We did an experiment. We talked about how hard it is to find highlighter yellow nail polish. Nobody in the house is a purchaser of nail polish nor did we do any searches for highlighter or yellow or nail or polish. A day or two later my wife got an Instagram ad for highlighter yellow nail polish. It could have been a coincidence or maybe they were listening.
Or maybe some combination of things we did previously led naturally to thinking about that yellow nail polish. I'm thinking about something like the trick where you ask somebody a bunch of addition problems that have 14 as the answer (what's 10+4? 2+12? 3+9? etc...) then ask them to name a vegetable and they will almost always say carrot.
"I remembered the time I was in my fraternity house at MIT when the idea came into my head completely out of the blue that my grandmother was dead. Right after that, there was a telephone call, just like that. It was for Pete Bernays--my grandmother wasn't dead. So I remembered that, just in case somebody told me a story that ended the other way." -- Richard Feynman, "Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman"
Someone did this trick with me in the '80s, but the numbers were to sum to 13. I still said "carrot", however. Wish I would have thought to use a different number than 13 when I tried it out on others.
It's an association thing. I thought carrot too. Maybe it's because of the tedious nature of processing. Maybe it's because the orange bar at the top of the screen makes me think carrot.
This is a message board about tech... comments aren't welcome anymore - we need evidence to participate?
I think it's interesting when a bunch of people chime in and say "Hey, yeah, I had some crazy thing happen to me, I'm in tech and understand how this stuff works, and there's a very small to zero chance this happened through some other parallel construction by the tech company, they just straight up listened to my conversation and showed me an ad".
This is what kicks off a handful of you to go packet sniffing and write up a blog post looking for this behavior. So yes, evidence is welcome but it doesn't seem like we are quite there yet.
In general I agree, but I think when you are being explicitly asked for a "source" in response to an allegation that it is settled that FB has been "caught recording people," I would prefer to not have anecdotes in reply.
I mean… this is a conversation, not some sort of formal debate? Someone is telling you "hey, this happened to me," and your response isn't "have you considered this other explanation?" but rather "I won't discuss this further unless you do a bunch of research and present the results to me."
I'm happy to continue discuss it (not sure where you are getting the idea that I'm not from), but I think it is also fair to point out when someone asks for a source to a claim that something has been proven/caught and instead the replies are a bunch of personal stories where people think something is happening.
To me, that is indicative that, contra the original claim, no such thing has ever been proven.
It's not verboten. But, candidly, it is kind of rude. What's the difference between someone at, say, the EFF "proving" something happened by running an experiment and writing about it publicly, and someone on Hacker News doing the same?
I disagree that it is rude to point out something is an anecdote.
The proof has to do with the technical details, not the authority figure posting it. If someone from the EFF wrote a blog post with the same content as these HN posters, I would be similarly dismissive of this as "proof."
They're saying "facebook has been caught multiple times doing this", which is not a personal anecdote, but an assertion that proof exists and is available.
> Edit: Holy fuck there are (paid?) Facebook shills all over this like flies on shit.
From the HN guidelines: [0]
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
Don’t iPhone have an indicator when the mic is recording? Also, this feels like it would be insanely easy to test by capturing the payloads sent to FB; you could even use something like Charles Proxy to do it.
FB having access to microphone makes sense for plenty of other completely innocent reasons (for example, if you can record a video from inside the app).
If this was actually true, I can’t help but feel that someone would have proven it technically by now instead of relying on these types of self experiment and anecdotes, especially given how commonly this is touted.
> 3) If a background app starts then stops recording audio while the screen is off, would you have an indicator that it recorded audio?
Yes. iOS displays an indicator if an app has recently used the mic.
> Note: Whenever an app uses the camera (including when the camera and microphone are used together), a green indicator appears. An orange indicator appears at the top of the screen whenever an app uses the microphone without the camera. Also, a message appears at the top of Control Center to inform you when an app has recently used either.
The phone was sitting between two people having a conversation, one of them "swiped it open" meaning it was off to begin with, then was immediately displayed an ad for that conversation, and upon hearing this the tech-savvy person in the house understood what happened, confirmed it with the mic access to facebook in the settings, and then disabled the behavior.
Considering the original claim was "zero indication that the mic is hot" and now it's "zero indication that the mic is hot if the screen is off", I'd say that the goal post has moved considerably.
But if you want to know if Facebook is listening to you through the iPhone microphone, you should probably look at the screen for the indicator. iOS apps can't start recording on their own in the background, there's no API for that. If they are listening to you, they'd have to start the audio session in the foreground, which would allow you to see the indicator.
I wrote the original "Wife swipes open the phone" comment, so that's the context you seem to be missing. Sure you can see a little dot on your phone when YOU run some experiment today and look for it, but was that indicator available in the exact situation where the targeted ad was displayed? No.
Also, this incident happened in the past and we know there have been dramatic API changes on both Apple and Facebook products. The limits of the API today don't reflect the capabilities that were available to developers in the past. I doubt Facebook is hacking the App Store process to use hidden APIs. It was probably just available in the past and my wife granted the facebook app complete access to the mic, so they took what they wanted.
I'd make sure to disable that permission today too, just in case.
One last thing is I just opened my iPhone again and hit record. I honestly didn't see the tiny orange pixel at the top of my phone until you pointed it out. I was basically looking for the green video indicator light to show. So I'm technically wrong about NO indication, you're welcome.
Android has a notification now when the mic is recording and has had the ability to deny microphone and lots of other access for a long time now. Thankfully it sounds like iOS is catching up
And don’t forget the battery. A mic recording 24/7 would drain the battery much faster and would not go unnoticed unless specialized hardware is used like the one for “hey siri” and “ok google”.
Try any voice recording app for a few hours, now use the facebook app for the same number of hours. The impact on battery life of a mic actively recording alone is very noticeable, so noticeable that your phone has a special chip just to recognize patterns similar to “hey siri”.
It would not need to record high quality audio and could maybe even take advantage of that same chip? Just thinking out loud here - smaller, crappier audio would also be easier to send back unnoticed (or instead of even recording audio it could be transcribing on the fly to a text file using something super basic and easy with low accuracy)
> This way too I can troll people on the internet when they suspect this is happening and I can say "bUt ThE bAtTeRy LiFe!" to defend Meta: my corporate overlord business daddy.
Please, stop with the sarcasm.
Okey, let’s say they manage to record us without a huge impact on our battery life. Now, how do you send these recordings or even the extracted keywords from a popular app, a client installed on devices controlled by the users and susceptible to reverse engineering and network traffic analysis without anyone noticing it?
This isn’t evidence. Even if Facebook was not listening to your conversations, there would be some rate in which you would just randomly be served an ad related to a topic you were discussing. There needs to be evidence that it is happening at a rate too high to be attributable to chance.
Sounds like a good way to engineer it... anything to improve the bottom line even if insanely-targeted ads only trickle out to users. How about limiting who sees this feature to also limit the risk of being detected? Maybe just do it once a year to everyone, or never to specific "tech-savvy" users that they have completely profiled.
So if were walking past a playing blaring the piña colada song, I’d see ads for alcohol and umbrellas? If coworkers around me are talking about activities I’m not interested in, I’d see ads for those?
They have far better information that shows I’m not interested in alcohol or extreme sports. Audio in the background is so low-signal that it isn’t worth showing ads based on it.
Even just transcribing speech something accurately is not something that was possible until the last couple of years. Yet this conspiracy theory has been around for a decade or more.
Yeah, it's probably not a coincidence that your wife is talking about X and is recognised by Facebook to be in a group of people that are interested in X.
