
Facebook did the sneaky listening thing, too - woliveirajr
https://gizmodo.com/facebook-did-the-sneaky-listening-thing-too-1837215438
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randolando
This will possibly be unpopular, but I want to share my experience anyway.

On more than one occasion I have jokingly mentioned food products like
"cheetos" or "doritos" only to have ads for these products (that I was not
being advertised before) show up in my feed a few hours later.

Each time this happens, I'll check my privacy settings and realize that I let
a social media app, like instagram for example, have access to my microphone
in order to capture a video (or similar)

It seems like more than a coincidence, but of course I have no way to know for
sure. So it usually is brused off as paranoia.

Still I can't help but feel like I'm being monitored more closely than I
think.

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5trokerac3
You'll commonly hear these stories brushed off with, "these companies have so
much metadata on you that they can know what you'll look for before you do."

I don't buy it - at least not fully. There are too many stories of totally
random stuff talked about showing up in feeds to make this excuse totally
plausible.

Hell, it was less than a year ago that you'd get brushed off with, "no, people
aren't listening to the things you're saying to your home device, it's only
run through NLP."

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dymk
Literally none of these companies were claiming your last "brush off".

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5trokerac3
Not anymore they aren't, but they were when the last gen of listening devices
were launched.

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dymk
> It’s not clear why Facebook was paying to have these messages transcribed,
> though it seems reasonable that the human transcriptions might be used to
> improve its AI software’s natural language processing abilities.

It’s not clear? They literally follow up with why Facebook transcribed
_anonymized_ recordings. This is Facebook’s (and every other company that
builds speech to text) publicly stated reason for doing this.

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jonplackett
It’s weird how people are still so surprised by tech companies not caring
about their privacy.

