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

[Eluan]

I can confirm that I (and close people) have received targeted ads related to stuff we merely TALKED about, with the phones in our pockets.

In more than one occasion it was awfully obvious that Facebook listens. It's not everyday that someone talks about wanting "red cookware" for her new house and a few minutes later I get spammed with ads for red cookware. This is ridiculous.

But you don't have to believe me. Even having screenshots of the ads is no proof because I don't record every live conversation I have in a day.

Re: everybody can say this

[Anonymous Coward]

Me too, I recently talked about building a little shed thing to house our bins. Next thing you know she starts seeing ads for bin shed things in her facebook feed. Never been discussed previously in any written form of communication. Never been googled (I'm going to build one not buy one). Only ever discussed once. She sure as hell has never discussed or searched for anything like that, and never seen any ads similar to it before. There's coincidence, but that's too much.

Re:everybody can say this

[AHuxley]

Re "would be as much credible."
Its an old idea.
From December 4, 2012.
http://washington.cbslocal.com...

Re:everybody can say this

[hazardPPP]

I can confirm that I (and close people) have received targeted ads related to stuff we merely TALKED about, with the phones in our pockets.

I can confirm a similar experience. Not with Facebook (I don't use it), but with Google.

There have been several eerie instances where Google auto-suggested a search item (based on the first letter or first few letters) that has just been talked about on the phone. This has happened to me, and it has happened to my friends who also have Android phones. No, it was not a common search term, no it did not make sense based on location, past search history, browsing or whatever. If those weren't just very weird coincidences (which I find hard to believe), then the only logical explanation was that Google was analyzing the voice conversation.

That's active listening (i.e. recording what you talk about on the phone). I've also had a few instances of what points to passive listening (i.e. just picking up ambient sounds while you are not using the phone to talk). For example, while watching Youtube videos a friend and I were talking, and he said the words "marxist" and "communist" - since I was watching some comedy on YT, the next suggested video was all of a sudden a Monty Python "communist quiz" (not the exact title, but that was the point - the skit where Karl Marx is a participant and they ask him questions about football). Now I don't watch marxist/communist stuff on Youtube, so again, if that's not a concidence, it's Google matching what it heard (passively!) with what I was watching at the time (comedy stuff) to make a recommendation.

Re:everybody can say this

[WolfgangVL]

Log into fb on your old mobile. Put it in a closet, next to another device playing:

The local foreign language station-
Niche podcasts-
Consumer product reviews-

Wait a week, then pretend it's not listening...... while presented with ads for niche tech product related podcasts in Spanish.

Easy to verify.

Still not tracking? You're either dumb, or paid. At this point denial just makes you an asshole. ............and for the record, they are ALL doing this. It's just the way the web works now. Conform, or adapt.

Re:everybody can say this

[war4peace]

This literally happened to me last week.
I had subscribed to Tidal for a few days and was talking to a colleague about it. He said he had been using a Romanian streaming music service from Vodafone called Zonga. I never looked it up on my phone, we were just talking, he literally said "I was using Zonga but gave it up because it didn't have the music I wanted" and I said "You should try Tidal, I found most my favorite music on it" (we're both metalheads).
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.
It was the first time ever I had received a Zonga notification on my phone, and the first time in months I received a notification from the main Vodafone app.

Might have been a coincidence, and I'm a down-to-earth person, always trying to look at things objectively, but we both agreed it was quite disconcerting and a little bit scary to see that happen.

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

[thinkwaitfast]

I remember about ten years ago, there was a story on /. about how some cop suggested putting video cameras in people's houses in order to catch them and everyone was freaking out and that could never happen. In another generation people will be expecting and even wanting this. All watched over by machines of loving grace.

I guess if you don't want to believe in imaginary god, they build a real one.

Re:everybody can say this

[RobinH]

This is one of those cases where a bunch of citizen scientists could easily perform a whole bunch of repeatable experiments and publish the results and we could know with quite a bit of certainty if this was happening or not. As it stands, people are being lazy about it.

Re:everybody can say this

[war4peace]

I had used other streaming services in the past, and Tidal had been installed for a couple weeks. I also had been using PCRadio extensively, for at least a couple hours daily,

Re:everybody can say this

[war4peace]

You can't repeat the experiment unless you know exactly how the algorithm is working. You might simply miss one trigger and yield false results.

Re:everybody can say this

[johnsnails]

I spoke about a phone feature where calls you receive but don't have saved in your phone should be able to come up with their contact from Google Business (Mechanics etc) and BAM it came out a few months later.
I also talked to friends about creating a proxy for email images so all images are downloaded and spammers know they don't know which images were downloaded by real emails and BAM it came out a few months later.

Re:everybody can say this

[johnsnails]

Sorry for the dup comment from a few posts above but yup.

I spoke about a phone feature where calls you receive but don't have saved in your phone should be able to come up with their contact from Google Business (Mechanics etc) and BAM it came out a few months later. I also talked to friends about creating a proxy for email images so all images are downloaded and spammers know they don't know which images were downloaded by real emails and BAM it came out a few months later.

Re:everybody can say this

[6Yankee]

I've told the story before, but:

My boss and I have talked often, with our phones in our shirt pockets, about a device that uses liquid gallium. Nothing weird had happened as a result.

Then he talked about it in a meeting with me and someone from outside the department, her iPhone on the desk, and two hours later *I* got 20 grams of gallium at the top of my Amazon recommendations. Never seen anything like it in my recommendations before or since.

I wonder whether there's scope for a "reverse Buzzword Bingo" game, where the objective is to use as many words like "huge", "purple", "pleasure" and "vibrating" as possible, as close and as often as possible, around the boss...

Re:everybody can say this

[iCEBaLM]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Re: everybody can say this

[guruevi]

Another generation? The Amazon and Google pucks, doorbells, thermostats and smoke detectors all have cameras besides the actual security and baby cameras that stream directly to the cloud.

Re:everybody can say this

[Highdude702]

Ive had this happen with pandora, no targeted ad, as i essentially have an adblocker for it (pandora downloader) but i have, multiple times in the past been telling somebody about a song i heard, or that i think they would like. and it has played next(on a station it really shouldnt have) or be one of the first songs i hear when i do listen. i have written it off as me being crazy. but ive had other people tell me the same thing has happened to them.

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:everybody can say this

[rmdingler]

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)

Not that large corporations don't make colossal mistakes, but the negative exposure from being caught using such an exploit would be very nearly a death knell even for Google or Facebook.

Folks are waking up a bit and even leaving Facebook over the latest compromised data scandal. Facebook users voluntarily surrender petabytes of personal data already, and Google mines more than enough advertising ore from your searches... it seems unlike any entity (except your three letter agencies) would have the chutzpah to eavesdrop on private conversations.

Re:everybody can say this

[CSMoran]

Really? Because never has an experiment revealed the underlying unknown law?

Re: everybody can say this

[rmdingler]

Nice try, but everybody knows you were talking about your mom.

If you really want to test the eavesdropping theory:

1) speak openly with your partner/mother about an act of armed insurrection against the US

2)wait like Charlie Brown and Great Pumpkin for the black helicoters

Re:everybody can say this

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not everyday that someone talks about wanting "red cookware" for her new house and a few minutes later I get spammed with ads for red cookware.

Facebook has over two billion monthly active users. With those numbers, even with entirely random advertising, that kind of coincidence is bound to happen frequently.

Maybe they are. It seems far more likely that there are at least some contextual clues that Facebook have picked up on to narrow the window of relevance. And honestly, red is an incredibly common colour for cookware. I just did a Google image search for "cookware" and the very first picture was red. Plus there are all the usual biases in place, such as all the times you've seen red cookware adverts and it's not been memorable because you haven't just had a conversation about it. So really, you're judging it as "I spoke about red cookware and al of a sudden saw an advert for it" when really you should be judging it as "I'm an adult homeowner in age range X-Y, so household goods like cookware are appropriate to show to me".

I know if I were in Facebook's shoes and wanted to make ads as effective as possible, always-on speech recognition would be way, way down the list in terms of cost-benefit. Aside from the implementation costs, aside from the cost of getting caught, the numbers probably don't even pan out. What good is showing somebody slightly more relevant adverts, if you end up showing them fewer adverts overall because you destroyed their battery life with ridiculous always-on speech recognition?

Re:everybody can say this

[gnick]

You might simply miss one trigger and yield false results.

So what? Run the experiment many times with different inputs. You only need one success and can ignore all your failures.

Re:everybody can say this

[adosch]

Absolutely agree. I have noticed this for YEARS when we've talked about something, then we went to our devices, we will see targeted ads minutes and hours to follow, but more importantly, there was a topic we wanted to use some internet search resource to validate something in our conversation, and even your default search engine shows that very F topic as the auto-fill suggestion as you type.

I feel a bit too tin-foil-hatted all the time, but seriously why shouldn't I? And how F helpless is everyone now? This is just confirmation that whatever technical fantasy or fairy-tail idea is well beyond what we think is done. Tech that's publicly available is already old-hat to what's being cooked on privately funded or black dollar defense contracts. And it's become such a fabric of our world to be connected, as the ball continues to roll.

Re: everybody can say this

[nospam007]

"1) speak openly with your partner/mother about an act of armed insurrection against the US"

And pronto you'll get ads for assault rifles and fertilizer.
This is business not paranoia.

Re:everybody can say this

[sinij]

You should also consider that whatever Facebook was showing you, convinced both you and your friend to talk about red cookware.

To give you a data point, I talked exactly zero times in my life with anyone about red cookware.

Re:everybody can say this

[Anonymous Coward]

Plus there's the new car effect. I don't know what it's called, but you see what you've been thinking about. For example, when you buy a car you suddenly see your same model everywhere. The same could be happening for a lot of people who see these ads. They could have been getting shed ads in the past and were completely ignoring them. Now with sheds on their mind, they notice these ads and suddenly Facebook is secretly recording their every word (so why aren't you getting ads for everything else you've said?).

I have no doubt Facebook data mines as much as it can, but there are always other possibilities and more than one thing can be happening at the same time.

Re:everybody can say this

[Zorro]

http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff3200/fc03101.htm

Re: everybody can say this

[c6gunner]

Easy to verify.

It is, yes. But you and I both know that you haven't tried it, nor will anyone else who is reading your comment. Conspiracy theories are way too fun to risk actually testing.

Re:everybody can say this

[Uberbah]

Yeah, sounds like when parents get a diagnosis that their child is autistic and blame it on the flu vaccine they had last fall. Correlation, causation, etc.

Re:everybody can say this

[Altus]

On the iphone access to the mic comes along with access to the camera which plenty of people give to facebook. I'm not sure how it works on Android. They wouldn't have to be violating apple's permissions model in order to make this work.

Re:everybody can say this

[war4peace]

So how do you differentiate success from a false positive? Maybe a false positive is what happened to me.

Re:everybody can say this

[war4peace]

Experiments start from a series of assumptions, e.g. "this happens, let's find out why".

Re:everybody can say this

[burningcpu]

You are correct, but so is the parent. As someone that has reverse engineered proprietary goods and also performed (pseudo) primary research, I can tell you that there's a difference in experimental practice.

And ergh, I don't mean to 'appeal to authority' here, but I don't have energy to type a considerate response. Take my message with an accordingly large grain of salt.

Re:everybody can say this

[gnick]

How do you ever? I once stopped at a business on my way home from work and, later that evening, Facebook asked me about my experience at the adjacent business. I'd never heard of that business until Facebook asked me about it, but I was briefly parked in front. To me, that's a strong indication that FB was using my location. It COULD be a false positive, but it seems unlikely. Anyway, I said you'd need one hit. That's to convince yourself and maybe share as evidence on /., like I just did. You'd want to get it to behave that way several times before making any formal report or accusation.

Re:everybody can say this

[Solandri]

Third possibility: out of a billion or so ad impressions (say 1 million slashdot readers who use Facebook multiplied by a thousand ad impressions per reader over the years), there are a few random ads which just by coincidence happened to match a recent conversation. And when this topic came up, those handful of users which experienced this coincidence self-selected themselves and posted their experience.

In the past, people attributed this sort of thing to psychic or paranormal ability. More recently, people have become familiar with it as cherry picking data, like a brokerage recommending buying several thousand stocks during the year, but in their ads purporting to show how good their selections are, they present the performance of only their top five picks. To properly gauge if Facebook is listening to your conversations via this methodology, you also need to collect data on when you had a conversation and Facebook didn't deliver an ad relevant to that conversation. And compare how many times it happened to how many times it didn't.

Re:everybody can say this

[war4peace]

Gotcha.
I didn't accuse, I just stated what happened and it shook me a little.

Re:everybody can say this

[nitehawk214]

I get these a lot and I don't have the facebook app, or any other social media app. I think what is going on is we tend to talk about things we have done searches for.

Today, most of the ads on Slashdot (mobile, of course) were for Logic Supply industrial computers. I just bought a computer from them last week and had been researching it the past couple weeks. Previously I get a lot of ads for a specific Olympus Camera... that I also already own.

In fact most of the ads I see are for things I already own. I think Slashdot's ad network is brain-dead.

I only see ads on mobile, but I will occasionally see ads on mobile for things I did a search for on the desktop.

Re:everybody can say this

[nitehawk214]

You put up with ads in notifications from an app on your phone?

That app would immediately be uninstalled on my phone. I have had a few free apps do this, exactly once, then they were gone.

Re:everybody can say this

[RobinH]

It's very likely not a false positive if it happens well above the level of chance and is repeatable by other people.

Re:everybody can say this

[war4peace]

System app, preinstalled by carrier. Can't uninstall. i can disable it but it re-enables itself every time a patch comes along.
I have this nagging feeling I'm fighting my phone. It's a company-issued phone so I'm stuck with it until June.

Re:everybody can say this

[RespekMyAthorati]

That's nothing.
I once said out load "I have to take a crap". Then I did.
Then I saw an ad for toilet paper on Walmart.com.
No way that could have been a coincidence.

Re:everybody can say this

[war4peace]

Make sure you take a look at PCRadio, I found it to be very good in terms of radio station availability and variety.

Re: everybody can say this

[thoughtlover]

If you REALLY want to test the eavesdropping theory:

1) speak openly with anyone about an act of armed insurrection against Facebook
2) Actually search Facebook for the best deals on fertilizer and pressure cookers
3) Sit back and watch your doors get knocked down by some three-letter agency...

If they can do it

[aglider]

They are already doing it, for sure.
Use the browser, you insensitive app clod.

Okay how would this guy know?

[Jarwulf]

Last I checked he worked for Cambridge Analytica not Facebook. Not saying its not true but how would he have some special insight beyond what some other random contractor knows? Or are they just hyping up stuff others have been telling us for years?

Re:Okay how would this guy know?

[gweihir]

Simple: He may have seen data or derived data that indicates this. He may also have developed a general intuition about the criminality-level of the business practices at Facebook. That this level is "high" is pretty obvious though. Although they may now have added "treason", which is a special accomplishment.

Re:Okay how would this guy know?

[ceoyoyo]

True. However, it seems that the answer to the question "do you know if Facebook collects audio data?" is "I don't know."

His speculation that they *might* isn't any more credible than, for example, some random Slashdot poster.

They probably do, of course. If they can, why wouldn't they? Particularly since they're about to launch a digital assistant, and several people who actually have insider knowledge have said that companies that collect and store audio data have an easier time making digital assistants.

Re:Also possible

[Narcocide]

Well, the real problem is that it's now officially a bad idea to even know someone who downloaded it.

How good is the app's voice recognition?

[sheramil]

And can it tell the difference between my speech and that "Cheech and Chong" album I was listening to? Oh, look. An advertisement for a marijuana dispensary.

Re:How good is the app's voice recognition?

[AHuxley]

Considering what the NSA and GCHQ had for decades globally?
Voice prints would create the maths around every voice and what keywords got used. The album would not be the main voice long term.

"in order to target advertisements"?

[hcs_$reboot]

Would that be true or not, it became so common to just store user data, today to target advertisements ; but who can say to what purpose that data is to be used tomorrow?

Re:"in order to target advertisements"?

[mwvdlee]

Political advertisements?
How much more evil do you need it to be?

Re:If this is what being social is

[PeterGM]

That's what I did... become a hermit I mean.

It's getting awfully crowded.

I have two issues with this

[Anonymous Coward]

And let me prefix this with the caveat that I deleted Facebook years ago and personally despise the company...

1) This sounds like a typical "Look, over there!" deflection type move from Cambridge Analytica.

2) It's hard enough many times to get Google, Siri et al to understand a command when speaking directly at the bloody thing, so I find it rather difficult to believe that somehow Facebook have somehow managed to distill and perfect this system into an always on service (which surely would drain the battery worse than FB already does due to sloppy coding) that works (even when said device is screen off and in a pocket, bag etc.) even outside the usual permission set enforced by a device with such accuracy as to make folk this paranoid (way too many folk claim that they have denied FB, Instagram etc. any 'microphone' access permissions yet it still 'listens').

Don't get me wrong, FB sucks and has way too many hooks into what we do (even if we don't use FB) but this claim at this time to me stretches credibility too far...

Re:I have two issues with this

[AHuxley]

CPU power that only looks for a set of words.
The ad company buys an ad for their product.
Only that product and its set of keywords matter until another ad is ready.
Cold weather and rain detected? Ads for heating.
Got a dog? Ad for dog food.
Talk about a holiday and not in that location? Ads for travel.

Re:I have two issues with this

[war4peace]

They still have to listen and decode all the time.
Rather, what I think they do, is have a multi-step approach.

First, establish on-off times. When should the app listen? That's based on your habits. Are you more talkative during evenings? When are you searching for stuff on your phone? When do you use this or that app?
Then the app starts listening for 30 seconds during certain times, triggered by previous analytics data.

Re:I have two issues with this

[AHuxley]

The flow of data back up would be so small but the ads pushed back would be a result of voices, keywords, voice prints and sounds.
Encryption works wonders to keep that burst of data back up well hidden.
The stored profile would be vast over years so thats all done.
Location and spending is tracked in real time.
Shopping, sites visited.
Sounds and spoken keywords fll in the rest.

What about WhatsApp?

[wiretrip]

I seriously doubt that FB are 'listening' to voice calls - they just don't have the technical chops for that, but... I bet they are slurping WhatsApp messages. Remember that these come in legalese under the heading SMS and that the promise for security is that messages are encrypted 'end-to-end'... but not at the ends obviously...

Re:What about WhatsApp?

[dwywit]

Why couldn't they slurp voice calls? The audio of your voice is just data, once it's processed by the ADC. Your voice is not transmitted as an analog waveform to the cell tower - it's digital all the way until the DAC at the other person's phone.

Re:What about WhatsApp?

[wiretrip]

I realise this, but 1) People don't use voice calls nearly as much as they use messaging these days and 2) It's a lot of effort to go to, training up systems to transcribe voice (Google, Amazon and Apple have vast arrays of hw devoted to this and are very, erm, vocal about it) and 3) WhatsApp is an easy target; FB already own it, the family of apps are already integrated, it is already text, and people trust it with things they would say on FB.

Re:What about WhatsApp?

[NormalVisual]

I seriously doubt that FB are 'listening' to voice calls - they just don't have the technical chops for that, but...

Maybe they do, maybe they don't. If they don't, I think with the amount of money they have that it'd be trivial to contract with Google, Nuance, or someone else to provide voice recognition services or code.

Re:What about WhatsApp?

[AHuxley]

So many mics in one room. Computer web cam. Cell phone always on and ready?

Re:What about WhatsApp?

[Sloppy]

I seriously doubt that FB are 'listening' to voice calls - they just don't have the technical chops for that

Meanwhile, Microsoft has explicitly told all their Skype users (you don't even need to paranoidly speculate; they have already admitted it) that they definitely do listen to all the calls and will take aggressive action against any users caught saying naughty words.

Are you sure about your probability estimate, that Facebook isn't doing the same thing that another (dare I say, .. more conservative?) company is doing?

Caution: Wylie

[nagora]

Wylie is a bit of a known nutter, so it's worth taking his word with some salt. He admits to stealing the same data from CA that he claims they should have had, when he left the company in 2014. So he's not really up to date or in the clear himself.

The real CA work was done by Carole Cadwalladr; Wylie was a useful source of contacts more than anything, as I read it.

The problem with the story as it stands is that many outlets are conflating intent with actual achievements and it's worth remembering that everyone involved at the CA side are huge bullshit-artists and absolutely not above promising to fix anything and pocketing the fee regardless of whether they actually can deliver or not.

Re:Caution: Wylie

[wiretrip]

Absolutely! This is the problem with testemony from people in the ad industry. I note that the leaked Ripon 'platform' used by SCL and CA consisted of a couple of php scripts and a powerpoint presentation telling the suckers how 'revolutionary' the software would be.

Re:Caution: Wylie

[nagora]

Intent matters in criminal cases AFAIK, so... f&ck them whether or not they just had 'intent' or actually achieved.

I agree, but in terms of deciding what to do about their actions, intent isn't so important.

Re:Caution: Wylie

[nagora]

Not shoot, just check the message a bit more carefully.

Reddit discovered this a while back

[Anonymous Coward]

This is old news. Heaps of people have reported on Reddit doing "tests" where they deliberately repeat some weird word in the presence of the FB app. Then, lo and behold, a few hours later ads start appearing for that weird thing. And some of the objects they were choosing were definitely not things that could appear by chance. FB apps are listening to people. It's not clear which platforms, however.

Reverse engineer facebook app

[Anonymous Coward]

On Android, it is relatively easy to reverse engineer the code of an application, provided you have the apk-file.

Aren't there any clever android developers who can check the facebook app code for calls to the microphone api along with the triggers that cause these calls to the api? That would change this from speculation to a very clear indication/smoking-gun.

Re:Reverse engineer facebook app

[wiretrip]

Easier than this would be to use an https proxy to listen into everything the app is exchanging with the mothership. Has nobody done this?

Re:Reverse engineer facebook app

[M0j0_j0j0]

I wonder this myself, couldn't it be blocked by some encryption? or even obfuscated as other "metadata" whatever metadata data is nowadays

Re:Reverse engineer facebook app

[AHuxley]

Could be the a small data set that detects words like cat, dog, holiday, Paris, flowers, coffee filter.
The well encrypted code burst up to the mothership could be tiny to induce an ad to be pushed back down.
Nothing for a competitor to see in the wild on the net during the way back to the mothership.
Wait for the next paying ad and push the ad out for dog food.
To every person who would be expected to have a dog given spoken keywords. Who has a dog. Had the sound of a dog over some time.
Who shops for dog food often.
The more sure of a real dog near the mic the more the ad costs?

Re: That pink mop

[Anonymous Coward]

Or maybe it's because people who present themselves like that are usually petulant assholes.

Re:Also possible

[war4peace]

What if you have no choice?
https://imgur.com/a2bOrLz

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.

This is easy enough to test

[Applehu Akbar]

This is an interesting thread of anecdotes about FB possibly listening in to conversations or phone calls, an anecdote being a data point that support the other guy's hypothesis. So why not test the possibility by dropping honeypot terms into daily conversation? We don't even have to wait around for a formal study, because such a finding would be a major coup for any tech journalist willing to devote a week to trying this out. Under iOS at least, any app using the microphone without asking permission first is violating the TOS.

Re:This is easy enough to test

[EvilSS]

Unless they found a way around it (and really violated the TOS) both Android and iOS require permissions before the OS will allow apps to access the mic. In the case of iOS when apps that do have permissions and attempt to use it in the background, iOS shows a big red banner alerting you that the mic is active and telling you specifically which app is using it.

Re:Caution: Wylie and HILLARY

[nagora]

It's fucking Clinton who is behind this. She is a convicted child killer satanist, who eats her little victims' heart. RAW!

You say that like it's a bad thing.

Re:Yeah no shit

[6Yankee]

That's not a red flag, it's a MAGA hat! Duh!

Re:Yeah no shit

[gweihir]

You lost me there. "MAGA"?

Facebook and google are spying?

[stooo]

Facebook and google are spying on us all ??
No way that can be true !

Glide and location

[CODiNE]

Last year I met someone for the first time and didn't get her contact info. About 10 minutes later I get a glide connection request from her. Hmmmm... ok. She must've asked one of my friends there, so I accept. Later in person I ask just curious how she got my number, she insists I got hers and made the request without asking her. What?? We go back and forth a little on this til we sort of tentatively agree the app must've spied on us when we met. She had her doubts for a while but no longer thinks I'm a creep.

Re:Glide and location

[dj245]

Last year I met someone for the first time and didn't get her contact info. About 10 minutes later I get a glide connection request from her. Hmmmm... ok. She must've asked one of my friends there, so I accept. Later in person I ask just curious how she got my number, she insists I got hers and made the request without asking her. What?? We go back and forth a little on this til we sort of tentatively agree the app must've spied on us when we met. She had her doubts for a while but no longer thinks I'm a creep.

Great job keeping cool, creep.

Re:Glide and location

[AmiMoJo]

So how did you arrange this meeting? Phone call or email or text message? And did either of you put anything in your calendar about it? Did either of you post something about just meeting someone on Facebook afterwards?

Facebook does use location data, so it knows you two were in the same place at the same time. But there are plenty of other ways they could have got this information, all equally creepy but more technically feasible.

Re:Glide and location

[CODiNE]

Met her in person at a regular religious function. Her first time there. We had no direct contact or information shared except many people in common there. Though I've suspected glide lies about "So and so added you as a friend" to initiate connections, this is the closest to proof I've experienced.

I know definately

[burtosis]

I asked Alexa if Facebook listens to every word I say without me knowing, she said no.

Re:I know definately

[sinij]

I asked Alexa if Facebook listens to every word I say without me knowing, she said no.

In not so distant future, when Google and Amazon cement their hold on being conduit for all information, such approach won't be considered stupid. At that point these companies will be able to dictate what is and sell to the highest bidder the truth.

Re: If this is what being social is

[Train0987]

That means the problem is you, not the rest of us.

The original app

[drinkypoo]

The original Facebook app stole everyone's contacts, and those it couldn't steal, it deleted.

Anyone who runs a Facebook app on their phone literally deserves whatever happens to them. They are literally helping destroy democracy.

Re:The original app

[xpiotr]

>Anyone who runs a Facebook app on their phone literally deserves whatever happens to them.
The problem is that people don't know or understand what they signed up for.
Facebook is exploiting this.
On my phone it came pre-installed.
It took some serious searching to figure that it could not be deinstalled, but desactivated.

Re:The original app

[drinkypoo]

The problem is that people don't know or understand what they signed up for.
Facebook is exploiting this.

People need to hold their elected officials' feet to the fire until they do the same to facebook. Nothing else can stop them from doing this stuff.

Re:If this is what being social is

[PolygamousRanchKid]

That's what I did... become a hermit I mean.

Well, becoming a hermit helps a bit . . . but it doesn't prevent Facebook from compiling a thick dossier about you.

If two of your friends happen to use WhatsApp, and talk about you on it, Facebook now has that information and can now sell it.

Facebook is like the old East German secret police, the Stasi. About 10% of the East German citizens were working as "informal employees", in other words, "informants".

Facebook and WhatsApp users are today's "informal employees". Every time they use Facebook and WhatsApp . . . they are collecting information for the Stasi . . . Facebook.

If Facebook and WhatsApp users don't mind giving away their information . . . well, that's their decision.

What they don't realize, is that they are giving away potentially damaging information about others, as well.

It's getting awfully crowded.

Oh, well, maybe some venture capitalist will realize our potential, and start a social web site for hermits . . .

Well no shit

[ArchieBunker]

The app asks permission for the microphone. Why do you think it needs that? Fucking idiots.

Re:Well no shit

[jerk]

It could need it for a number of reasons. Taking videos with sound, using speech-to-text, etc. I still haven't given it access to the microphone since I use the built-in camera for video and photos and don't use speech-to-text, but there are legitimate reasons for 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?!

Paranoia?

[sjbe]

There have been several eerie instances where Google auto-suggested a search item (based on the first letter or first few letters) that has just been talked about on the phone.

And how do you know this is not just coincidence? If you talked about it it's credible to believe that other people did so as well.

No, it was not a common search term, no it did not make sense based on location, past search history, browsing or whatever. If those weren't just very weird coincidences (which I find hard to believe), then the only logical explanation was that Google was analyzing the voice conversation.

How do you know it wasn't common? To be honest I'm HIGHLY dubious that Google is listening to your conversations. While I cannot deny that its a possibility it doesn't make a lot of sense that they could do this without it becoming public knowledge. SO many people would have to keep it a secret that I just don't really buy it.

Of course if you use Android always remember that Google makes their money from advertising so any decisions they make will be through that lens. The more information they have about you the more effective they will be at selling advertising so use Android and any other Google products with that in mind. Not saying be paranoid but be aware.

Re:Paranoia?

[hazardPPP]

And how do you know this is not just coincidence? If you talked about it it's credible to believe that other people did so as well.

How do you know it wasn't common?

Well of course it could be a coincidence, but it's a very freaky coincidence...and I don't know 100% that a search term is not common, but I know that it's highly likely (given the particular situations) that it's not, and that when you "normally" search Google with the same few starting letters, in 95% of the cases that I've tried it suggests something else (and in 0% of the cases prior to a given conversation was it giving me what it gave me after the conversation).

Of course if you use Android always remember that Google makes their money from advertising so any decisions they make will be through that lens. The more information they have about you the more effective they will be at selling advertising so use Android and any other Google products with that in mind. Not saying be paranoid but be aware.

Of course I'm aware, I just think it's wrong to use something people paid for explicitly (i.e. their phones) to collect data (for any purpose other than technical troubleshooting and bug fixes). If I'm using Gmail, Google Maps, Google search, Chrome, whatever, those I got "for free" and hence I will be paying with my data and/or eyeballs glued to some advertising. If I download a "free" app to my phone, I can expect the same, that's fine. However I paid a couple of hundred dollars for my phone, it's main and basic function is to make phone calls, so it's 100% wrong for phone calls to be eavesdropped on by the stock apps (i.e. Google apps) for the purpose of advertising-driven data harvesting.

Re:Paranoia?

[thoughtlover]

"To be honest I'm HIGHLY dubious that Google is listening to your conversations."

And yet, Google confirmed that the Location Services switch was never really off and they were tracking locations of millions of Android users without their knowledge or consent.

https://qz.com/1131515/google-...

Re: That pink mop

[tripleevenfall]

I'm not sure what he's like in his private life, maybe we could ask Zuckerberg to present recordings he made with his telescreens

Re:If this is what being social is

[Sloppy]

Nobody goes to the hermit cave anymore, because it's always so crowded.

Re:If this is what being social is

[datavirtue]

Last week my wife and I happened to be talking about deodorant. She sits down at her desktop and sees an ad about deodorant on Facebook. She was a bit unsettling as our entire discussion had been verbal.

Not surprising at all

[andyring]

I've been eyeing a new table saw for a while, and settled on the one I want a couple weeks ago.

Although I've obviously talked about it with my wife (I mean, it's a $500 purchase, not something you just do without talking about it) quite a bit, she has never, ever, not once looked up anything about table saws whatsoever on her phone (iPhone 6s) or laptop (MacBook Pro). Sure, I have on my devices but they are not tied together at all. Separate accounts, separate iCloud, all that. I'm not on a single social media network either although she's a Facebook and Pinterest person.

Her and I have talked, verbally, about the saw I want, and that is the extent of her interaction. While using our computers or phones though for other purposes.

So a couple days ago, she asks me "Any idea why I'm seeing ads for table saws on my computer?"

Re:Not surprising at all

[farble1670]

Not sure you need an evesdropping app to explain that.

The fact that you are married is a public matter. If you've ever seen a background check it even shows people are you "associated" with: friends, ex-girl friends, etc.

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.

Re: If this is what being social is

[thegreatbob]

Middle ground: if it actually only affects the person pressing it, everyone wins.

app?

[X10]

Who in their right mind would install the Facebook app?

Spying versus economics

[sjbe]

Well of course it could be a coincidence, but it's a very freaky coincidence..

Or some other bit of your behavior other than a random conversation might have lead to that result. Some search term or search term related to a different search term. We rarely have conversations in a total (figurative) vacuum. It's pretty easy to forget about other things we've done that may be related or we may not realize are related. I'm not denying the possibility that Google really is listening in but I'd need a LOT more evidence than a single anecdote which in all likelihood is probably just either a coincidence or has an alternate explanation. Plus that seems like an incredibly economically inefficient way to serve ads. They really would have no way to know the context of any given conversation and selling the ad space would be a tough go.

However I paid a couple of hundred dollars for my phone, it's main and basic function is to make phone calls, so it's 100% wrong for phone calls to be eavesdropped on by the stock apps (i.e. Google apps) for the purpose of advertising-driven data harvesting.

Two points on that:
1) Smartphones are not devices whose primary purpose is to make phone calls. Never have been and never will be. They are handheld computers who just happen to also be able to make phone calls. If you just want something to make calls then you really don't need a smartphone. Good news is that phones who's real purpose is to make calls are a LOT cheaper.

2) The ENTIRE purpose of google making Android is for them to gather data about you and serve advertising to you. They developed it so that companies like Apple and Microsoft couldn't shut them out of the mobile ad market. If you expect Google to not "spy" on you with the intent to serve you ads then you are being naive. It might not be by listening in to a conversation but they definitely are watching your activity.

Re:If this is what being social is

[burningcpu]

To further your comparison to state-run organs of similar purpose: in Belgium, following invasion by the Nazis in WW2, protests regarding the collection of data regarding Jewish ancestry were stymied through the 'normalization' of data collection, especially regarding topics previously considered irrelevant.

These goal of the exercise wasn't necessarily for Jews to self-identify (true positive), but rather for the populace of non-Jews to self-identify (true negative) such that the population remaining would be more readily sorted.
Further, this normalized the collection of data that while not considered 'taboo' at this time, was...irrelevant to modern man.

Re:If this is what being social is

[Ryanrule]

I just have no friends.

Re:Also possible

[nitehawk214]

Get a new phone/carrier.

Re:Also possible

[war4peace]

It's a work phone, provided by the company. I don't have much choice on the matter.

Re: If this is what being social is

[Killall -9 Bash]

Is it confirmation bias if I think you're an asshole for saying things that make me think you're an asshole?

Uhh ... test it?

[bill_mcgonigle]

Why is everybody conjecturing? Anybody with an Android phone (better with PrivacyGuard) can install the app and watch for requests to use the microphone. Get the PrivacyGuard data to logcat and run grep on it.

Re:Uhh ... test it?

[farble1670]

Does the system log when the microphone is being used? Answer depends on who customized and built your firmware.

Advertising

[preflex]

Caution: The linked article contains nasty animated ads which evade uBlock Origin's filters. View at the risk of your own mental health.

Re: If this is what being social is

[capntao]

reminds me a bit of this: http://abstrusegoose.com/533

Re: If this is what being social is

[c6gunner]

Is it confirmation bias if I think you're an asshole for saying things that make me think you're an asshole?

No, that's the hostile attribution bias. Basically, when you're an asshole, you tend to see assholes everywhere.

Re:Yeah no shit

[6Yankee]

It stands for Make America Great Again.

Re:Also possible

[nitehawk214]

A work phone has the facebook app on it? You should probably report that to your security team as that is a massive security flaw. If they don't give a shit, push it up the chain until someone does.

I wouldn't want to be responsible if facebook decides to leak company secrets.

Re:Also possible

[war4peace]

If it only were so simple...
I did report it. They said "we will look into it". Nobody else reported it though (I assume they already had Facebook installed themselves or didn't care otherwise).
The solution which came from one of the Mobile department guys: "Don't configure it if you don't want it".

STOP until we get a handle on this...

[martinfb]

It just seems wrong to study individuals just so you can design an ad that would better brainwash someone into buying your product.

It is quite disgusting even that ads, like those on TV, cater to some unrelated aspect to convince you their product would have anything to do with that.
Like car ads that focus on sexuality; obviously hoping you would buy a car to become someone you are not.
We have an obesity epidemic now because fast food companies have convinced you that you need 32 ounces of soda with those 2 huge burgers and fries - because the value is better than your health! WTF?!

How about advertisers actually work on better, honest descriptions of products so that we potential consumers can see the ACTUAL value of something and base our purchase on REAL facts.
It seems a far more mutually serving thing to present real facts and possibilities rather than finding ways to manipulate consumers into something we don't need or want.
This is how our society has gotten into trouble before time and time again.

Capital Punishment for offenders!

Re:Yeah no shit

[gweihir]

Urgh.... I see. Thanks, I think.