I've heard this from non-tech family/friends.
Is this actually happening though? If so, who is doing it and how?
Edit: I'm referring specifically to ad tech that targets ads based on overheard conversations.
The remaining 1% is if policy changed in the past few years (read: < 3 ), or if there was some top-secret team that few knew about working on this.
In general, these cases are coincidences based upon one or some combination of the following:
1) Search history that became "subconscious" and the person forgot. Annecdotally, check your history and see if you remember _everything_ you've ever searched for...you may be surprised. Android especially saves more than you might think
2) Related searches or characteristics relevant to the market. Example: during Black Friday in the 'States, many people are searching for TVs, so Amazon or Walmart will probably serve you ads for that in anticipation. Let's say with 10% odds, 1/10 people will see this ad and think "huh - I was just telling my wife we need a new TV. How did they know?" Law of large numbers and such...
3) The person installed malware that IS collecting sound samples, feeding that data to an ad-server, and actually performing this malicious behavior - but it isn't necessarily FB/Apple/etc. You tend to see this more on Android, as the Play Store has too many apps with malware like this, but it can happen on iOS too if the user isn't careful about privacy permissions.
Hope that long response helps answer your question =)
I think the definition of malware is blurring though. On some websites when I view the list of advertisers & third parties listed in consent dialogs, it's literally hundreds of them. There's no way to tell how many of those are equally motivated to protect user data and be on best behaviour.
It's also easy to forget that many users simply don't have the same understanding or reasoning about phone permissions that the audience on HN does.
I worry a great deal that we're walking into a world where older generations in particular are exploited by technology via a bombardment of settings and dialog boxes -- and that we're veering away from the real promise of technology, which is to provide clear, simple, fast and effective life improvements.
I worked on a side project a few years ago for price checking stuff. When I was working on the toys r us integration I noticed their site loaded insanely slow. So I dug deep and the site had dozens of hits to random urls. After doing a bit of spelunking - whois lookups, etc - the webpage was having my browser contact pretty much every major (or subsidiary of) tech company you could think of: oracle, ibm, cisco, facebook, etc. etc. etc.
It made me realize how utterly insane the web has gotten.
No, no trust, none at all, zero. This is not at all in any way personal and you're anon so it couldn't be.
Do you understand how that works and why? Pathological lying has taken place in the world's most successful bait and switch. Nobody agreed to this. Not a single person agreed to a surveillance state and the creation of a turnkey facist enforcement solution. The stasi couldn't have dreamed of having so much power.
Zero trust. Less than zero. Facebook and Apple (and others) have now been caught and are desparately trying to pretend it's all ok. It isn't. Not even close.
We now have to assume the content is lies, we don't have a choice. The fact you need to be anonymous in claiming everyting is really ok is telling.
Not believing a PR/damage control statement from an Ad company on the other hand is probably the right thing. Now at some point Ad companies may start doing huge disinformation campaigns on social media with payed commenters but that doesn't seem to be the case yet.
The exact turn of phrase was "Facebook or Apple". Formally speaking, you cannot conclude that they are working for either, given they phrased it as a disjunction, much less that they are working for both.
So maybe let's not jump to conclusions about other commenters? Who knows what the GP meant by "doxing myself"?
(Note: formally, "A or B" implies neither A nor B).
the claim is "i have inside info at apple and facebrick therfeore trust me" The pedantic difference is utterly meaningless here but you know that.
The answer is you absolutely refuse to trust an anonymous person based on this claim. The end. Period. Yeah? Yes.
Interesting all the pedantic responses that have zero baring on that, including yours.
Trust was asked for. The only sane response is to refuse, publically and loudly.
“Zero trust” sounds cool because cynicism is often confused with smartitude. But it is impossible to actually verify even a tiny slice of the information you consume and rely on every day.
But yeah, maybe it doesn't involve trust at the level of whether the letter s is actually q. Sure.
Especially verify if there are zero consequences for someone deliberately and falsely making a claim that this time there is no deception.
Deliberately false and misleading claims by facebrick, goog, apple and the entire internet advertising con-job is how we got to this point, remember. So maybe don't just decide to believe blindly when that has been tried before with the outcome we have.
The _denial_ is the thing that is not evidence. Whether it is happening or not the denial here is not worth electrons used to deliver it.
I make no claims at all about what /is/ happening beyond all these companies having zero credibility given their incredible bait and switch to produce an outcome that literally nobody agreed to.
Verify what, exactly? Verify literally every claim someone else makes that Facebook denies? There's simply no smoking gun to indicate that they're listening to phone audio. It would be extremely surprising if security researchers had not discovered them secretly doing this, or that a concerned employee wouldn't have leaked it to the press.
I don't trust these companies either, but that doesn't mean I believe any and all negative claims made about them, particularly claims that don't have any evidence supporting them other than the occasional well-targeted advertisement.
That is what we are discussing, here, now.
I don't trust those positive claims that facebook are not misbehaving. If you do, I can't help you.
Is that evidence of their nuclear weapons program? Obviously and clearly not. I have never here put forward evidence of their misbehaving. That continues to come regularly. Whether it is this or somenthing else more will come is a reasonble bet.
Should you trust them or anyone who says without evidence "we are doing nothing wrong" That is being addressed here.
Do you? Really?
So much pushback for taking exception to an anonymous defence with no evidence. Surely taking exception to anonymous claims with no evidence because "trust me" is what every single one of should do. Especially when we've been burned so very, very hard.
Until there are real consequences for telling lies trusting facebook denials is naieve in the extreme.
Fool me a 56th time what am I? An owner of a facebrick account.
So purely from a selfish business perspective, which is how I assume they make decisions, why would they implement this? And that is to say nothing of the PR risks.
What do you have leading you to believe it’s happening?
Or are you simply saying we should not implicitly trust the anon commenter? If so, I agree fully.
> The person installed malware that IS collecting sound samples
The Facebook app uses certificates that circumvent permissions. Any analytics package installed in the Facebook app could actually be listening and putting that on their ad server, making the Facebook app the malware that is collecting sound samples.
Facebook Inc. can accurately say "we aren't collecting" and may actually have no knowledge, and everyone continues to be misdirected.
Ironically, whether it was a package in the Facebook app, or from any other service on the phone, the ad-server is sharing the same fingerprinting across to all the other apps and companies including Facebook.
Probably by sheer 'coincidence', when google was being investigated - apple, samsung and few others shut down similar initiatives.
And with how hostile and profitable the advertising world is, I'll stay with 'guilty until proven innocent' mindset.
They'd have to be using some very sophisticated techniques to hide internally that they're doing it, given that engineers can all see the entire codebase. I was pretty intimately familiar with every bit of the build process; it'd have been hard to miss some injection of secret code. Also, the benefit would be minuscule, and the threat to their reputation if caught (given that Zuckerberg has very explicitly claimed not to be doing this) would be huge.
I am almost certain that it's not happening on Android either, but I'm not as familiar with that codebase, so I won't claim to know first hand.
I'm fairly certain that if this has been happening for years, somebody would have leaked confirmation or publicly admitted to it by now.
"We're sorry, we can do better." ad nauseam.
Here is an excellent description of the Big Tech employee today: "but their main skill is capacity to pass exams written by people like them".
Yes, Facebook is like a cult. You can verify this by asking any Facebook employee their view on privacy. You will usually get a ramble which will look exactly like the other passage from that essay:
"that class of paternalistic semi-intellectual experts.... who are telling the rest of us 1) what to do, 2) what to eat, 3) how to speak, 4) how to think… and 5) who to vote for."
And I will add 6) why privacy does not matter.
My point is: I think this person is lying. Now, if only Facebook open sourced its entire codebase, I would be willing to take back my view. See the problem here? It will be back to square one.
"Trust us. We know we are right. And we must be right because we are successful.."
It's possible but a lot of the reports are clearly coincidences. Take this example of someone watching 'Catch Me If You Can' 2 days ago, and then yesterday seeing a HN posting about the main character and finding it hard to accept as coincidental.[0]
Imagine you have conversations with your spouse about hundreds of things. And then you see ads about hundreds of things. Sometimes they happen to be about the same things. That's something out of ordinary for you, so you remember that. You are spooked by that, and you might even tweet about it, or tell your friends about it. You don't tweet every time you don't see an ad about the thing you talked about. But the probability of that happening several times over the course of a year is quite high.
Most people who are creeped out about things like “I talked to my friend about traveling to Aruba yesterday and today on Facebook I have ads for trips to Aruba!”
First of all you could have had those ads all year but only noticed after the discussion. That’s the simplest explanation.
But also, if this was indeed a friend (or someone who was ever e.g. the recipient of the same email as you, or has friends in common with you etc) then that person perhaps shared that they were in Aruba recently. Since the two of you were in the same location when you talked, a clever advertiser could show you ads for products or services that people they think you interacted with have already bought - such as a hotel stay in Aruba.
I’d really like to hear if anyone has first hand experience with spying like this - and the fact that no one has yet come forward and confirmed it suggests it must be rare.
Maybe it's like the dieselgate thing where various engineers may not see the big picture, but I honestly do not believe this is the case. I have a strong feeling that for vast majority of people, ads have a significant effect on your purchases, perhaps you were not thinking about traveling to Aruba but after couple of your friends went there, talked to you about and you got bunch of ads showing beautiful Aruba you decided to go. They don't need to listen to you to "get you".
I found a forum for Uber drivers where someone asked, “Why does the driver app ask to access the microphone?”
It's funny as I've literally just done a project on this to automatically classify phone calls. In reality voice recognition is only good at set phrases, most of Google Assistant and Alexa is smoke and mirrors.
It wouldn't even be able to recognise "wine tasting in Woodenville", let alone for it to be economically viable to process every voice like sound in a taxi and make money off adverts.
It's just the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, not Uber recording you.
But the reports of third party companies suddenly having access to this data (for quality improvement purposes) tells another story.
Also my YouTube keeps suggesting videos for any show my phone is near when it plays.
There was an article about this that I read a while back, I'll try to find it if I can.
Edit: here, found something:
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/11/beware-of-ads-th...
The ultrasonic pitches are embedded into TV commercials or are played when a user encounters an ad displayed in a computer browser. While the sound can't be heard by the human ear, nearby tablets and smartphones can detect it. When they do, browser cookies can now pair a single user to multiple devices and keep track of what TV commercials the person sees, how long the person watches the ads, and whether the person acts on the ads by doing a Web search or buying a product.
Edit again: to be fair, not even Facebook and Google have the tech to match the shows you watch with ads just by what your phone hears you say. Speech recognition still doesn't work _that_ well.
I think there's a lot of anecdotal evidence that would seem to confirm this. It might seem like they're listening, but it might just be the real-time data collection taking place. If you have an Alexa in your house, it's always on and listening.
I have a neighbor who swears when him and his wife are talking about their grocery list, they'll get ads on their phones for the stuff they need. They even tried on purpose to test it out and were talking about getting blinds (they didn't need new blinds) and twenty minutes later they opened Google on their phone and on their desktop PC and they were being served ads for blinds.
I had another friend who did the same thing and started talking about how he hated he had to constantly shovel all the snow in his driveway and within minutes was getting ads on his laptop for snow removal services.
People will swear Alexa doesn't do this, but the amount of instances I've heard makes me think they can't all be coincidental.
I've sent messages to friends through signal about specific things which then started showing up in their google ads the next day. After digging into it we found the recommendation to set signal to no longer preview the messages via notification. Since changing that there's been no further occurrences.
Or, perhaps microphones in public that try to tie overheard conversations with beacon or location data to find out who it heard.
Apparently these apps don't record human speech, but the capability's there.
https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-cameras-grocery-store...
Not quite targetting based on conversations but still creepy.
I think the targetting based on voice conversations is maybe a bit overblown, but text conversations through messenger or whatsapp, I have no doubt about. There's been more than one time I've started getting targetted ads based on text conversations i've had through those apps.
But, I also get targetted ads based on my emails, things I search for on reddit, youtube videos I watch or search for, websites I browse, local ones based on my location, and a myriad of other things that are nearly as bad as my conversations being recorded.