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Comment by randolando | Hacker News Reader

This will possibly be unpopular, but I want to share my experience anyway.

On more than one occasion I have jokingly mentioned food products like "cheetos" or "doritos" only to have ads for these products (that I was not being advertised before) show up in my feed a few hours later.

Each time this happens, I'll check my privacy settings and realize that I let a social media app, like instagram for example, have access to my microphone in order to capture a video (or similar)

It seems like more than a coincidence, but of course I have no way to know for sure. So it usually is brused off as paranoia.

Still I can't help but feel like I'm being monitored more closely than I think.

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I would suspect, that if facebook were listening, someone, somewhere would have some amount of evidence. A reverse engineered binary, an emulated program, something making a visible call to a microphone and hashing the words or something.

Based on google being able to identify what song is playing in the room my phone is in, while my phone is in airplane mode, I suspect facebook COULD have a list of a million brand words stored on the phone and their corresponding representation, and tally as you say them and report the tally back, without ever sending the audio itself off the phone. But I would think, after all this suspicion, someone would have some amount of actual evidence of the process itself, and not just the results.

Zuckerberg said the answer was NO in front of congress. That would be a pretty bold lie.

No, none of these apps use your microphone to listen in on you. This has been stated many times in official newsroom posts, and in front of Congress.

It has been disproven countless times by simply looking at network traffic of the apps.

This is simply a version of the Birthday problem. You consider 100 things during any particular day. Facebook shows you 20 targeted ads in your newsfeed. It'd be a statistical anomaly if they were wrong about every single one of their choices. By pure random chance they're likely to get at least one right every once in a while.

> It has been disproven countless times by simply looking at network traffic of the apps.

I dont have reason to believe the apps are listening. BUT I dont think absence of network traffic alone is enough to disprove it.

They could do all the processing on device, and assign different Trademarks different numbers, and the network traffic would be as simple as ++10456827 ++9814132. The network traffic would be a very easy part to disguise or tuck away with other transactions.

(Googles Pixel 2 Now Playing identifies what song is playing near a microphone, while the device is offline. Its absolutely reasonable that phones could identify trademarked terms without an internet/cellular connection.)

You'll commonly hear these stories brushed off with, "these companies have so much metadata on you that they can know what you'll look for before you do."

I don't buy it - at least not fully. There are too many stories of totally random stuff talked about showing up in feeds to make this excuse totally plausible.

Hell, it was less than a year ago that you'd get brushed off with, "no, people aren't listening to the things you're saying to your home device, it's only run through NLP."

In a sense they do know what you'll do. What happens in some of these cases like with OP is they'll see a doritos ad, then they'll buy or talk about doritos. Then they'll see another ad and get freaked out.

Literally none of these companies were claiming your last "brush off".

Not anymore they aren't, but they were when the last gen of listening devices were launched.

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