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Comment by kolinko | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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