It's Possible that the Facebook App is Listening To You, Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower Says (theoutline.com)

Jon Christian, writing for The Outline: During an appearance before a committee of U.K. lawmakers today, Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie breathed new life into longstanding rumors that the Facebook app listens to its users in order to target advertisements. Damian Collins, a member of parliament who chaired the committee, asked whether the Facebook app might listen to what users are discussing and use it to prioritize certain ads.

"That's probably a question for Facebook," Wylie said. But, Wylie said in a meandering reply, it's possible that Facebook and other smartphone apps are listening in for reasons other than speech recognition. Specifically, he said, they might be trying to ascertain what type of environment a user is in in order to "improve the contextual value of the advertising itself. There's audio that could be useful just in terms of, are you in an office environment, are you outside, are you watching TV, what are you doing right now?" Wylie said, without elaborating on how that information could help target ads.

Comments

everybody can say this

[geekymachoman]

I could've told you that, would be as much credible.

Call me when you actually confirm that they're listening in (without disclosing it in their terms of use or whatever)

Re:everybody can say this

[thegarbz]

Then we both minded our business until a couple hours later I receive a notification on my phone from the Vodafone main app advertising Zonga.

What's more likely, that your phone is always listening and waiting for the opportunity to sell every conversation you have to someone else, or that an Vodafone knew you just started using Tidal and simply wanted to advertise it's own competing service?

This is most likely a case of classic false attribution.

I talked with a friend about kitchen knives and later that day I saw ads for kitchen knives on Facebook. He jumped to the same conclusion .... except that I'd been on websites such as Knivesandtools for the past week, typing kitchen knives into Google and in general using service where I 100% knew I was already being tracked.

Re:everybody can say this

[AmiMoJo]

If this were possible it would be an incredible technical feat.

Phone batteries don't provide enough energy to constantly record audio and look for speech, then transmit it back to Facebook or do speech recognition on the device. Not to mention the effect on your data allowance.

The way those always on "hay Siri" type things work is to have a special ultra low power chip that recognizes just "hay" and then wakes the phone to process the rest, with an appreciable effect on battery life.

I think more likely is that they do a couple of things. Firstly they are really good at connecting you with your close friend's desire to buy red cookware, and the app noticed that you were near each other with the usual location services so there is a fair chance you might be interested in red cookware too now. Creepy as hell still but based on established, practical techniques.

The other thing they could be doing is a little bit of Shazam style audio recognition. Shazam is an app that listens to a song and tells you what it is. Google has a similar feature on the Pixel 2 that uses audio fingerprint data stored on the phone, so it doesn't need to transmit any audio. Facebook probably only care about fingerprinting a small number of different TV/radio ads and detecting them when the app is open. Again, that's feasible with current tech and won't completely destroy your battery life, or give the game away by transmitting chunks of audio data periodically.

Re:Yeah no shit

[gweihir]

Hehehe, indeed. Would not surprise me at all if he was bankrupt. That guy is good at burning large amounts of money with no real return. If he had nothing to hide, he could just publish his tax records. That he does not is a huge red flag, but since his voters are essentially part of the "stupid" faction, they would not recognize a red flag if hit over the head with it.

Re:If this is what being social is

[ripvlan]

Yes thank you. Everytime one of my "Friends" uploads their address-book to Facebook/LinkedIn (using those handy Sync features) - those companies learn all about me. Including the info that I DON'T share with them. I don't give out my private cell#, my real birthday, home address, or private email address (I have alias / virtual email/phone# and fake bdays that I use). But a friend may have my actual info. So it isn't about me controlling my info, apparently my friends can choose to share my data too.

I received a post-card advertisement in the mail the other day wishing me happy birthday. They were referencing my fake birthday used on Facebook/LinkedIn. I'll have to login to each site and change the month of my fake bday so that I can see where data comes from. I worked for a company years ago - we all volunteered to fill out a magazine subscription card with different magazines in order to test their advertising reach - we purposely misspelled our names with each one and used this as a Tracer Bullet for the junk mail that would be forthcoming.

Why do this when it's my info I want to protect and the rest of you can jump in the lake?!

Re: If this is what being social is

[c6gunner]

Last week I was debating getting a pizza and then drove by a billboard advertising pizza. It was a bit unsettling because the whole discussion took place in my mind.