Facebook Says It's Not Secretly Recording You (fb.com)

An anonymous reader writes: In 2014 Facebook introduced a feature which can use your phone's microphone to identify songs you're listening to -- but "we don't record your conversations," they're reminding users. A mass communication professor at the University of South Florida tried discussing specific topics near her phone, then discovered Facebook appeared to be showing ads related to what she'd said. Though she wasn't convinced there was a link, the Independent newspaper reported that "The claim chimes with anecdotal reports online that the site appears to show ads for things that people have mentioned in passing."

An official statement Thursday reiterated that "Facebook does not use your phone's microphone to inform ads or to change what you see in News Feed." But another news site sees these concerns as a reminder of all the permissions users routinely grant to their apps. "Go into your phone's application settings and you'll see a whole list of what an app like Facebook has access to: your camera, your location, your contacts, and, yes, your microphone too. How about this for a warning? By downloading Facebook you give the app 'permission to record audio at any time without your confirmation.' Tom's Guide security editor Paul Wagenseil says Facebook can...listen to your conversations...but it would be illegal to do so."
Meanwhile, the FBI "can neither confirm nor deny" that it's ever tapped an Amazon Echo device.

Comments

Uh-oh

[marcle]

"Can neither confirm nor deny" doesn't sound good.

What's better than a geo-tracking device every citizen carries that also allows access to phone conversations, texts, and emails?

An audio feed of everything that happens inside the citizen's house, that's what.

Orwell was prescient, but he didn't foresee that his surveillance state would be sold to "consumers" as the latest shiny toy.

Re: Uh-oh

[TheRaven64]

On the 20the anniversary of Apple's famous 'why 1984 won't be like 1984 ad', they released a new iMac that had an iSight camera built in. I found the irony very entertaining.

Oh sure

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

But...that's exactly what they'd say if they were secretly recording me, though.

I mean, do you really think they'd come right out and say, "Yeah, we're secretly recording you"?

Re:Oh sure

[gzuckier]

"I mean, do you really think they'd come right out and say, "Yeah, we're secretly recording you"?"

Given that that would make the resulting lawsuits an open and shut case, no, I don't expect Facebook to say (more accurately) "Yeah, we're illegally recording you."

But if you have clicked on the permission for Facebook to access your microphone, which is an act you did not something that happens automatically unless you opt out, then you'd have a hard time arguing that it's secret.

I believe them

[Livius]

I mean, come on, it's hardly a secret.

Complete lie and a distracting story

[axewolf]

"Facebook is not recording you, it would be illegal to do so, so therefore they are not doing it!"
How little self-respect you must have if you believe any such claim as this after the existence of mass surveillance has been revealed.

All of these little stories, which are posted here almost every day, are meant to nibble away at your outrage and underhandedly restore your trust in the government by soothsaying.

There is nothing mitigating the mass surveillance conspiracy. There are no checks or balances. As a society we looked at the evidence and did not act on it. There is no oversight.
That means it's going ahead and expanding.

There can be no freedom for people who are under total surveillance. It's life imprisonment. It's a hard and fast limit on your potential. Are you really content to have your own humanity and that of your children progressively reduced until there is nothing left? Most people are. If you're not, and you don't change your pattern of action radically, there will be no hope left for you or anyone else.

Re:Complete lie and a distracting story

[hyades1]

I used to object to the term "sheeple", which was usually applied to the majority of people who just can't be bothered to figure out how much of their private lives they're giving away (and the private lives of their friends, relatives and children, too) in return for some shiny, useless app.

I was wrong. "Sheeple" describes these people well. My major concern now is that their actions have endangered my privacy and freedom, as well as the privacy and freedom of those I care about.

Nobody has the intention to build a wall

[NotInHere]

Man, facebook is working really hard at becoming the most evil company. Microsoft, your title is in danger!

Re:Nobody has the intention to build a wall

[U2xhc2hkb3QgU3Vja3M]

At this point, even if Microsoft and Google were to somehow join forces the new entity wouldn't be anywhere as evil as Facebook.

facebook should be made to pay

[sittingnut]

apart from privacy aspect, there is a property ownership aspect to facebok's use of information about users.

facebook ( and google and other so called social media) are primarily ad sellers.
they sell ads with help of content created by users for users(themselves and others), which is different from say tv or newspapers which create/buy content to sell ads.
shouldn't users have a right to monetize the content that is being used by facebook etc? shouldn't they have a cut from ad revenue same way tv program makers or reporters for newspapers?

and shouldn't users have right not to sell money making content, which is their property, without receiving payment?

while how courts will view the privacy concerns of users are uncertain, i think law will come on the side of users on the ownership of their property in the end.

few years down the road, facebook and google or their successors probably will end up with very thin margins.

"We can do that - but it would be wrong."

[jeffb (2.718)]

Those of us of a certain age remember that phrase well.

But if you've explicitly granted permission for Facebook to record audio from your device, at any time, without notification -- in what sense would it be "illegal" for them to do so?

Re:"We can do that - but it would be wrong."

[manu0601]

if you've explicitly granted permission for Facebook to record audio from your device, at any time, without notification -- in what sense would it be "illegal" for them to do so?

The idea is that no contract can be against the law. But the point assumes there is a law against recording you, and I do not see which one it is.

Re: "We can do that - but it would be wrong."

[dcw3]

Some states only require One participant involved to be aware of the recording, in which case this would not be illegal as Facebook is aware of it.

IANAL, but I don't believe this applies to a discussion where the party (FB) doing the recording isn't even known to be a part of the fucking discussion. It would be like me calling my wife, an having someone else listening/recording our phone sex w/o our knowledge.

Re: "We can do that - but it would be wrong."

[AthanasiusKircher]

IANAL, but I don't believe this applies to a discussion where the party (FB) doing the recording isn't even known to be a part of the fucking discussion. It would be like me calling my wife, an having someone else listening/recording our phone sex w/o our knowledge.

Actually, it would be more like... well, what it is: a listening device in your house (or wherever you are).

This actually demonstrates the fundamental shift in technology that has occurred in the past couple decades. It used to be that the most standard method of spying was interception of a communication, like tapping into a phone line to hear what was being transferred over that line.

Infiltration was often harder -- it would require you to actually physically go "bug" someone's house by installing your own hardware and transmitter (rather than relying on voluntary use of a phone line to carry information out).

But now rather than choosing a time or a place to speak into an electronic device (like a phone or a general microphone), we instead tend to carry these devices with us at all times, where they can theoretically be activated and programmed to activate remotely -- and can listen in whenever and wherever you have that device. Bottom line is that your phone or tablet or whatever is MUCH more insidious than a traditional "phone tap" ever could be.

Meh. This is a surprise?

[Frosty Piss]

Who here installs such an app and simply takes the default permissions? Well, probably not anyone that reads Slashdot. And the other Facebook users? they don't care.

"I did not brush my ass with your toothbrush.."

[willworkforbeer]

"every night, while you were sleeping"

Re:"I did not brush my ass with your toothbrush.."

[antdude]

Why do you even have a donkey? [grin]

Of course they don't

[Z80a]

They probably use some text to speech algorithm first, and then feed their massive insane AI with the data that uses it to determine things like if the person is a victim/perpetrator to ring a phone somewhere with cryptic words, or the brand of toothpaste the person use or usually both.

Headline wrong again

[Kant_resistor]

Facebook says it's not using your microphone to inform ads or to change your News feed. It says nothing whatsoever about recording you. This is the classic non-denial denial.

This is exactly one of the reasons...

[zuki]

...why I do not currently have it installed on my mobile device.

I found their mobile app to be so intrusive, I uninstalled it after a day of trying it out. The cherry on the cake was that of course, you can't even turn the freaking thing off, which is what I had first tried to do unsuccessfully. Only by going online and searching for this did the bleak reality of it become apparent.

You might call me naive, but I had never come across an app that you can't turn off. The only way to stop it is to deinstall it altogether and wipe the cached data. I guess it must have been determined to be a good feature in order to 'maximize shareholder value' ? Because obviously it's not the sort of thing that can just happen by accident.

So given this heavy-handed approach I wouldn't call it far-fetched in the least that they would decide to parse audio in order to squeeze in contextual advertising.

Meantime, this really brings back on the table the greater issue which is: why are people falling for this free service when they are giving so much more value with all of their personal data than what it would cost as a subscription service of say.... $3 a month or less. I hope that a credible open-source alternative does surface that can perform most of the same functions without the 'walled garden' and incredibly pushy approach they are increasingly taking, not to say anything of their arbitrary algorithmic censorship and heavy-handed monetizing initiatives.

Re:Yet everyone here is all mad at Microsoft...

[U2xhc2hkb3QgU3Vja3M]

It makes Microsoft exactly the same as everyone else, but late as usual.

Officially Old

[ThatsNotPudding]

I am now officially a curmudgeon, as I cannot understand why anyone would willingly have something like an Echo in their home.

Hey, cats: stop belling yourself.

Other explanations

[XXongo]

I get Fossil watch ads frequently without talking about watches (nor searching anything related), so I will suggest maybe this one is coincidence, or more likely the attention effect (you don't notice the Fossil ads until Fossil is brought to the front of your attention, then they seem everywhere).

Or possibly reverse causality: the topic of Fossil watches came up because the company was running a web campaign and buying a lot of ads.

You may have forgotten

[drinkypoo]

Or maybe you just didn't notice, but in its early days the facebook app did bad things to a bunch of people's contacts. I can't remember if it just deleted all the ones that didn't have a facebook account from your phone (which is how I remember it) or something more evil, but it's been garbage since always and while I commend you for removing it quickly, it's always appalled me that people were willing to install a facebook app on their phones at all when their phones already included web browsers and fb works just fine that way. I imagine they imagined that notifications would be worth it, but they aren't.

Re: Reasons why I don't like the Internet of Thin

[gzuckier]

You can, but I wouldn't say 'easily'. Unless you've got Android 6, you need to root your phone and install XPrivacy in order to block individual permissions for an app, and that's not something most people would do.

I suppose somebody has to point out that any permission that can be blocked via software can be quietly reinstated by other software..