed, despite having never once set foot there or having ever known anyone from the area.

Myself and someone I just met were suggested as friends to each other after we met. Neither looked up the other. Neither created any contacts in our phone. Only possibility is our FB app knew we were both in the same place at the same time for a few hours.

now that is creepy

I also had this recently too. I got given a friend suggestion of someone I haven't seen in twenty years. We have no shared FB friends, nor location, nor schooling / college education.

I have her email address in my contacts which has been shared with WhatsApp.

Curiously, there should be no way to directly link my FB account with WhatsApp. I haven't shared my mobile number with FB, and I haven't shared my FB account email address with WhatsApp. Somehow they have tied the two together.

I've never installed any other FB app on my phone, and my FB account is only a month old.

I found that particularly chilling. The friend suggestion doesn't have my email address nor mobile number, and we live in different countries. I'd love to figure out how they did it. I even use a pseudonym on FB.

That's simple - whenever any of your personal or business contacts grants access to their contact list to some app, "everyone in the world" obtains a mapping between your mobile phone number (that they had), your full name and nicknames (that they entered manually) and likely your other identities as well (e.g. emails, various IM providers, etc) that they linked to you in their contact list.

It's the same with facial recognition - to avoid it, it's not enough to never post your pictures, you'd also need to ensure that noone who knows you would ever tag you in some picture they have.

Another musician here: One day I got ads for Waves Plugins. I still haven't figured out how they have learnt about me being into producing. My FB friends are (afaik) non-musicians from school days and I don't open FB in my regular browser. Furthermore, I block almost anything µblock has to offer in my normal browser. Maybe they derived something from my e-mail address. Pretty scary stuff!

I don't think it's impossible for them to see your financial (Credit Card?) records and use that too? Advertising companies are after all, advertising companies... They get anything they can, even the old way of finding things out. I used to buy cigars online, to this day I still get mail from websites / companies I never bought cigars from.

If they looked you up that could be part of the why and how. Facebook knew where you both were, and the fact they looked you up initiated this. Totally creepy either way.

Two potential causes:

1. Location matching - both your apps detected you in the same place for an extended period of time. Maybe you guys had mutual friends in the music community?

2. Microphone[0]. They have since refuted that claim[1], but I've had way too many coincidences and I'm choosing to keep my tin-foil hat on... :/

[0] www.geek.com/apps/facebook-app-now-listens-and-records-audio-when-you-post-updates-from-your-phone-1595873/

[1]http://newsroom.fb.com/news/h/facebook-does-not-use-your-pho...

I stopped using Facebook completely when it suggested that I friend a Work Associate that I have only dealt with once via email. The creepiest part of it was that I have never told Facebook where I work at all.

All the other people that it suggests that I friend where I have no idea who they are, I wonder where the association came from...

The most hilarious part of this is that he's already a customer! They don't need to target him!

Advertising is such a racket.

I imagine the conversation going on the lines of:

Facebook: In the week we exposed the user to the add, the user posted a picture of your product. We made that sell for you!

Advertiser: Say no more, take my money!

Facebook: (smiles smugly)

I seriously doubt there's that much detail. It would be dumb for FB to tell customers that something like this is a primary targeting criteria. That's the racket, that FB (probably) doesn't say, and if any customer is asking I can't think that FB would tell them, since it just results in wasting the customer's money.

It's like a conversation I saw last week, that video ads pay out to the provider/site even if the user only sees one second of it before pressing pause or the back-button.

Well the fact that he is a customer already does make it more likely that he will also be a future customer. He already likes XYZ distortion pedals, so lets remind how good XYZ chorus pedals are..

For the sake of discussion, why is that scary rather than kind of nice? Unless you take the AdBlock route, aren't well targeted ads better than irrelevant ones?

It's scary because the system learned something about you automatically from an innocuous photo and told others about it, all without a human in the loop. Ads are pretty harmless, but you can imagine what might happen in a surveillance system or if a more malicious actor was behind the system.

Ok, so I'd like some way to get the benefits but protect from the harm. I don't want to throw out the convenience if that's possible.

That's my wife's position, and IMHO it's a wrong one. It's the same argument about letting them store your search history: everything about you ends up in a database that someone can look up whenever s/he wants. Where you shop, where you eat, where you go on holiday, all about your family and friends, what you like, your health... it's a treasure trove for all sort of nefarious activities that could target you, from ID theft to fraud, framing, entrapment, you name it. But of course it will never happen to you, right?

Because he also looks terrible on the photo and he immediately received ads for MacDonalds jobs within minutes of posting this picture. His insurance also resigned his health policy after a system recognized him as a drunkard.

Insurance/banks are already teaming up with fb for moves in that direction. That isn't anything new.

Realizing that the sentence «big brother is watching you» accurately describes the world de live in ils kind of scary…

It's something to rationaly know it, it's totally different to experience it in real life !

Its scary because its intrusive. I didn't post the picture so that I would get better ads - rather, to inform my friends that we were having a jam session. But now, we're all going to be bombarded with ads for instruments we don't need to buy (because we already have them).

The most uncomfortable angle is just how quickly Facebook tuned into what we were doing and then changed its ad-delivery algorithm to match. I have one friend who had his picture taken in front of a headshop - he now gets regular ads for bongs and smoke accessories, even though he's not a user. So, that's also quite discomfiting ..

> I didn't post the picture so that ...

This assumes that your and Facebook's intent and interests are aligned. Clearly they are not. Why you posted your picture onto someone else's database is relevant primarily to you, and perhaps also to some subset of your friends.

You're not obligated to turn that process into a money-making proposition.

As Eben Moglen warned us a long time ago [1] the arrangement between you and Facebook (et al) is neither complex nor confusing:

You get some PHP doodads and you get spying for free all the time.

[1] https://www.google.com.au/search?q=eben+moglen+doodads+and+s...

I understand the responses to this, but my take is we're so far past the Rubicon we might as well be in the Atlantic.

For example, I have a friend who has never been on any social media. If he wanted to opt out of the surveillance apparatus, he still would have to address: collection of phone metadata, browsing history, traffic cams, other CCTV, financial paper trail, probably more I'm missing.

I wrote an essay in 2003, saying that all of this was 100% inevitable. No matter how many people thought it was creepy, didn't want it, raised privacy concerns, it was imminent all the same. Digital sense organs would continue to multiply all over the planet, and the digital nervous system would become ever more sophisticated and scary-smart all the time.

I argued that the one thing we had some limited hope of shaping was cultural attitudes and public policy towards this information and how it is applied.

Is there a link to your essay? I would be interested to read it.

My best guess is it's on a zip drive, in a box, in a storage unit. The idea that the future would feature drastically reduced privacy was taken as a given. The thesis was basically that humans tend to be both judgmental and hypocritical, so in a world of total information, we could either keep persecuting and jailing each other over non-violent cultural things, or we could become more tolerant.

I must say that the current climate of everybody tearing each other apart on social media is so far not encouraging.

The rest of it was about the more concrete benefits, like improved traffic, logistics, labor and resource allocation.

>aren't well targeted ads better than irrelevant ones?

Depends on whether you're a fan other other people making your choices for you, I guess.

> "aren't well targeted ads better"

When you're the advertiser, sure. When you're the target, not so much. Do you really want billboards speaking to you as you walk down the street? Making suggestions based on your recent purchase history or activities and personal associations?

Just because advertising technology can achieve greater powers of reaching people, doesn't mean we need or want advertising woven into the fabric of our existence more than it already is. You can opt in to that if you want, I'm staying well clear.

This is probably the most important question to be able to answer effectively, though I (and it appears many others) have trouble coming up with a compelling reason why people should be worried. Most of the people I try to convince remain unworried, thinking along the same lines -- why is it bad if they know more about me? I inevitably try to explain that 1) it's not beneficial to you, and 2) more importantly, bad actors could use the information unscrupulously. However, they believe that if this information is helpful in any way in protecting them, and otherwise doesn't really bother them, then it's a positive trend.

I would like to come up with some powerful (frightening) examples of why the data collection going on is so dangerous, and why people should be worried and careful.

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