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Facebook Could Be Eavesdropping On Your Phone Calls (news10.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Facebook is not just looking at user's personal information, interests, and online habits but also to your private conversations, revealed a new report. According to NBC report, this may be the case as Kelli Burns, a professor at University of South Florida states, "I don't think that people realize how much Facebook is tracking every move we're making online. Anything that you're doing on your phone, Facebook is watching." the professor said. Now how do you prove that? Professor Kelli tested out her theory by enabling the microphone feature, and talked about her desire to go on a safari, informing about the mode of transport she would take. "I'm really interested in going on an African safari. I think it'd be wonderful to ride in one of those jeeps," she said aloud, phone in hand. The results were shocking, as less than 60 seconds later, the first post on her Facebook feed was about a safari story out of nowhere, which was then revealed that the story had been posted three hours earlier. And, after mentioning a jeep, a car ad also appeared on her page. On a support page, Facebook explains how this feature works: "No, we don't record your conversations. If you choose to turn on this feature, we'll only use your microphone to identify the things you're listening to or watching based on the music and TV matches we're able to identify. If this feature is turned on, it's only active when you're writing a status update." I wonder how many people are actually aware of this.
"God, I just don't understand how he can be such a dick. Anyway, I've gotta go, time to put my cake in the oven." Two minutes, an idle Facebook moment, and an ad for erotic cakes later...
It's the bomb.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I've had a similar experience with Google. Having a conversation and then start typing a search based on that conversation in Google and with just a few letters typed, one of the suggestions is 100% on topic for the conversation I was having. This is typically on my desktop and I'm not running any Google offline apps (just hitting web pages).
Google is even worse... they do mind reading. Often when I am only thinking of something and start typing it, autocomplete shows the exact thing I was thinking about! Get out of my head, Google! I can't even find a setting in Android to turn this mind reading feature off.