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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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.

"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:If this is what being social is

[PeterGM]

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

It's getting awfully crowded.

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: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.

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: If this is what being social is

[Train0987]

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

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 . . .

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.

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: 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?

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

[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.