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Comment by yupper32 | Hacker News Reader

Tech companies don't need a specific therapy app to know if you have anxiety.

If they wanted to be nefarious in this way, they could just mine your chats and emails and get a great idea about your state of mind. They wouldn't even have to get around potentially legally privileged information.

My go-to related example of this: People often worry that Facebook is listening to their conversations because they'll see an ad related to a conversation soon after. You probably shouldn't worry that they might be listening to you (because they're not), but you might want to worry that they didn't need to listen to you to know what ad to serve you.

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I think the “Facebook is listening” position is common because realizing how predictable people’s current interests are is a bit unsettling.

I think what's even more unsettling is realizing people's interests aren't as much predictable as they're being made predictable.

My wife and I, we experience a "Facebook is listening" event roughly every month these days. Of course I know they aren't, but these too-well-targeted ads or post recommendations aren't about generic, easy-to-guess interests - they're about completely random things that we just happened to spontaneously and briefly talk about that same day. The most likely explanation to me is that those conversation topics weren't actually spontaneous - that is, we were already primed, nudged to talk about this, and while we didn't know that, ad targeting algorithms did.

Couldn't that just be availability bias though? as in, these ads for _things_ were shown to you anyway, because there's hundreds of ads shown to you in some way or another every week and some percentage of them are for _things_, but because you were recently engaged in a conversation about _thing_, ads for _thing_ stood out in your perception enough to get past your attention filter?

Why do you think they are NOT listening? Whatsapp and facebook messenger/chatter thing both have mic access for a lot of people and it is truly bizzare how topics of conversations, even the first time they are broached, end up in facebook ads.

I think the data/power usage would be noticeable.

They sample it every few minutes or seconds.

You can decompile these apps and audit them to your heart’s content.

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