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Comment by superbrama | Hacker News Reader

I disagree with your feelings about the anecdotes given there is an official account that’s more likely. Why would fb come out officially saying no, knowing they’ll be uncovered eventually if the answer ever were yes?

Also, your techniques could reveal a false negative both in the existence of a bug in the particular build of fb code being tested, and that such a mechanism could have existed in previous versions but already removed.

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Likelihood has to be judged against the evidence. A lot of scientifically-minded people have tested it for themselves and found ads to appear when they spoke about subject explicitly to test whether ads would appear. I recall several specific cases. It's not quite scientific enough for me, but I'd expect a scientific study to have the same conclusion.

Just like if you do a scientific study of whether baked beans make you toot, yes, you will find that they do.

Although you state there is a high likelihood of a false negative, it would be a useful study for me and others in the more likely case that it matches the informal n=1 studies numerous technical people performed by themselves.

Source?

>Source?

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=%22baked+beans+make+me+fart%...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/79i4cj/youtube_user...

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjbz1N4qBQA the host themselves did the same.

In the original comment of mine that you replied to, I suggested how to make the methodology even more scientific with a double-blind study. As far as anecodtal evidence this is going to be the best that you can do. I personally find it convincing. These are reasonable people testing things as scientifically as they can.

Dude, cmon. I know this is hn and I’m supposed to put effort into crafting useful responses. But, how have those links convinced you that it must be the mic?

From the evidence in those videos, I’d rather be considering whether fb is part of a future AI continuum monitoring and influencing the past (from the future in which the AI exists) by messing with people testing this feature. Yep, cat is alive on Facebook/IG, days later. Microphones and big data/AI are but two slits through which photons can pass, in the experiment known as fb.

What other kind of explanation do you expect? People have tested it by playing a Spanish soap opera on their TV for a few hours, leaving their phone in front of it to listen. They then started getting Spanish advertisements. I realize that there is a confirmation bias in that they are then actively looking for Spanish-language ads (to test their theory) but don't you think they would have noticed them at other times? They explicitly ran an experiment and got the verification.

In fact, some people were incredulous and re-ran the experiment thinking there's no way they would start getting Spanish ads: they did too. That's all it takes to convince me. I mean what other mechanism would get back to Facebook? As far as I know TV's don't report back which specific channel they're tuning into (all channels are streamed concurrently.)

I'm all for a more scientific test but at the moment I find the anecdotal evidence quite convincing. I just outlined how a scientific test might work here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15782323

One has to be very thorough when reviewing the details of such investigations. For instance, we would want to look at details regarding the experimenter’s cable tv service. If it’s digital perhaps the viewing data was resold to fb.

At the most in those cases there’s enough info to suggest data sharing is going on at the least, but not enough to confirm anything regarding the fb app itself and the mic.

Worth investigating more, though.

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