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Comment by falcolas | Hacker News Reader

> just how adamant people are about FB spying via mic

I'm of the opinion that it's easier for your average Jane/Joe to believe (and maybe even preferable to believe) that someone is listening and responding to your words than a computer piecing together a picture of you from unrelated clues via some nebulous "machine learning algorithm".

Anybody can listen to your words and advertise to you based on them. It is, on the other hand, not feasible for a human to look at a stream of unrelated posts and figure out that you're pregnant.

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A lot of it is confirmation bias as well. People will remember when an ad is creepily relevant, but they don't remember the dozens of times they were completely irrelevant. It's like when my friends made me watch Stranger Things, it felt like Stranger Things references suddenly started to appear everywhere on the internet.

Confirmation bias and the Baader Meinhof Effect. I've talked with friends about topics I didn't know about before. Then I got fitting ads about it on my phone. I wouldn't have noticed these ads if they weren't fitting. It seems more creepy because it's new to me (consciously).

Humans tend to anthropomorphize - "my printer hates me" etc. It's simpler to think the thing listens than figure facebook included javascript tracking code along with the like button on some independent website that they visited an hour back. Even I have a job figuring what script did what.

My beef was more with google, but my isolated instance of this was pretty damning. I started watching Meet the Press after the election. It airs on Sunday mornings. One day though, it was pre-empted by a golf tournament, I forget which, maybe the British open. I never ever watch golf. I have been golfing maybe once, never search for it, never talk about it, have zero interest in it.

I think I got distracted, or maybe since my show wasn't on, I just decided to go shower, and left it on for a bit. The next week, I start getting notifications about golf on my phone.

There are two possibilities here- Verizon (my cable provider) is making data available on what I watched to google, or google is using my microphone to pick up what I am watching on TV. I don't know which is more likely, but VZ and google having a partnership like that and keeping it secret seems unlikely.

Is it possible that Google would know that you watch Meet the Press (generally)? That coupled with knowledge that it was replaced by the golf tournament (either from TV listings or an influx of people searching "Meet the Press" + "golf" to find out why it isn't on) _might_ explain it without Google/Verizon specifically tracking that individual event.

I think that's definitely the class of behaviour we're seeing. In general people don't think in terms of second order effects (or anything more abstract). Even if they do understand the concept, they will still prefer to believe something simpler.

Telling people that doing A and B leads to C which leads to D which makes E more likely to happen is just a bunch of gibberish that can't be right because who can you blame?

I might have believed that too, except I know about data profiles and ML, I’m a programmer and can think like that too, and yet I’m still convinced by the examples my wife and our friends personally encounter that there’s no better explanation than that FB is spying on us via the mic and using it to target ads to us.

Don't you think it's more likely that they just aren't noticing the ad before it is relevant? I mean, how often do you really notice an ad anyway?

That being said, perhaps the ads are doing their job and planting the idea for that particular product. You then bring it up in conversation or mention it out loud. Then, when you return to facebook later, you see the same ad again and due to it's recent mention, it jumps out at you.

Both seem more plausible.

No. We've definitely mentioned out loud things we've never searched for or even entered into a phone or computer, either before or afterwards, and they've shown up in our ads within hours. It's happening at least once a week now. I'm confident it's not any kind of cognitive bias, and that it's just FB spying on us through our mics.

jjeaff didn't say you searched for or entered it into your devices, but that it might have been the devices themselves that first made you think about those topics.

I call BS. You're just hyper sensitive to it now. There is absolutely no way FB is able to spy on people through their phone mics at this time.

Well, Target was doing just that a few years ago, using patterns they noticed among purchasers.

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