
Getting to the bottom of the ads-coinciding-with-conversations mystery - spking
https://www.vice.com/en_au/article/wjbzzy/your-phone-is-listening-and-its-not-paranoia
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djsumdog
I've heard about this multiple times and there was even a Reply All podcast
about it.

If it were true, there are plenty of security researchers and bug bounty
hunters that install their own CAs on phones and pull packet dumps. You'd
think we'd see reports of this by now.

Facebook/Google and others have some pretty advanced learning algorithms, and
a whole shit ton of data on you. What if, via some predictive analysis based
on browsing history, messages, photos and other sources, their algorithms
guessed the author would be thinking about Tokyo before the conversation
happened?

If true, it's kinda sad such a powerful system is simply used to sell shit to
us. And if true, it could also provide some crazy insights into determinism
and human predictability.

The post is shit though. The author needed to team up with a researcher, pull
apart the Messenger/Facebook/Instagram apks (or whatever iPhone packages are)
and find real evidence the apps passively listens to conversations and
transmits that data.

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0898
The author's "evidence" of Facebook eavesdropping on conversations is the fact
that he talked about 'shirts' and then saw adverts for them in his newsfeed.
He doesn't seem to have realised that every other post on r/entrepreneur is
from a FB ad bro with a drop-ship t-shirt business.

~~~
reacweb
Confirmation bias is a more probable cause.

~~~
AndrewOMartin
I used to ascribe many things to confirmation bias, but now I worry that I can
only remember the times when confirmation bias was the cause, and I've simply
forgotten the other times.

Think about it, isn't it eerily common that you can ascribe something to
confirmation bias?

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kall
I'm not an expert on the iOS security model so I'm happy to be corrected about
this, but as far as I understand this (enabling the mic without the alert
banner or fetching data from wherever Siri might cache requests) would mean
that either Apple is secretly colluding with Facebook or that Facebook is
using an iOS exploit and sneaking it past app review. Thats an extraordinary
claim that needs more then yet another anecdote and a vague technical expert
to back it up, especially since it would not be unreasonably hard to provide
some technical proof for this.

~~~
jsjohnst
I’m not an expert either, but I’ve played one on TV, and I agree, it’s utter
BS this was happening on an iPhone.

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zdw
Continuous speech recognition is difficult. There are technical reasons why
this entire supposition is wrong, at least in the phone case.

The reason for the "Hey device..." preamble to most conversations with the
device is that, in most battery powered devices at least, the always-on mic
and processing unit that handles this is a separate, very low power unit that
recognizes _only_ the preamble, then fires up the rest of the system (usually
along with buffering a bit of audio) to handle the rest of the query which can
be more complex.

I could imagine that it's always listening/recording for non-catchphrase data
on the power unlimited always-on pucks though, but a network traffic analysis
would probably reveal that as well.

~~~
gnode
It's probably possible to do speech recognition with much less power /
computation, if you don't care about its reliability. For the purpose of
targeting ads it doesn't really matter if you get it wrong, as long as you
improve the probability of getting it right.

That said, the article lacks any conclusive evidence this is happening. It's a
scary prospect that it could happen though.

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kposehn
This is pretty sloppy reporting on Vice’s part. If you wanted to definitively
test this you could, but the author’s method brings no real conclusion outside
of confirming their own bias it seems.

~~~
optimuspaul
That was my takeaway as well. I notice coincidences like the examples all the
time, but I don't always have my phone and many times the ads are on TV or
Radio. Usually when I see the ads online that seem like a coincidence it tends
to trace back to me actually looking for an item I had talked about on amazon
or something. And honestly based on the number and variety of ads I see I
wouldn't be surprised to see something pop up out of the blue that I had
recently talked about.

I'm not convinced, but I think I could be.

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mrtksn
I really don't understand this conspiracy theory.

These devices don't run on magic but on technology that's well understood by a
very large number of engineers and scientists all around the world, even in
countries that are not exactly friendly enough to maintain the conspiracy of
the American corporations or whomever else you believe is behind this.

Because these devices run on technology and not on magic we can also observe
their behaviour and reverse engineer them. We can see when and what is
transmitted from these devices, we can observe individual components, we can
observe apps.

I find it very unlikely that such a privacy violation and grand lie can
survive the scrutiny of mortal enemies of the corporations that are allegedly
behind this.

What's more likely is that your unscientific observations are flawed and you
are biased to confirm your "theory" and write an article to make some ad money
and fame.

~~~
gadders
I think if it were true, someone would have leaked it by now.

I think what is happening is the effect where you discuss buying, say, a new
Ford XX car and then when you go for a drive you see them everywhere.

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oldcynic
Where's the control in this "experiment"? Even just a colleague at the same
location checking ads without uttering these ridiculously generic test
phrases. Did he ensure his logged in account wasn't used to research some
points for this story, either on his laptop or phone? There's quite a few
trivial ways he could have polluted his ad stream before needing to look to
voice monitoring.

Half of the stories on this topic seem to be merely the effect (I'm sure
someone's coined a name for it) of seeing more of what you look for. e.g.
Decide you are buying a Tesla and suddenly you notice there seem to be more
Teslas on the roads...

I'd like to see some studies and stories on this that are a significantly more
credible. I am naturally suspicious but in the absence of evidence I tend to
think it's not happening, yet. This piece clarifies nothing.

~~~
seren
> Half of the stories on this topic seem to be merely the effect (I'm sure
> someone's coined a name for it) of seeing more of what you look for. e.g.
> Decide you are buying a Tesla and suddenly you notice there seem to be more
> Teslas on the roads...

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases#Frequ...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases#Frequency_illusion)

Frequency Illusion or Baader Meinhof phenomenon.

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jaclaz
>Phrases like _I’m thinking about going back to uni_ and _I need some cheap
shirts for work._ Then I carefully monitored the sponsored posts on Facebook
for any changes.

The test phrases are way too common.

Proposed phrase for a future experiment:

I surely need to find a new postillion (as the previous one was struck by
lightning).

though there is the risk that no postillion is paying for the ads, making a
false negative ...

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seren
It seems to be a bold statement without much proof or explanation.

~~~
elicash
I can't believe this is on Hacker News.

The only source here is a random cybersecurity guy with no factual basis for
making the claim. That and a poorly thought-out "experiment" that seems to be
about as sophisticated as "I talked about shirts and I see shirt ads."

And what the hell is this referring to? "Seeing Google are open about it...”
What exactly is Google open about in regards to sending random audio from
phones to any app that wants it? How can this writer just throw that out there
with no explanation?

The conspiracy theory here is that Facebook built the most sophisticated ad
product ever invented and is using it secretly for their advertisers to
improve advertisers' results without telling them about it.

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BenoitP
I'll take Occam's razor on this one. This is much better explained by people
becoming more aware of something after having been exposed to it recently [1].
They talk about it with a friend, and suddenly the ad that usually goes under
the radar now goes above the consciousness threshold. It connects to more
neurons that usual, and thus makes a complete cycle in the brain.

Furthermore, this is highly amplified by marketing tactics. Their friend would
have been exposed to the same campaign, and this might be why he/she talked
about it. This is the co-occurence that the second person actually reacts to.
It knows the statistics are skewed on this one. Something is up.

I would not be surprised if Facebook campaigns are rolled out clusters by
clusters of friends. It takes repetition for consumers to remember a message,
and this is an efficient way to create it.

That's the nature of social ads.

If anything, it informs us of the emergent phenomena that can arise in a
social graph.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases#Frequ...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases#Frequency_illusion)

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Karupan
Genuine question: is there definite proof that phones and services
(Siri/Alexa/Google assistant) are NOT listening and recording everything? I've
always refused to use those services because I have no idea what kind of data
they collect, regardless of what they claim.

~~~
shagie
Yes. Attach the device to a network where you can monitor the amount of
traffic (don’t need to monitor the actual content).

Streaming voice takes a bit of data. That traffic would be clearly evident.
320kbps rate translates to 2.40 MB per minute or about 1 GB every 8h. I can
assure you my data plan would notice that.

As I don’t see gigabytes going out of my devices (I have several amazon and
apple devices at home), it’s fairly safe to say they aren’t uploading all the
noises of the house for analysis.

~~~
ksherlock
Nice try zuck. Prove that Facebook didn't infiltrate the iPhone supply line to
plant secret microphones (not even Apple knows about them!) that are triggered
by the word "shirt" and communicate back a shirt count to the facebook by
delaying TCP packets ever so slightly. You can't disprove it! Nobody can!

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liberte82
So... yet another article full of nothing but anecdotal evidence.

What will it take to actually get a real answer on this?

