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Comment by rqtwteye | Hacker News Reader

Just read this. I have had enough weird incidents where you for example chat with somebody about a topic and a day later I suddenly received ads Youtube recommendations about this topic. There is a lot of reason to not believe big companies. I don't see why Facebook should be more ethical than tobacco or oil companies that have been lying and obfuscating for decades.

The only solution I see is to make it illegal to use personal data. Especially make data brokers illegal. When you give a company access to your data, you often agree that they will pass the data to third parties who then pass it on and suddenly everybody has your data because you have permission to use your data.

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People often get mixed up about what causes what in these situations:

We might chat about all sorts of random things, but many times there's something that happened before, let's call it event X, that leads us to talk about a certain topic, say topic Y (like when you mention a cool shirt a friend just bought).

Then, if they see an ad about that later, folks jump to the conclusion that "Facebook was listening" to their chat. But what's more likely is that this topic was already trending among people like you, and that's why it popped up in your ads.

So, it's not that talking about it made it appear in your ads. It's more about a common event that sparked your conversation about it and also made it show up in your ads.

Have tech companies ever deserved the benefit of the doubt when the plausible deniability is that solid?

If you think objectively about this issue, it's hard to see how they can get a positive ROI out of this.

Simon does a great job highlighting why this doesn't make sense from the technical and business standpoints: https://simonwillison.net/2023/Dec/14/ai-trust-crisis/#faceb...

I'm not so worried about the corporation's ROI calculations at the top as much as paperclip maximizing middle management with warped incentives and little in the way of corporate controls or morals. We're one badly designed KPI and generic internal data collection API away from such spying falling through the cracks. Once it's there, the incentives are heavily against looking too hard at where the data came from until a public scandal draws an executive's attention.

It's played out over and over again, especially with Facebook. They don't deserve the benefit of the doubt, even when "logically" the ROI for the company doesn't make sense. Facebook specifically can't be trusted at the executive level either; that culture trickles down.

Sorry, I’ve worked for and known about too many companies that “spent money to make money” and went bankrupt.

You can’t use net profit as a yardstick of rationality in the corporate world, but especially Corporate America. People will seek revenue that results in negative returns on investment. There’s nothing rational about it, which is the problem.

They can increase revenue by making ethically terrible decisions. Full stop.

It doesn’t have to be something the “deserve” really. Facebook, data brokers, and other creeps have already infected the whole internet. They spy on the content you aren’t even willing to talk about with anybody. They don’t need to secretly access your microphone because they’ve openly violated your privacy more throughly than that.

Not sure anyone's asking for "benefit of the doubt". As defenses against privacy intrusion go, "Of course Facebook isn't listening to all your conversations and using that to serve ads to you. Why, that would be too expensive to contemplate. All they're doing is tracking everything you and your friends do on the web, tracking your location, noticing you're physically close to each other, inferring that you're probably having a conversation together, and using your friend's web activity to serve you targeted ads, as just one of a suite of methods for targeting ads based on your context. Also as soon as it's not too expensive to contemplate we're probably going to actually do it. We're not failing to do it for any ethical reason. It's just too expensive right now." is pretty weak sauce.

"We're not actually transcribing every word you hear and say, we're just using capabilities that the Stasi could only dream of at rates of speed they couldn't even conceive of, and it's just that these coincidences happen so often that it looks like we're transcribing your speech. Come on, be less paranoid."

Your example right here is exactly why I care so much about this.

If people think "they listen to me through the microphone" it distracts them from understanding what's actually happening - the whole sequence of things you listed there.

Which means they can't take measures to protect themselves, or campaign for better practices - because they're working off the wrong mental model of how this stuff works.

No company has ever deserved the benefit of doubt. There are plenty of examples in history where companies prioritized profits over harm to people. And they knew exactly what's going on.

Every time i've received a hyper targeted ad, it's because the person I was just on the phone with was googling the thing we were talking about.

I told my mom i wanted a vacuum cleaner for christmas - guess what, facebook advertises to all your friends what you're shopping for. "lookalike audience" - to your point.

"So, it's not that talking about it made it appear in your ads. It's more about a common event that sparked your conversation about it and also made it show up in your ads."

It's not a common event. They were totally random conversations. That's why I noticed that something is going on. I am not sure if they really listening on the microphone or what else they are doing but it's super creepy and should not happen.

No matter what exactly the mechanism is they use to end up with these hyper-specific results the end results is that by fusing data from an always expanding amount of sources companies are gaining insights into peoples lives which are nearing the almost mythical "all seeing eye" in a way that never happened before in human history. And I think we should ask really hard questions of whether society should continue to allow this or whether it should be reigned in. And we shouldn't accept vague "oh, you know, a person could do this too, so it's okay" or "companies are just persons" statements as an answer. Even for die-hard market fans there's the question if a market can work if the other side in an transaction knows everything about you.

As for using personal data - EU has it covered.

But the whole „facebook listening to you” os absurd - on iOS you would see a system notification that the microphone is active, I assume on android as well. Also, it would take crazy amounts of bandwidth/battery/processing power to pull off.

It would also be trivially discoverable - a ton of people are listening to what apps are sending out, and even if encrypted, it would be noticeable by the outgoing traffic volume being high.

It is virtually impossible to pull off even today, as anyone who ever developed anything on mobile can tell you

Likely a cognitive bias there, we pay selective attention to the topics we've been discussing previously, and likely remember when an ad comes up that's related. So yes, they're not listening to our microphones. It's just our selective attention and memory, instead.

plus all the other types of tracking and stalking they do

The scarier reality to me is less that I'm being actively spied on and more that we're all very algorithmically predictable. Why bother actively spying when it turns out that the websites they visit in a day does a good enough of a job predicting what kind of person they are.

And even if it were trivially easy to pull off surreptitious microphone monitoring, Facebook's incentives to do so aren't obvious. You can't charge advertisers more for an ad-targeting feature which officially doesn't exist (and if optimising targeting above and beyond expectations was that important, they could probably start by fixing some of the terrible choices made by self service buyers that wouldn't incur the same risk)

Yeah, I'll add that one to my list of arguments. If Facebook were doing it they would be actively telling marketers in order to get more ad money.

It's not absurd. Siri is listening for "hey siri" all the time. Folks don't really grok how that's different than Facebook spying as described. I'm frankly not sure that it's impossible, just that there's enough churn of Facebook employees that it would eventually leak if it was being done.

It's plausible to a naive observer, but it's absurd from a technical level. As you're probably aware, there's an entirely separate low-power coprocessor tasked with understanding just the words "hey Siri", because keeping the main processor awake for that task would absolutely destroy the battery life.

It's not absurd from a technical level. The coprocessor can absolutely have a larger vocabulary and adding an entry to local storage for hearing "tennis watch" would be valuable for ad-marketing.

It's not impossible to do, but impossible to hide, and not feasible to do anyway. The technical complexity is massively higher than just using your browser history, which means there would have to be a huge team that does it, and therefore no secrecy. Also for the same reason it would be massively more expensive than existing data collection, but the ads would sell for the same price,.so it's not economically viable.

I think some people need to figure out how those high speed video cameras work. It would affect their view of what is possible and not possible with electronics.

The ELI5 version is that it can watch everything and then keep the bits that happen just before the person hits the button.

That’s how they can catch things that explode or do something and you aren’t sure when it will happen. Like popcorn popping.

Siri is basically doing the same thing.

Siri also misfires. And that data can be sent in.

If that is the case, why aren't developers who are implementing such pipelines coming forward. This was the case for 9/11 being an inside job because many workers are needed for such an inside job. A whistleblower like Tristan Harris could come forward and accept that facebook is doing such stuff.

> chat with somebody about a topic and a day later I suddenly received ads Youtube recommendations about this topic

What's funny about it is that counterclaims will often be that this information doesn't necessarily need to be coming from reading your chat messages. It could be that they just know you happened to be chatting to that person -- despite "metadata" supposedly not being personally identifiable information -- and then one or more parties started to look up on google the topic they were discussing. As if that's supposed to be less invasive.

They have so much data about you that they can predict what you are going to do or look for before you know it yourself.

Technology good enough is indistinguishable from magic.

GDPR is on the right track, but they made collecting consent too easy so now the entire Internet is covered with dark patterns trying to trick you into giving consent.

What we need is basically GDPR except that consent can only be collected in the form of a signed and notarized contract.

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