
Couple Proves Facebook Listens in on Conversations with Simple Experiment - sharjeelsayed
http://theearthtribe.net/video-couple-proves-facebook-listens-in-on-conversations-with-simple-experiment/
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Walf
Post hoc ergo propter hoc.

This experiment is so full of flaws it's ridiculous. Here are just some of
them:

* Pet food ads are extremely common. The chances of not seeing them are fairly low.

* The likelihood of them choosing that subject at random is also very low. It's more likely that they had seen an ad on the topic recently, but were simply unaware because of its lack of relevance to their lives.

* They didn't do a placebo. They should also have discussed another common subject, away from any phones, then waited to see if they were also served advertisements about that.

* Two days is arguably too long to wait to influence purchasing decisions of much needed groceries.

* Confirmation bias. How many scores or even hundreds of other subjects did they see in the same period that they had not discussed.

At least the "simple" in the title is not misleading.

~~~
dhoulb
I love everything you said.

It’d be so easy to structure a clean experiment to test this. Bad science
sucks.

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simias
The video is really a flimsy proof IMO. We don't know what else they did with
their phones between the start and the conclusion. Did they search for it
somehow? Did they or their friends post about it somewhere? I've seen this
video posted several times already but never found anybody replicating the
experiment, only anecdotal evidence in comment threads. That's not very
scientific.

I'm in no way a Facebook shill (I don't even have an account) but I doubt
they're silly enough to risk the insane backlash they would get if people
caught them spying on conversations when they shouldn't.

I mean, think about it, Facebook would be listening on all their users cell
phones all the time, parse it constantly to isolate keywords (not an easy task
at this scale, and would probably result in a comical amount of false
positives) and then use it to show ads? And all that in complete secrecy?

Furthermore the video is more than two months old now, I'd expect that
somebody would have found a harder proof by now, either by snooping on the
network or even at the hardware level.

~~~
madeofpalk
Facebook is still showing me ads to buy an iPhone, car, and a clock from my
home _country_ 5 months after I moved away and updated my location. If they
can't get that right, I doubt they're able to gain anything useful from
listening from my mic 24/7.

~~~
amelius
They know you're an IT-worker who could expose them.

~~~
madeofpalk
So they know where I work but not where I live, even after updating my
location and 5 months of location-tagged posts?

The level of mental gymnastics people are going through to hold their belief
is astounding.

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seanwilson
> “My wife and I took a random subject we had NEVER every talked about or
> searched online, and talked about it while her iPhone was on in the
> background. Two days later, our Facebook advertising completely changed over
> to cat food for a few days,” Neville wrote.

This is really unconvincing. How many hundreds of ads were they shown over two
days until they were shown one in the category that confirmed their bias?
Refreshing Facebook a few times now, I'm shown several ads for products and
pages I have zero interest in which I don't search for or talk about.

Wouldn't Facebook randomly recording your conversations be a PR disaster for
them as well? Seems like a damning and unfair claim to make with such flimsy
evidence.

~~~
blensor
>How many hundreds of ads were they shown over two days until they were shown
one in the category that confirmed their bias? Refreshing Facebook a few times
now, I'm shown several ads for products and pages I have zero interest in
which I don't search for or talk about.

And to go even further. How many ads of cat food have they seen in the days
prior to their experiment that they did not conciously see but that influenced
the "random topic" they chose.

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shawn-furyan
There was a Reply All episode on this conspiracy theory recently.

My thing is, why does everyone get hung up on listening to the microphone?
Facebook surveillance of users and non-users alike is _more powerful_ and
_creepier_ than listening in on the microphone!

I mean at least people have some understanding of audio bugs. Nobody really
understands the byzantine network of distributed opt-in web trackers and data
brokers that Facebook uses to put together its compelling, yet deeply flawed
dossier on every person.

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Rainymood
If their experiment is N=1 then allow me to be N=2. The moment I heard about
this I inserted "Toyota" into nearly every other sentence with a couple of
friends of mine. No ads from Toyota yet. Now that I posted the word twice here
my experiment of course has ran its course.

~~~
js8
Does it work with brands, too? Why would Toyota show you their commercials if
you remember them so well?

~~~
madeofpalk
Okay I just said "adult diapers" three times around my phone and still no
related ads are coming up.

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lunchladydoris
Every time an article like this hits HN, one of the standard responses is how
trivial this would be to check doing network analysis.

I'm curious if anyone has ever actually gone and done the so-called trivial
network analysis to check it out?

~~~
jvehent
I don't think it would be that easy. If this is done "the right way", then
facebook processes audio locally and only uploads keywords every once in a
while. The traffic would be indistinguishable from normal https traffic
between your phone and their servers.

~~~
edf13
Also - Facebook is likely doing SSL Pining so it isn't easy to unpack their
SSL traffic either...

Also - The Facebook App itself is heavily obfuscated making the task of
rooting through the source code very difficult to try and discover what is
going on...

Not an easy task at all...

(Although I doubt they are actually recording sound)

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mattmanser
Isn't this trivial to check if you just inspect the network traffic?

~~~
madeofpalk
This is exactly what I would imagine. What is it about this topic that causes
HN-types to drop all sense of logic and critical thought?

People have been claiming Facebook eavesdrops on conversations for years now,
yet no one has been able to technically prove it. Facebook is a huge target
for people to 'decompile', reverse engineer and sniff network traffic, which
has been done multiple times, yet no one has been able to identify this.

This is of course ignoring the fact that its 'supposed' to be impossible for
iOS apps to use the microphone without the status bar from going obviously
red. It would be _extremely_ surprising if there was a venerability that only
Facebook knew about that they were exploiting to bypass iOS.

~~~
js8
They might have a neural network that preprocesses the input first; then it
would be quite difficult to understand its output.

~~~
gardnr
If you mean doing speech to text on the device then that was my first thought
as well. But DSP isn't cheap and we are talking about serious battery
consumption. Even if they cache audio and only process it while the phone is
charging then they would still need the algorithms baked into the binary
(researchers could find em) unless they somehow sidestep the app stores not
allowing remote code to be loaded.

They could have a really cheap algorithm that just tries to inexpensively
match audio fingerprints in windows of audio. I guess if you have trillions of
hours of audio it's ok not to inspect every minute to the fullest extent.

It's an interesting problem to think about but as other hackers have
mentioned: why would they risk doing it in secret? They could just update the
EULA.

------
tathagatadg
I saw this on reddit a few days back, and showed to family members who are
less technically inclined and hopelessly addicted to facebook. It seemed to
hardly bother them, as they continue to use it the way they have been -
shaping their life choices based on the chosen moments of others' life. What
concerned me was they found the advertisements "very useful", as it reduced
the time spent searching for goods they wanted to buy. I haven't been able to
put up any argument convincing enough about why this trade off is bad.

Metaphors, I think could have a better result. One that I have thought of is:
If this was a job position, and one candidate could buy their chances of
getting picked - would it be fair to the other candidates or the company? It
only profits the broker.

Any other convincing argument I can put forward to get them thinking about it?

Ultimately, all arguments come to the fact that "keeping in touch" is so much
easier with facebook - and I do not have an alternative that I can propose.
Note I use the word argument as any discussion I have tried to initiate
becomes an argument very quickly.

------
wonderous
If you really don't want Facebook listening to anything you say at any time,
you can turn off the app's access to your microphone.

In iOS, go to the Settings panel, find Facebook, and slide off the
"microphone" option.

On Android, go to "Privacy and Safety" in Settings, find the microphone
section under the app permissions panel, and toggle off Facebook's access.

~~~
madeofpalk
Well, the premise of these claims is that Facebook is bypassing system
protections (which I highly doubt they're doing) to listen without notifying
the user. If they're doing that then surely they can get around microphone
being shut off for the app.

Again, I would be extremely surprised if they've managed to do this without
anyone finding out. iOS and Facebook as just too big of a target for this to
stay with just them.

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api
Here's a wild speculation:

What if Facebook is only doing this to people it profiles as non-technical and
therefore unlikely to notice it?

Taking the app apart might not even be good enough since in that case those
not receiving surveillance may not even have the code for surveillance.
(Apple's store technically bans such practices, but this is Facebook we're
talking about.)

~~~
irishbro
I once joked with my friends about something similar to this. The best target
audience to attempt something like this one would be people who are really big
into conspiracy theory's and would have any attempts to bring something like
this to light immediately shot down due to their other beliefs. It would be
pretty simple for facebook to flag users that match a profile like this just
off their likes and profile activity!

~~~
api
One of the best ways to cover something up is to have someone with "negative
credibility" break the story. There's been a persistent rumor for years that
some tabloids have ties to intelligence agencies and pretty much exist for
this purpose.

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boondaburrah
Wasn't this covered before and it was something like Facebook analyses audio
from messenger for modulated id codes in adverts that may be playing in the
same room? (ex, find out what TV station they've got on in the background,
deploy adverts based on said station's demographic) That sounds way more
probable than running speech recognition on everything. Even then I think they
would only do it if the app had focus.

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dec0dedab0de
I cant watch the video, but in general I dont take anything seriously on a
horoscope website.

Still this seems like a good time to point out that mbasic.facebook.com
exists.

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red_admiral
The page would convince me more if it didn't appear in its own "popular posts"
section between two articles about horoscopes.

It sounds to me like the kind of thing targeted at people who believe an
article because it has "proves" in the title and one data point in the
contents.

I do not think it likely that Facebook could pull this off without either
Apple or Google noticing.

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Tarean
This sort of articles always end up with people doubting that Facebook
actually records audio, me included.

But somehow it seems even scarier how much information facebook can scrape
without having to record audio. They can read chats and emails, track your
location and daily routine, they buy data from credit bureaus, track which
sites you visit... And on and on it goes.

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scarface74
The article states as "proof" that it is possible to eavesdrop is based on
what the FBI could do in 2006. That was before the first iPhone or Android
reached a customer.

Is FB somehow able to hide the notification that the iPhone displays on the
top when an app is using the microphone?

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Doctor_Fegg
Direct YouTube link when theearthtribe.net is suffering the HN hug of death:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0SOxb_Lfps&feature=youtu.be](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0SOxb_Lfps&feature=youtu.be)

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alexee
On a related topic, I was looking for a rental car and was googling related
keywords, and then 30 minutes later chat bot from some car company messaged me
on Facebook. Can someone explain how it is possible, how did they know my
Facebook account?

------
nmeofthestate
Couple Alleges Facebook Listens in on Conversations with Alleged Simple
Experiment.

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dhoulb
Yawn, nonsense.

They obviously just used deep learning to predict these were the kind of
people who would want to do a cheesy video, and predicted cat food was an
obvious topic they’d pick.

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dz0ny
I've bet they discussed with friends on instagram/whatsapp, how they are gonna
do experiment with Facebook, about cat food. :D

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bluesign
Sorry but this doesnt prove facebook doing it, unless only app on the phone is
messenger.

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lighthazard
Android doesn't give access to always-on microphone, right?

~~~
pcnix
No, and the battery usage should make it very obvious if the microphone is
always on.

~~~
cptskippy
One day someone is going to write some Android malware that does system level
power optimization to cover it's tracks. The only means of detecting it will
be to observe abnormal battery life on your Android phone. People will start
freaking out when their phones start lasting all day. It will be madness.

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therealmarv
Prove it at least a x>1 times, a little more please.

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kickling
Could this not just be a coincidence?

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Digit-Al
Source: David Wolfe

Case dismissed.

