Dude that shit seems to happen when I THINK about products. Like no fuckin lie. So clearly something is going on.

I've had the same experience man. I'm hardly on facebook anymore so I'm more meaning Google in my experience...but it definitely has on more than one occasion.

And I'm talking about shit that's really random and I definitely haven't said outloud haha

They have been working on this technology for a while now. It has happened to me as well. It’s fucking creepy as hell.

Super fucking creepy

Read about Building 8 projects at Facebook. They have been talking about this since at least 2015.

Do you think it's AI that's learning your thought patterns?

That'd be my guess. People literally type their thoughts into Google. I'm sure they have a huge relational databases of thoughts that are associated with one another. If you google "Where can I get cheap tacos?", Google probably knows to advertise toilet paper and tums in the next eight hours or something.

Yes. The this is EXACTLY what they are doing.

Could be. I’m not super hip on how that stuff works, but my guess would be something along those lines.

Amazon has even released a statement or two about it iirc

Predictive product placement or something along those lines. They're trying to figure out what you want before you even know you want it.

I’ll have to look that up. Anything they can do to get you to buy is what they are going to do, come hell or high water.

That's the thing they actually admit it but just dress it up to sound innovative and cool

Reminds me of that time a store figured out a woman was pregnant before she knew and started giving her targeted promotions for baby stuff. I wanna say it was a big retailer, walmart?

Is this serious? Doesn't this prove that it's just coincidence or an algorithm reading onto my other posts.

Facebook is not reading my mind. These comments are fucking ridiculous. You really think Facebook has come up with mind reading technology and they are using it to show you ads for things you thought about? That's the best use for this technology.

Jesus fucking christ this is fucking delusional.

Not making this up, not delusional. I do t think this is for ad placement specifically.

Facebook today unveiled a project from its secretive Building 8 research group that’s working to create a brain-computer interface that lets you type with your thoughts. Regina Dugan, a former director of DARPA and the ex-head of Google’s experimental ATAP research group, announced the news today onstage at Facebook’s F8 developer conference. Dugan, who now heads up Building 8, says the goal is “something as simple as a yes-no brain click” that could fundamentally change how we interact with and use technology. While it does not exist today outside of very specific medical research trials, Dugan says her team is actively working to make it a reality.

However, that example is with an invasively implanted electrode array

This is delusional. I'm not just trusting them. You need some kind of sensor to interpret brain signals. Our cell phones can't do that.

truth

I mean we manipulate sound waves, x rays, etc, what is to say we can’t modify or keep track of brainwaves? This shit has definitely happened to me too, with very obscure references my friends and I use

Do you or your friends have devices with you that contain multiple cameras and mics when you're making those obscure references?

That's where the confirmation bias comes in...the algorithms are so good, you think it's reading your mind. I even have an Alexa device and don't notice this mysterious ad behavior.

I just messaged someone to tell them my story to see how crazy it sounds because it doesn’t involve just adds targeted at me but actually people I know reaching out to give me information real-time. It goes way beyond a microphone.

Confirmation bias.

I know the difference m8. I'm just speaking casually.

They do it through scarier means, IMO. They know who you are friends with. They know location data. They know almost all your online habits. So if you are searching for product X, and it is tangential to product Y and someone you are physically close to for a period of time just bought Y, they will assume you also want product Y as well. So if you see someone with a new watch, FB knows they just bought it online and you were close to them, then they assume you also might be interested in that watch, even if you never spoke of it to anyone. This is a simplified answer, but it is crazy.

I’ve seen this and experienced it real time. It’s a Bizzarre occurrence. Freaks you out I actually thought a friend had been hacked because it was so contrived.

I hope I can explain this properly. Ask questions if I don’t.

Me and three friends wanted food. We didn’t want to drive. The places we wanted food didn’t deliver. We were searching Google for a third-party solution.

We couldn’t find the business we wanted because it had gone out of business. And so we were searching things like does Uber deliver food. Can you get a taxi to get you beer and pizza. Things of that nature. What is the business that used to deliver food? Etc etc

So as this is happening a friend of mine on Facebook messenger messages me and says hey do you know about XXX business? I wanted you to know because I thought you’d like it. They do delivery of any place you want.

The girl has never pitched a product to me in her life. I am mediately thought she had been hacked or something. She lives Away and we don’t communicate much.

And I kept thinking what in the heck. How could they even do this. Did something on her screen flash about me and this business at the same time enough to connect in her brain to reach out to me?

And I’ve often found that certain situations bring up Spanish ads. I’m not sure what combination of information. It’s more than just a mic though.

Damn that is more intense than what I was thinking about. But it is insane what triggers in our brains. Not facebook related, but my wife and I both smoke. We usually smoke L&M's but one day we both brought home Winstons because we decided independently that we wanted a no additive cigarette. We hadn't discussed this previously and didn't recall any ads recently. We just both had an idea to try a new brand and picked the same one for the same reasons. Something had to trigger that. It could have been coincidence, but man that is a long shot.

For the record, before I am called a shill, my wife thinks Winstons suck and switched back the next day.

They really do suck

Acquired taste for sure :p

Smoking sucks.

This is the correct answer. Yet I still do it.

Maybe you're just real soul mates?

This has more to do with our subtle connectedness as humans. Where do our thoughts go after we think them? They are flying around in what physicists call “subtle energies”

Vibes bro.

They real

pseudo science bullshit.

Alright, authority of the universe.

You are limited by your belief

Don't say false shit like "physicists call them subtle energies" if you don't want people to make fun of you. Simple.

Or maybe we aren’t as unique as we’re led to believe.

More likely this guy and his partner saw ads for winstons but didn't consciously pay attention to the ads.

Do phycisists call it that? Cause I think you're lying.

I’ve definitely heard varying scientists use that term and similar ones. I personally don’t.

Looks like they do! At least these Stanford scientists do https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/c82e/35d051ca75a2327af27975d216f498ff05b9.pdf

Seems like something Chopra would say, of you're into that.

I personally don’t [use the phrase, "subtle energies"]

Bro, be real with us. I'm picking up subtle energies you've been kidding all along and you don't actually believe in vibes, man, but this shit is like far out and surf's up and why aren't you in Cali right now, dude?

You’re in a conspiracy forum. Stop being such a adamant materialist when scientists admit that they don’t fully understand what I’m referring to.

Science is a work in progress. It will catch up.

Well fuck me for reading your vibes wrong, right? I'm an adamant old codger because that's what I am. The thing you're referring to is intuition.

I know that much of the advertising is subconscious. We brush over hundreds or thousands of ads a day. Our brains are inundated with carefully crafted designs to get us to buy products.

This is not coherent. How do you survive? Anecdotes aren't evidence

I’ve survived quite nicely. I’m 47 and retired. I think I’ve figured something out about how the world works.

Bro even if Facebook is listening in, there's zero chance they used that conversation to directly or subconsciously influence someone you know to hit you up with an on-the-spot service recommendation. Don't get me wrong, they're definitely doing shady shit. So is Google--I feel like Google is taking a much more complex look at us than they indicate, by e.g. parsing the pages we visit for useful data rather than simply collecting URLs and search terms to tailor the search experience, build advertising profiles, and sell us shit. But what you're suggesting doesn't hold up to any critical examination.

Well you got to give them credit, you connected with an old friend and learned about a delivery place when you where looking for one. At least the secret spying/info collecting works.

I work in retail marketing.... if you have ever enabled geo location, and browse a site (despite never submitting any info), I know who you are. I know where you live. I know your phone number, I know your email address, I have google street view of your house.

The average consumer has no clue how far gone the concept of online privacy is.....

Tangential. I've literally just gotten out of bed :'/

You mean "marketing"?

Yeah people think they are just "simply" listening to the mic and getting data that way, which would probably drain your battery like crazy, when in reality the targeting is far more sophisticated. Even if they aren't literally listening to conversations.

Bingo - people aren’t as unique as they think, of you like beer you probably also like peanuts (an example obviously) and if you browse for beer they will serve ads for peanuts as well. Also, if all your friends are searching for something online, you may get served ads because of your profile similarity - this is called a look alike audience. There is no conspiracy, just statistics on online advertising.

In 2009 (NINE YEARS AGO) Schmidt of Google said they could predict what you were going to do within the next 10 seconds quite accurately. Where you were going to do and what websites you would visit. He said they could identity your name from a handful of photos as well. This was 9 years ago.... What you’re seeing here with Facebook is theatre. People have no idea of the terrifying depths of data profiling and behaviour prediction that is happening. This data is being shared with 3 letter agencies freely they are using highly advanced algorithms to profile you. Yes you.

This bullshit about Ads is a limited hangout.

I messaged you about something to get your opinion. It seems weird

This happens when I buy something on my computer and log into Facebook on my phone. I only use Facebook on my phone, and only in chrome. I use Firefox on my PC. I'm not sure what the hell is going on.

I thought I was just being overly paranoid when I noticed this occurring to me recently, and I assumed it was just a coincidence. But your comment has me fucking intrigued, and I genuinely wouldn't be surprised if neither of us are off our rocker in the least.

The tell is when it is extremely specific. For example, I was reading about why special forces guys like rolex watches -- rolex ads come up. Obv this is a bad example because content is consumed on a computer (therefore, one can assume everything is logged in some form or another).

Oh, absolutely. I think about a lot of things that I don't necessarily search up online. Specific or sometimes even obscure things that'll ultimately just be passing thoughts. Then I'll notice ads or social media posts (on my Instagram explore feed, for example) that pertain to that precise topic popping up left and right. Some of it could conceivably be confirmation bias, but other instances I definitely know aren't and it goes beyond coincidence.

We scroll past so many ads every day it could just be more of a deja vu-like experience.

Chances are you said something about it.

Or FB knows just that much, like, you how often you buy TP (CC transactions), so they'll know exactly when to advertise TP.

Think about if they had access to every electronic device you own, are around, or pass by/in front of.

Now realize this is probably close to reality.

Honestly for the past 4 months I've gotten nothing but crypto ads, and that's about to go away. What I'm trying to say is I haven't really noticed any of the creepy shit lately. I'm sure that is about to change soon though.

They just haven't gathered enough data on you yet =/

What are you getting at here?

The scary thing is if they aren’t listening. What if their prediction algorithms are getting that good. “Quicksnap purchased an electric mixer 3 weeks ago, liked a picture of an old girlfriend last week, and clicked on article about melania trump nudes today. According to the past 3000 users who followed this pattern, he has a 20% chance of looking for a grill brush today....”

This is the scary part of data mining, the enormous volume of data being able to predict things by correlating events a human mind can’t even begin to see the pattern in. It’s annoying when it is advertising, it will be different once they start using probabilities to try and get warrants.

They are still shit, I bought one of those internet company foam mattresses on amazon, literally those random google ads would show me nothing but leesa mattresses for months. I just bought one, i dont need another one thanks though. if they are so smart why does it think i need two of the same fucking mattress.

Google doesn't know what you bought on Amazon. They don't have access to each-others data, since both services aren't controlled by the same company.

You would be very surprised at how much of your data is publicly available to anyone, not just those companies

I would like to think that I am fairly knowledgeable as far as that is concerned, but perhaps I am missing a few things. I know about the data available through social media. I know about the data that has been breached by companies. I know about the publicly available data from the government. What would you add to this?

Google could know if your amazon account sends order confirmations to your gmail account. I knowbive had Google assistant or whatever scrape through my gmail account to identify purchases made on Amazon, because I remember seeing "cards" or whatever that understood enough to describe the order and give me options for tracking the package.

Google could know if your amazon account sends order confirmations to your gmail account. I knowbive had Google assistant or whatever scrape through my gmail account to identify purchases made on Amazon, because I remember seeing "cards" or whatever that understood enough to describe the order and give me options for tracking the package.

It is true that they could know, assuming you use your gmail account that you are normally logged into as the email you use for Amazon. This also assumes that they scrape email with AI specific commands like "Hey look for their Amazon purchases (or emails that look like purchase confirmations), and make a list of those specific things they purchase", rather than having those scrapes just gather key words that influence how they treat your profile when it comes to serving ads to you. The former could very well be true. I personally think it is likely that they do the former, but don't know it to the point that I would state it as fact.

I also think it is possible that the ability of the Google assistant that you speak of has that data scraped specifically for that one app's functionality. In the case that you had given permission to the Google assistant to do so, based on your "I know that I've had Google assistant or whatever scrape...", I would think that it is even more likely that it is app specific.

It is also true that they could use Chrome to do this, though I think this is extremely unlikely that they do based on having not seen similar cases (chrome scraping large amounts of data based on anything visited), having not seen this as a goal or purpose of them creating chrome both to their investors or the public, and having not seen data that suggests that browsers are uploading this information to them.

Except they possibly do know. Say you buy a mattress on Amazon, and you get an invoice for the purchase to your Gmail account, now Google knows what you bought, even though they didn't directly know you purchased it.

That is true. Look to my response to Afrobean if you want to see my full thought on this.

There are Google (Google analytics to be exact) trackers on Amazon. So yes, they do know.

When looking it up, I can't find where it says that Amazon uses or allows the use of Google Analytics on their pages. Do you have any sources on that? The only thing that I know of that Google could track is if you did a search on their page, and clicked the link to the Amazon page. That wouldn't let them know you bought the product though.

Amazon does though, so you can tell them to stop emailing me about products I already own.

Ugh yes for a whole year Reddit was showing me ads for the apartment complex I already was living in

This is apparent to you when it is something you already bought, but I actually talked to a marketing guy about this specific issue and he said that it is a hugely successful technique. They might even know you bought a mattress, but a recent mattress purchaser is very likely to make a return and try another one....

Exactly this. I think their algorithms are pretty fucking simple really (doesn't mean they're not listening in though).

Getting into Minority Report territory here

It's almost certainly prediction based. Like how super markets work with their guarantee cards, but on a larger scale. Makes me think of the story of when Tesco accurately predicted a 16 year old girl was pregnant and sent her discounts on newborn stuff before her parents found out and they freaked.

Thats what I thought. Its the algorithms Its the computers figuring us out. Zucc is probably dead and thats his AI replacement trying to calm us down before they skynet that shit.

Yea but on the other side is Amazon advertising to me stuff I’ve already bought.

it will be different once they start using probabilities to try and get warrants.

That's what the Precogs are for!

Clearly FB has mind-reading capabilities, only explanation.

it really is majical... the other day at school, one kid in a hallway knocked off a unicorn pic and layer that day I got an ad about a unicorns are real y shirt!!

Wasn't to long ago that people were called nuts for saying all our data is logged/monitored. This fb spying thing is the new one of them. It's obvious it happens but can't be proved.

Bro, have you even seen the secret

Never, but there are many secrets lol

Yup. That something is called confirmation bias. That's the something, and that's the only thing

Think about it like this, there's 2 forms of data. Hard data, and soft data. Hard data is tangible information, likes dislikes, location, gender, race, etc.. These are the kinds of things Facebook openly admits are used for ad targeting. Soft data, which I like to think of as implied data, is where Facebook really gets to know you.

Imagine you are looking inside a graphically modeled version of the entirety of the Facebook User Information database. You would see groups, like, Catholics, Nickleback fans, people who like cat pictures, conspiracy theorists, you get the point. What you would also see are a bunch of lines connecting different groups, and these lines creating group combinations, overlaps, even aggregating many, many different groups into one. The lines are the soft data, the implications, predictions, assumptions about how you will behave on the internet and how you will react to anything put in front of you. These implications gained from comparing your data, to every single possible "location" that you could exist in within this massive framework of interest relationships.

Example; "you" belong to 5 groups (not literal Facebook groups, just groups of individuals within their database), open to conspiracy theories, Star Wars fan, Brony, anti-Hillary, Liberal on most social issues. So there's obvious targeting you could get hit with, it's fairly straightforward. But, Facebook also knows that in their database, there are 14,859 other people who belong to those 5 groups, and of those 14,859 other people, 85% of them click and end up liking, posts about Bernie Sanders, and posts about Nickleback's new album. Without even knowing Nickleback has a new album, or being too politically involved, you will be targeted with these advertisements, and chances are, you will click on them. This is obviously a fake correlation, but apply all of your current interests right now to this idea of Facebook Database Groups, and it makes sense that someone unaware of the kinds of implications gained by having so much data on so many people, could be seen as Facebook reading your mind.

That's why he was sweating bullets. Seriously tough he is in fact interested in measuring and shaping behaviour, I think that's why he bought Oculus

I had a dream about a super soaker I had as a kid, next day, ads for it on Facebook.

I am 100% certain that machines are watching, listening and learning from anyone willing, 24/7, but machines aren't yet capable of reading thoughts in a meaningful way. They are predicting them, on the other hand. It's referred to as "sentiment analysis."

This happened to me recently. I went to the store and saw a package of jerky. I stopped and stood for a while contemplating if I should purchase it. I decided not to and went on with my day. The next day,I saw the same brand and same flavor as an ad on Instagram.

There are ways to get that info without the microphone, and that's scarier.

This. People here just ignore that possibility always. It's just "they spy on us through our phones!" while it's way scarier that they can get exactly the same data without touching the mic at all. I wonder why some people try to bury this and keep that "it's just the mic, don't look into other stuff that's possible" angle.

Yeah, the mic is the easy way.

There is a reason your mind went to a topic though, it's scarier that they can figure that out without having to hear you say it. Perhaps they even created some of the conditions for it.

I used to think like this as a kid and it fucked with me so much.

Likes excite the same area of the brain as disco snow.

The scariest truth is that we're all pretty much predictable automatons at this point. If you see an ad for something after you mentioned it, it's likely because your other shopping history correlates with people who later bought a particular product. So the companies are showing you an ad for a product that people like you bought after buying other things, and that happens to correlate with when you start thinking about it and talking about it. People are a lot less unique than they want to believe. It's easier to believe that Facebook is literally listening to our conversations or spying into our brains than admit that we're basically predictable robots.

Look I was talking with a friend about dogs swimming and wondered out loud if they made floatation jackets for dogs, we talked about it for 30 seconds and that was it. 5 min later he opens Facebook and there is a video ad of a dog swimming round in a life jacket thing.

It's real

The Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon The fact that this one instance sticks out at you more than anything just proves that its that; a one-instance. These is a possibility of it just being a coincidence, a good portion of videos on facebook are of dogs, which i assume some are of dogs swimming. And the fact that your friend was talking about dogs just shows that dogs somehow correlate with his life. Either he was watching other dog videos on his phone and it triggered a conversation he wanted to have, or he has dogs himself. There are many ways for facebook to know he has or is interested in either A) dog products, or B) watching dog videos.

Dude it happened, it's happened to me multiple times but those were things that could be explained by whatever your on about.

I brought up the dog conversation, I mentioned a dog in a life jacket. The ad was for a dog life jacket.

Dude I believe you.

I was talking with a friend about how cool chemistry is and how you can mix a few things together and end up with something to fix your windshield. In the same conversation, I mentioned getting business cards made.

Got on Facebook the next morning and there was an ad for windshield crack repair goo and right below it was an ad for Vista Print business cards. Literally right below. I even took screenshots which I might dig back up.

I'm sure there are some situations which could be explained away with the "Baader-Meinhof" theory, but not this shit. It's so obvious I actually think they want you to notice as part of the learned helplessness programming.

Yup, my friend and I were talking about dry ice, and how we didn't know how to buy it. He, knowing I worked in a supermarket, asked if I kept we kept it out back.

I laughed my arse off because we don't, and I knew exactly where he'd gotten that idea from, a yahoo answers thread we'd both independently found when looking for it when we first learnt about dry ice kids.

When you get your information from a predictable location, e.g. reddit, podcasts, similar youtube channels, facebook whatever, you can link advertisements in a less linear way.

For example, the podcast I listen to shills a brand of razers, mattresses, underwear and a few other services. If I use the code for just one of those products, they know to double down on the others for me in particular because I've assigned myself a position in a group that has heard of those products.

This isn't inherently evil, but it does feel like your mind is being read.

Ayy, Bill burr?

Nah lol but there's only like a dozen podcast ads.

While I believe you are certainly onto something here, me and my wife decided to test this a few months back after she noticed getting ads for random things she talked about with friends. We have never purchased any furniture before, everything we have is hand me downs. So she brings up the Facebook app and starts talking to me about how we really need a new lazy boy recliner. Went on about it for prob a minute and that was it. Within 6 hours she was seeing nothing but ads for lazy boy recliners on Facebook. I never even pulled up the app on my phone and I began getting them within 2 hours, actually faster then they started appearing on her app.

As far as I know Facebook hasn’t invested much into speech to text and you would need reliable speech to text to be able to serve ads based on a microphone. Combining a few data points like location and interests is way easier and could reliably yield the same results.

For the same reason the look sat Facebook or Harvey Weinstein and look no further

Well in all fairness. They are spying on us through our phones. Just not listening to the microphone.

It’s pulling from your purchases on bank/credit cards. I’ve had it happen twice that I remember specifically. Once a new yogurt I purchased at the grocery store, another a new mascara I purchased. Both times I was alone so I know I wasn’t talking about it to myself. Both were ads on Facebook within a day or so.

They are listening as well, but the purchase pulls are what’s really alarming to me.

I dont think so...

I dont have facebook now, but when I did, I would get the adds we speak of.

However, I havent had a bank account/ CC in about 5 years now.

I’m going to do a test. Im convinced they are pulling this data. There is no other way I would get those targeted ads.

maybe your phone camera caught a glimpse of the products?

Phone was in the purse, no way it would have caught a glimpse.

This absolutely happened to me and I thought it was the spookiest thing ever. I ran into a local grocery store after work because I wanted to make a dirty martini, but I’d already used all the olive juice from my jar of olives, so I bought a bottle of the dirty martini mixer stuff. Used the credit card I use on amazon, went home and made my drink without incident.

The next morning I’m checking my personal email (the same email address I use for my amazon account) and there was a fucking email ad for dirty martini mixer from amazon!!

I absolutely didn’t converse when I was in the grocery store (used the self-check out), I didn’t talk to anyone that night, I didn’t mention buying dirty martini mixers to anyone at all. In fact, it was the first time I’d ever purchased a dirty martini mixer in my life. I’m normally a beer drinker, but had been on a martini kick for a week (I blame Mad Men...)

So if they’re not pulling information from our debit/credit cards, how on earth did they decide to target me for that particular item??

Exactly. They are most certainly pulling this data. My neighbor went to a restaurant for dinner, but left her phone at home. The next day Facebook asked her to review the restaurant. Only way it knew that she was there was her purchase. People can try to rationalize this anyway they want, but it’s happening.

I mean location services

Left the phone at home...

I'm baked I'm so sorry lol

Your a good person

Do you have your email registered with the grocery store? It is probably the grocery store that is selling your data to advertisers in this case. There is no way from Facebook to be tracking you through your debit/credit card. Not even the bank knows what you purchased, just the amount , time, and where the purchase was made.

No email registered to the grocery store. And it wasn’t Facebook that sent me the email ad, it was Amazon. Credit card used in this case is the same one I use for amazon. For the small, local grocery store (less than 5 stores in my region) to sell my information to advertisers within 14 hours of purchase is truly amazing. And if they’re selling my data to their competitor, they’re damn fools.

Amazon has no way to know what you purchased with your card. They have the ability to credit/debit the card and that is it.

They simply buy the data.

They could buy it from the grocery store, the grocery store is the only one that knows what you purchased. Just like I said before . . . .

This can't be the case. When you purchase something with a debit/credit it does not record what you purchase in any way, just the amount. The only people who know what you bought is the store you bought it from, and THEY could be selling that data to advertisers, and they definitely are selling that data if you have any membership with them in any way.

UPC codes are universal, so it is possible.

No, it's not. Not even your bank knows WHAT you purchased, they only know the amount, where and when. The only people that know WHAT you purchased is the store.

I’m not so sure. I used to reconcile my company’s business credit cards, and the report I downloaded from the credit card site would occasionally list the individual items purchased. I only noticed that for a few grocery stores, and it just started showing up like that in the last year. But it listed each deli tray, package of napkins, bottle of pop, etc.

Nope. Not possible. I work in the industry. I know exactly how it works

I think it must be possible, since the detailed info was there. Like I said, it wasn’t every store. Perhaps that grocery chain was providing that info to MasterCard. I’m not sure. I know it’s only anecdotal experience compared to ‘I work in the industry’, so we’re probably not going to convince each other. Have a good day, internet stranger :)

What industry exactly? At what level? It is very much possible.

This is true. Joanna Stern at The Wall Street Journal wrote a short article about how these companies like Facebook will purchase data about your spending based on rewards cards and match to users.

You got a phone number attached to Best Buy or Kroger or Speedway? Facebook has your phone number? Yeah they know what you buy.

yogurt and mascara are literally everywhere

Yes, they are. But specifically the ones I bought out of the thousands of varieties? Both identical to what I bought, not some random variation.

Oh for fucks sake this dumb shit again

Why would you expect for that video to convince anyone that wasn't already inclined to believe it?

There's this.

To make it happen, Facebook would need to record everything your phone hears while it's on. This is functionally equivalent to an always-on phone call from you to Facebook. Your average voice-over-internet call takes something like 24kbps one way, which amounts to about 3 kBs of data per second. Assume you've got your phone on half the day, that's about 130 MBs per day, per user. There are around 150 million daily active users in the US, so that's about 20 petabytes per day, just in the US.

To put that in perspective, Facebook's entire data storage is 'only' about 300 petabytes, with a daily ingestion rate of about 600 terabytes. Put another way, constant audio surveillance would produce about 33 times more data daily than Facebook currently consumes.

Even if it was feasible and possible, that would use a whole lot of transmission data that would show up in a lot of cell phone plans by blowing their caps out.

What if it just stored keywords and only sent them when loading/reloading the app?

By that I mean what if it was "listening" the same way siri "listens" and any keywords or phrases the microphone would pick up on would be saved in a way similar to other info you accumulate while browsing (posts liked/read, time spent on the website, advertisement info, etc.)? So like not the actual audio itself but rather a transcription of keywords that could indicated specific and possible interests. This would surely cut down on the amount of data needed, wouldnt it?

It might. Just having Siri on takes more power use. Having Siri listen in, process, then another software compare against a list of keywords (selected how?), would use a whole lot more.

This strikes me as one of those moon landing is fake claims. The capability probably isn't there. And if it was, it would have been detected in a way that was more convincing than a youtube video about cat food.

Holding a simple hash set in memory of keywords you've uttered (all of them) probably doesn't use any more power than simply waiting for only "hey siri". Then it just uploads that list whenever your phone is already doing something else and something on a server decides if any of them are relevant to ads that they could serve. Its not far fetched at all, and there is a lot of evidence that it does happen.

Rough translation of my previous comment in German:

1. The hypothesis that Facebook would record conversations and use them for advertising has existed for several years now.
2. With over 2.2 billion active users, immense public attention, and hundreds of thousands of IT specialists, researchers, scientists and analysts using as well as observing the social network, no one has been able to publish actual empirical evidence over the years to date. Just some anecdotes. There's literally no scientific evidence.
3. iOS and Android have supported the individual assignment of rights for apps for years. The user must explicitly allow access to the microphone. To overcome these barriers, Facebook would have had to exploit two undiscovered, massive security holes in the core products of the two largest IT companies in the world for years.
4. iOS does not allow an app to be active indefinitely in the background. In addition, a clearly identifiable notification is displayed during an audio recording (red/blue status bar). To work around this, Facebook would have to program an even greater security hole in the app, which would completely override the fundamental functionality of iOS. And Apple would not have had to suspect or be aware of this vulnerability to millions of its users' diagnostic data for years.
5. Technically it is possible on Android to start an audio recording without a notification. However, (since that's how Android works) a permanent recording would be extremely unreliable in the background without a permanent notification (which would give the app more resources from the OS and not close it so quickly). Again, Facebook would at least have to bypass the entire energy management of Android in order not to shoot through the ceiling in case of permanent audio recording in the battery statistics. This would also require an excessive security gap, because neither Google, technical experts nor users can prove a difference in the battery consumption of the Facebook app between allowed and denied access to the microphone.

Either the two largest IT companies in the world, hundreds of thousands of experts and literally billions of users fail to fix, find or even prove Facebook's massive security hacks after years and the social network is able to exploit several unprecedented 0-day security gaps... Either that; or the anecdotal reports of personalized advertising, which a layman could not explain without knowledge of the algorithms, are simply a massive example of collective selection bias.

Anyone who has 2.2 billion users and places an ad for baby food with one billion women will certainly meet one who told her girlfriend 10 minutes ago their baby. It doesn't matter if absolutely nothing suspicious happens to 100,000 users and the 100,001th has this creepy coincidence that the "right" advertisement comes at the right time. And this story is of course shared and seen as strong evidence.

1) yes it has

2) the only 100% proof scientific evidence would involve decrypting and intercepting the data. extremely difficult. it is way too weird that you can talk about things and see ads for them within hours. IMO not a coincidence when you've never searched for them.

3) whats your point? there are many undiscovered massive security flaws on these devices. The NSA might even call those "features" if you know what I mean.

4) That is incorrect, certain types of apps can be active in the background, also, I don't see why it would be weird to think that Apple doesn't know? Pay them enough money to look the other way and I don't think they'd care.... also, we didn't say anything about "recording"... just listening and analyzing and extracting metadata.

5) Again, using the mic and storing the resources would take very little power. The mic is a system service, the only thing the app would really be doing is updating a hash set of keywords for later submission.... my assumption is that they are probably accessing it outside of normal OS features, probably with custom C or assembly code. If random children continuously are rooting and finding ways to unlock their phones, I'm pretty sure massive companies would be capable of finding exploits too.

Take the tin foil hat off man, it isn't a good look.

the only 100% proof scientific evidence would involve decrypting and intercepting the data.

A scientific and empirical study would only take some smartphones, fresh Facebook accounts and a controlled testing environment for each of these devices. Four identical setups are already sufficient:

1. Mic permission granted, targeted conversations with certain keywords.
2. Mic permission granted, no targeted conversations with certain keywords.
3. No mic permission, targeted conversations with certain keywords.
4. No mic permission granted, no targeted conversations with certain keywords.

If there's a significant difference regarding advertisements between the phones you've statistically and empirically proven the hypothesis.

IMO not a coincidence when you've never searched for them.

I've seen countless of Facebook ads targeting completely irrelevant things for me and never saw any ad about a product I've just talked about. Randomly getting some things right when you target hundreds of ads to literally billions of people is pretty much the definition of coincidence.

That is incorrect, certain types of apps can be active in the background

• Not indefinitely.
• Not using the mic without any indication.

Simply wrong.

I don't see why it would be weird to think that Apple doesn't know? Pay them enough money to look the other way and I don't think they'd care

I see why this sub is called "conspiracy". Flawed hypothesis? Just add another dozen of far-fetched premises!

Paying Apple for not fixing an unprecedented massive security flaw in their own OS would mean billions of dollars in bribes. How do you hide these transactions from tax investigators and investors? Is it worth billions to show some users that fluffy puppy toy they've just talked about? I suppose you don't care about plausibility since it's all about the great conspiracy that somehow has to work.

also, we didn't say anything about "recording"... just listening and analyzing and extracting metadata.

You just said "recording" with different words. It doesn't matter whether you call it "listening and analyzing". In order to analyze and extract data from an audio recording you have to at least temporarily save it. That's the definition of "to record".

Your last paragraph misses the point of my previous comment since I didn't say it's technically impossible to do any of that but requires an insane amount of premises that all perfectly work together, includes several pivotal security flaws in iOS and Google while all 2 billions users and the two biggest tech companies in the world fail to find any incriminating evidence. The only thing we have are some random reports from heavily biased users that can't fathom how advertising and coincidences work.

• Not indefinitely.
• Not using the mic without any indication. Simply wrong.

Again, you just don't know what you're talking about. This is literally how the siri and google assistant apps work. Yes, 3rd parties aren't supposed to be able to do this, but big companies like Apple and Google have been known to give advantages to certain deep pocketed companies already because of big money. There is massive cash to be made on advertising. It is not that far fetched at all.

I can definitely fathom how advertising coincidences work. I've been working with "big data" for many years and I know all about how they keep scores in pairs etc to show people things based on how likely they are to be interested after something else happened that you did... or even people near you in cases of location data on FB and them knowing who you are friends with. But the stuff I've seen cannot be explained away so easily. As you say it doesn't constitute 100% proof either. I say it doesn't matter either way though... they clearly are able to accumulate way too much data no matter how these "coincidences" are occurring.

You just said "recording" with different words. It doesn't matter if you call it "listening and analyzing". In order to analyze and extract data from an audio recording you have to at least temporarily save it. That's the definition of "to record".

Right but we all tend to see EULA that say we give consent to have "metadata" collected. We don't typically give consent to have all our conversations "recorded". See the difference? They can mince words and have plausible deniability if they get caught because much of the public without a technical background will believe the explanation.

That's an absurd amount of processing that not even the largest tech companies are capable of. Combine that with the fact audio engineering is usually only 80% accurate and you have a TON of mismarked keywords.

But isn't that exactly how Hey Alexa/Google/Siri works?

Nope

Care to expand on that?

Google/Alexa/siri only work with a very small vocab and all of the good speech analyztion must be done server/cloud side because of computational complexity. Offline results are simplified down to 'Play some music'. Couple that problem with voice clarity, and it won't work if your phone is in your pocket, handbag, or more than one person is talking at a time.

In the end Facebook would yeild little to no value on this information because of how low quality it would send up being.

Your phone has a built in text to speech converter that's fairly accurate. I don't know what decade you're living in.

It's fairly accurate if you are the only one talking to it, in a silent room, with no obstructions. People in this thread are dumb as fuck if they think you can accurately pick out keywords from everyday speech to serve ads

You’d only need a handful of keywords that the handful of advertisers willing to pay for this premium service of buzzword-in-speech advertising will provide to you.

You wouldn't be able to tell the difference between passing speech and possible interest with just 'keywords'. Even the best machine learning models have a hard time on detecting relevance of keywords in small content. They need training on millions of labeled text to determine relevance. And the speed at which any tech entity can do this is not there. Advertisers are only able to generate ads from from what you directly search because they KNOW it is contextually relevant to what you are interested in. Even then people complain that the ads they see aren't relevant. Add in a multi-level complexity of speech processing, language derivation, and contextual relevancy and no tech company on Earth is close to being able to serve ads or do anything useful based on speech to text labeling.

VoIP can be a much lower bitrate than that. If FB only pinged the mic occasionally like when you got to work/arrived at a friends house then ran voice recognition on the stream to identify the words you spoke, it could be feasible. Still easier to track a user everywhere and serve ads based on browsing/physical location though. I don't believe they listen to your microphone.

Not really, since Siri and Google you have to say trigger-words to activate it (like "Ok Google"), which means it is already listening. It just doesn't save the audio.

Yet... Shazam has an always-on mode that will listen all the time and identify songs, even if you don't ask it to. There's an "Auto Shazam" button on the drop-down task bar in the new Android OS.

always listening doesn't mean always recording, though.

You don't have to always be recording, you just have to always be listening and activate on key words.

The way I understand how things like Alexa or Google assistant work is They re always listening for the key words "Hey Alexa" or "Ok Google" and then they start recording what immediately follows. If there were some key phrases like "I need" or "I want" that Facebook listened for and only recorded a few seconds of audio immediately afterward it could be technically possible.

I'm by no means an expert on any of this, but it makes sense in my mind that if they ran it like Alexa or a similar device they wouldn't need to send a dickload of audio all the time all day, only small packets of audio occasionally that could then be processed for words like "Lawnmower" or "Cat food" and be deleted immediately after.

I'm not saying I definitely think this is a thing that's happening, it just doesn't seem all that outlandish to me.

Not if it's happening locally. Why did you assume it's happening remotely?

Because like everyone on this sub, they are speaking entirely out of their asshole.

It is not hard to place a logic analyzer on the lines going between the mainboard and the mic. If FB were sneaking mic access, some ad-or-attention-hungry hacker would have been able to see it.

"Smart phones don't get viruses"

"Smart phones don't get viruses"

They most certainly do. I'm guessing your quotes indicate sarcasm, but I'm not clear what you're getting at.

Yes it was sarcasm and I read your thorough comment below here (even if I understood just a little). Thank you very much for your contribution to this discussion.

Haha, no problem. I'm just glad I had my day of relevance on Reddit.

I just have a hard time believing that FB could be sneaking illicit mic access without any Google, Apple, or independent reserachers detecting it. There are way, way too many ways to be noticed.

Right on. Yeah I was just mad at the people who said it wasn't possible when a massive amount of circumstantial evidence points to the contrary. Your point about it being ALL of the companies (at least passively) allowing it makes a lot of sense to me.

I think that is the only reasonable conclusion - how much those companies (and the US government) knew about a data breach, including when it started and who was compromised.

I saw an interesting comment a few weeks ago wondering what type of data was leaked from the Capitol building, and if that data breach was what really sparked the inquest (because you know, why would they give two shits about us plebs).

Yup - not to mention it would show up in the logs if someone were to actually examine your phone. The reality is that Facebook pulls in a ton of third party data sources that people aren’t aware of, and it’s so comprehensive that people believe Facebook has devised a way to actually record and analyze a 24/7 constant stream of Audio from almost every smartphone on earth.

If anything has become apparent from this and the Cambridge analytica thing it’s that most people have literally no idea how modern ad tech works.

This is a massive amount a fucking bullshit.

You can easily, and with low power consumption, recognize a large number of keywords with suitable accuracy (~80%, plenty for this use case) entirely on-device. They'd just need to stow away the "I heard this word" packet in their next app sync.

I mean, FB isn't listening to you all day for all sorts of reasons (it would be insanely easy for someone to detect illicit mic access, and no one has), but data transmission doesn't have anything to do with it.

What's your background to say this with such certainty?

A masters in computer science, an academic background in machine learning, and professional background in embedded systems engineering.

The ARM chipsets on most modern phones will have zero issue running a basic voice-to-word maching algorithm, particularly when the word set is (1) limited, (2) localized, and (3) accuracy is not critical. It's not that computationally intensive when the user isn't there assessing it.

Siri, for example needs to know a shit load of words, and needs to be correct at least 99% of the time, or users will bitch excessively. FB? If they can pick up just a few ad-worthy words per day, that's an easy way to make money. They don't need to parse an entire sentence and respond. They just need to hear "furniture", or something, and they can start trying to sell you shit.

And the thing about accuracy is that, going from 50% recognition accuracy (false positives = false negatives, or some other arbitrary point) requires much, much less effort and computation than 100% accuracy. It is not a linear scale. Low hanging fruit make up the majority of the basket.

And the microphone is not connected to the processor with magic. The microphone IC will have analog lines connected to an ADC of some variety, and then digital lines to that ADC will make the long journey across the logic board to the CPU's GPIO pins. You could place some sort of sniffer on that bus to determine when the mic ADC is in use.

The only thing I'm less than completely certain about is the routing on the mic. This is going to vary from phone to phone, and I'm sure there are at least a few devices out there which could be easily inspected. In the worst case, they're carrying analog lines buried in the PCB all the way home...but even then, someone with more skill than myself could figure it out, unless the host OS is for some reason already always listening to it. At that point, you'd need to inspect where the signal goes in software.

On that front, root (kernel-space) access is readily available on most android devices, and infrequently on jailbroken iOS devices. If the kernel is sending mic data to a process in the userland, it wouldn't be hard to track that down.

If its not hard to track that down, then wouldn't someone have better evidence than what is presented in this thread? Wouldn't there be a way to tell?

What's your background on the subject?

Insufficient, which is why I'm relying mostly on a tech article and the guy I replied to.

If its not hard to track that down, then wouldn't someone have better evidence than what is presented in this thread? Wouldn't there be a way to tell?

I...agree? If it were happening, there'd be much more substantial evidence of it. That's my entire point.

Or are you saying that there should be more substantial evidence that it isn't happening? That's just a logic error. You can't easily prove that something isn't, or has never, happened. This often comes up during religious discussions, more discussion here.

In any circumstance, don't you think its better to adopt a belief in this when we have better evidence than anecdotes from anonymous strangers on the internet?

What?

We agree then. You can't prove a negative.

Thank you for this well informed comment. Saving. It may be worth putting together a whole post on security, it sounds like you've got some knowledge worth sharing with the community for sure. With phones that come pre-installed with fb's suite, I've heard that these can't be deleted without root access. Do you think in these instances, they would be able to do the keyword recognition under the surface? Perhaps if they had a deal worked out with the manufacturer to subsidize cost?

I mean, FB isn't listening to you all day for all sorts of reasons (it would be insanely easy for someone to detect illicit mic access, and no one has)

Exactly. You can easily throw wireshark up on your network and watch your traffic from your phone.

If Facebook was monitoring all of our data, someone would have sniffed the traffic by now. Even if it were encrypted, someone would have said "hey what's this encrypted shit" and there would be thousands of basement dwellers investigating.

Easy enough to just restrict it to WiFi, and to have some basic processing that throws away “unclear” audio before attempting any kind of upload (like background voices, toilet sounds, etc).

Fact/anecdote of the matter is, I turned off Facebook’s access to my microphone and gained back two hours of battery, as well as no longer being able to deliberately make it show advertisements for bizarre products when speaking about them nearby. Wife and I have cats, so we tested speaking about dog products off and on with the app open. Within about 48 hours we’re being served targeted ads about collars, de-wormer, outdoor dog runs, and boarding services.

Phone calls already trigger on voice only, so they only need to record data when you actually speak. If they have enough samples of your voice, they can reduce the syllables you say down to a few numbers. It won't be much to send. Even if it's wrong half the time, you'd still get targeted ads.

Offline processing: speech to text recognition, ignore anything that's not a noun or verb (e.g, a, and, the, etc). Only send data when connected to wifi as a compressed bundle. Not impossible, nor necessarily impractical.

This is all based on the ridiculous idea that every device is transmitting 3KB/s audio 24/7.

It doesn't take much processing power to do crude voice analysis. You don't need 100% precise transcription, you only need to recognize when someone says "dog" or "plane" or "new TV" with half decent accuracy. Computers have been doing that for decades. There are Nintendo 64 games that do it.

You don't need to store or transmit the audio at all, only a simple analysis of it. You don't need to listen all the time; phones have all sorts of ways to tell if you're active. That's why it can turn the screen on when you pick it up, and reduce power consumption when in your pocket.

You also don't need to keep the data around forever. One argument I keep hearing is that if it's not being sent in real time then it must be stored, and the storage would fill up. Why do you think it wouldn't automatically purge old recordings to make room? They don't need to hear 100% of what you say to get useful data.

Countless people have no idea how predictive advertising works, and how smartphones work. That's predictive advertising - when it doesn't work you don't notice, but when it does boy do you notice what you described.

Also if it did this, it would be so easy to detect the enormous data movement audio streams make, or CPU usage in using text-to-speech.

Is it mere coincidence when I mention the St Christopher Auto Club pin in my mom's car and get served an ad for that?

Yes

Yes, because you're only remembering the time that something coincidental happened and not all of the times it didn't.

Why would Google or Facebook ad services think that St Christopher's Auto Club is relevant to my interests less than 4 hours of me just saying something about it, unless those ad services are passively listening to me and converting that speech to text?

Read the comment you originally replied to again. And then a few more times until it starts to sink in.

These same people believe in miracles and the lord cheesus crust on toast. There's a lot of em

..lisa I would like to buy that rock

First off, I agree. Second, Shhh the ignorant sheeple with no knowledge in computers will lecture you on their lack of privacy they agreed to forfeit in user agreements that serve as legal documents. Tabloid journalism has taken over America. Legit.

The question I thought was whether or not the ad services were actively listening and transcribing text, and not a question of whether or not people agreed to just about anything (we all know now that the agreements are the legal equivalent of an ass rape, but hey it's Farmville).

How does your phone activate Siri? Does it always have to be inherently recording audio to listen for the trigger?

I just trim the jack end of a set of headphones off and stuff it in my headphone outlet. Then I trim small pieces of black electrical tape to cover my camera lenses. Then they cant hear or see shit. Screw 'em.

I caught on to this about June of 2017. My friend from another university and I tried it.

We both had lived in apartments for 3 years and had no use for lawnmowers. We set out trying to trigger an ad by talking about lawnmowers over lunch with Facebook launched on our phones for a week. Taking care to not influence the ads, we never searched for lawnmowers and neither of us had for years.

Both of us were getting ads for lawnmowers (riding lawnmowers particularly) by lunch of the second day.

I visited a Buddhist temple, took pictures with my phone, and spoke about the tibetan bracelets and other souvenirs we got while in the car on the way back home. I didn't have internet connection during this trip, not even a simcard in. I had never googled anything related to it.

I'll be damned but as soon as I got home, I started getting ads for tibetan stuff like necklaces and bracelets.

So, either from my pictures stored on my phone, or from somehow listening and storing conversations offline. I don't even have fb app installed, just messenger and through Chrome.

One of those apps may be utilizing your location data (like GPS), though I'm not 100% sure how that would work if sim is not in.

Don’t need a sim for gps

I did the same thing loudly saying Chik fil A for a few hours. I was talking about Hawaii (something I hadn’t discussed in a few months at the time) and targeted ads started popping up. So I started talking about Chik fil A to see if the ads were based on a microphone listening in. I’m a vegetarian and do not eat food there nor do I have a reason to ever discuss it. After probably 10 times of loudly saying things like “Chik fil A sounds good” or “we should go to Chik fil A for lunch” I got a banner ad for Chik fil A within the same day. That cinched it.

Everyone who’s talking about predictive purchasing or WiFi networks or Google searches being the source of creepy ads needs to try this. Pick a random item or establishment that you can assume has a marketing budget (so nothing super obscure) but that you have not discussed in months or years and that you certainly would not be purchasing as someone in your demographic. Your lawnmower example is perfect. Then just talk and wait without doing any internet searches. Those ads will roll in.

I use adblocker software, so I don't ever see any ads by google or FB.

My partner inherited a lizard (a bearded dragon) from a friend who had to move suddenly. We'd never had one before. I'm a cat person exclusively for over 20 years. We were sitting on the couch in the living room discussing the heaters they put under the tank. I opened up Amazon and, lo and behold, what was under the "suggested items"? A terrarium heater pad for bearded dragons.

Me and my girlfriend were hanging out and talking/joking about getting married on vacation. Later that afternoon I got ads on Instagram for engagement rings. I have never searched or looked up engagement rings before. I have never had Facebook messenger installed only Instagram.

This has happened other times too. Happens especially quick when I say things over the phone to people too.

I started to learn Japanese along with my girlfriend but never actually typed anything remotely like that into the computer. I'm now being given fully Japanese commercials/ads I don't even slightly understand and so is my girlfriend.

I'm confident that if you and your girlfriend are learning japanese, one of you has looked at something japanese related online. And FB knows you're related, so you can both be served those ads.

We've looked up anime before but we haven't even watched anything lately. We downloaded Duolingo, that's literally the only thing that it really could be.

What if it's a third party program that listens... technically he said no facebook products listen... could be a slight way to not lie, but could still be going on

Google Assistant, Siri nd Microsoft's one all use the mic to target ads. That's probably what triggered it, not Facebook

Siri? Target what ads? Apple doesn’t do advertisement. They did in a very limited capacity once. There is no evidence that any of the others use the mic for that either.

That doesn't mean they don't sell.

He's technically not lying though, Facebook listens through Android/Apple/Amazon/etc... products. Not Facebook products

I used the FB messenger once about a year and a half ago. I was messaging my brother. While doing we were going back and forth there was an add on the TV for the Peloton exercise bike. So I went into the kitchen to tell my wife about it because she's a fitness nut but couldn't remember what it was called. Typed the letter P into my search bar and I shit you not, it was the very first thing to pop up in the results. Take it for what it's worth but it creeped me out so much that I immediately got rid of the app.

Google patent in 2007: http://www.seobythesea.com/2007/06/google-radio-and-tv-personalization-ratings-and-advertising-patent-applications/

2009: http://www.seobythesea.com/2009/05/measuring-google-tv-advertising-and-privacy/

Five years later, 2014: http://www.seobythesea.com/2014/09/google-patent-watch-tv-as-ranking-signal/

I am in online marketing and study patents like these to reverse engineer ways to game Google's algorithms. They take into account an insane amount of information.

Similar situation here using Google where I was talking in the car with a family member. He was asking me if I remembered a boxer with a certain characteristic... I forget exactly what it was, but for the sake of this example, lets pretend it was "Boxer with 1 arm". I am not into Boxing and definitely hadn't searched for anything like this, but I pulled out my phone to look this guy up and started typing "Boxer wi" into Google and it automatically suggested the sentence "Boxer with one arm" (or whatever it was) as the top result. I pulled it up and instantly got that boxer's name.

I just checked and when i type boxer into google, it auto completes to searches related to dogs. I've searched for plenty of Kangaroo boxing videos (which are awesome by the way) - anyways, this was weird.

I've experienced similar situations with ads being served via Facebook for things I've talked about in my daily life and am also convinced they do this, but as like someone else said, probably a 3rd party is doing the heavy lifting somehow and Facebook is obtaining the data that way.

Who knows, they could have an entirely different way of capturing, storing, and analyzing the data necessary for this type of advertising that it can't conceptually be described as "we listen to you all day and serve you ads based on your verbal dialogue".

It’s happened to me as well. Before I deleted the app.

Youtube also does this!

Agree. Only have Instagram. Never had Facebook. Few months ago, I inadvertently left the “microphone access on” in settings (iOS). Several times I’ve had very obscure conversation items I’ve considered buying suddenly a week later make it into my Instagram feed. After realizing and turning off the mic, that problem went away. He is full of it.

Baader Meinhof phenomenon?

Me and my friends have had multiple conversations about just random things. Next day ad or Instagram or Facebook. We were talking about dangling Christmas lights that look like icicles, next day ad for it on instagram.

The camera just reads your lips. r/technicallythetruth

I first noticed this a couple years ago. My friend asked in a casual conversation where something was, I said “Oh that’s off of ______ by the Rooms To Go.” I wasn’t looking for furniture, never have, never searched it... a couple hours later I get an ad for Rooms To Go.

There’s been a few other weird instances over the years. I’ve noticed the ads are more specific on Instagram.

A couple weeks ago my girlfriend was sick. I asked if she wanted me to get her her favorite mint gelato ice cream from the store on the way home. She said yes. Next day I get an ad for Talenti Mint Gelato ice cream. The same exact little speciality brand, the same exact flavor I specifically asked her.

I work at a school. Last week I told the kid to get in the breakfast line... he said he wasn’t hungry, he already ate. I said what did you eat? Cereal? And he said yep, Froot Loops! And I said “Froot Loops?!” back kind of loud. I haven’t had Froot Loops in years. I haven’t searched for Froot Loops or any other cereal in God knows how long. Guess what I get for an ad the next time I opened Instagram?

Same here. Me and a friend talked about adult diapers to test this out. Literally just punctuated every few sentences with "incontinence" and "Adult undergarments", etc. I have the Facebook ap disabled on my phone, and it has been since I got it, but when I logged in through the browser, they served me ads for... wait for it... adult diapers. Trust me when I say that there's no reason to serve me an ad for diapers. I think it's an ad-serving sub-system that is built right into the Android OS, and aps just latch onto the cached keywords. I have no evidence to back this up, but it would make sense, and would be the loophole that Zuckerdick is using here; "No, Facebook doesn't listen to your mic to serve you ads... Google does that, we use their data"

So at this point it’s 100% obvious that they are doing this, and yet they continue to deny that ads are based off of conversations picked up on mic. In my own life I have seen so many examples of this and even tested it to prove a point. I’ve spoken about teeth, cavities, dentures, etc. in front of my phone and despite the fact that I’ve never had so much as a cavity or searched any of the aforementioned topics, I began receiving ads for dentures and dental implants the very next day. All I can think of is that they have a defensible legal position that allows them to deny that this is what they’re doing. It must be that Facebook itself is not using the information obtained through the mic to tailor the ads. If that’s the case they can probably say that they do not serve ads based off of snippets of conversation picked up on the mic. That is not to say that they don’t provide information to a third party that then uses that information to custom tailor their ads. I would like to see someone question them about whether or not they collect information through the mic and if that information is made available to advertisers to do with what they please. Because from where I stand that is the only explanation, someone just needs to box them in with their line of questioning. Unfortunately, I don’t see anyone looking for real answers getting to do the questioning any time soon. This whole thing is a dog and pony show to appease he masses and give them a harmless little bone to chew on before moving on to the next bullshit news story.

So at this point it’s 100% obvious that they are doing this

It certainly isn’t, and it’s not even possible to use the microphone in the background covertly on iPhones, for example.

and yet they continue to deny that ads are based off of conversations picked up on mic.

Yes, because they likely aren’t, and there is only anecdotal evidence from people not trained how to do proper scientific experiments and subject to psychological biases.

You would think someone would have uncovered this. You can monitor the data flowing from your phone. You can enter debug mode and collect logs. Some researcher would have noticed the facebook app recording audio and converting to text or transmitting the audio to the FB servers.

Do me a favor. Talk about toothpaste, toothbrushes, dentists, cavities, etc in front of you phone for like ten minutes. Pretend to have a full on conversation about it, don’t just say a word every now and then. And then log into Facebook over the next couple days and tell me what your ads look like. I don’t expect you too I actually try this but if you do you might be shocked at what you see.

Proof of listening

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0SOxb_Lfps

You experience could also be explained by the frequency illusion/Baader Meinhof phenomenon.

People can deny it all they want, I experimented with this as well about 3 years ago and its scary. I refuse to use the facebook app now, mobile html version only now. Deny browser any permissions to camera and mic, clear cookies every session.

It happens to my wife and I constantly. I don't use FB or Instagram but things I talk about with her will pop up on her FB/I almost daily. Things that neither of us have Google searched or anything.

It happens on Google playstore too. Dont work out, don't go to the gym, don't do any kind of crossfit. Talk to wife about how it looks like people doing it are going to throw out their back. 8 different CrossFit workout ads on the play store. I fb uses anything from Google that might be it too.

That’s only evidence of bias. They recall the times it happened because the times I didn’t there was nothing to notice.

This happened to me. I was talking about Blue Apron with my sister irl, not over the phone. The next week I had Blue fucking Apron ads swarming my YouTube vids

Can confirm ive posted about this before. Targeted ads from a conversation.

My very white boyfriend works with a ton of Mexican dudes. In their shop they listen to tejano and norteno music all day long. About 2 weeks into his job he started getting ads in Spanish. That's when I was finally convinced they listen to us.

I've had it happen to me once (during a roadtrip when we discussed where to eat and mentioned McDonald's and a couple of minutes later I got McDonald's ads in my Facebook app). However, since then I've tried to reproduce it but I've never managed to do it. Led me to believe it was just a coincidence. Or maybe it just stuff like my position and the time of day to figure out that I would soon probably look for something to eat.

I've done this with my friends. Open Facebook, and talk about dog food for like a minute, say dog food about five times. You will have dog food ads on your timeline within a day

Wrong company, OP.

Amazon has the patent.

One Amazon patent shows the company could instruct the Echo device to listen for designated trigger words, like a discussion of vacation destinations. It could then transcribe that conversation and use it to try to sell the device's user a related product.

Link: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/google-home-amazon-echo-patents-track-listen/

There was a video about a couple speaking about cat food all day in front of their iPhone. They got cat food ad. Turns out it wasn’t really Facebook who was listening to them, but Siri ?

Didn’t investigate that much, because I don’t have Facebook app anyway.

https://youtu.be/U0SOxb_Lfps

Apple doesn’t sell ads or even has an ad platform anymore.

Recently I've had two examples of this.

The first one, my mate and I were talking about him getting one of those mini Nintendo SNES from a particular online store. Later that day I open up Facebook, and what do ya know? An advert for the SNES from the exact online store.

Also, at the weekend I watched Thor. Afterwards, I open Facebook and there is a suggested post with a picture of Chris Hemsworth as Thor.

I'm totally convinced Facebook is listening to everything! And not just Facebook either.

Yeah total bullshit.

I'm vegetarian, there is no way I search for meat products online, let alone purchase them or talk about them. A coworker in the cubicle over from me was telling me about about how he made beef jerky with his kid on the weekend. Couple of hours later I jump on Facebook on my phone and I'm being served ad's for discount Trucker jerky and shit. No fucking way I had any data trail of that other than my coworker mentioning it.

Same here. I will go under oath and tell this. I even put my phone next to a radio playing spanish music and ads overnight, and my fb and ig ads were spanish the next morning. Plus, I used to work on the phones and things that were related to my business but had an entirely different entertainment meanings would show up too. Like GMA is an international tv channel and I was talking about it for a good 20 minutes on the phone. I started noticing ads to watch GMA Good Morning America videos with GMA in the title. I have not ever searched liked or watched Good Morning America.

Worked at a cellphone and electronics repair store for 2 years, and can indeed confirm that it does this. 100%

Talking about some obscure random thing with a customer, then, low and behold our store's facebook page had ads for that thing 5 minutes later, on the store's admin PC.

But that’s not confirmation, that’s just that you think it does it. You only observe the result, not the cause. Also it’s “lo and behold”.

So... talking about Greyhound bus tickets to a customer, which I haven't used in years and never talked about outside of this one conversation, then having ads for bus tickets on a device not even connected to the one with the microphone, and only having Facebook as the common connection between the two doesn't prove this all to you?

I don't understand how you don't see the connection. They're listening to everything your phone is near. Plain and simple.

^{Also, I am aware it's lo and behold but there's a thing called autocorrect which gets more wrong than right.}

I'm thinking his no is that Facebook is an aggregator of data. So they are not using it for advertising, because they are selling the data. That data is instantly sold to the advertising contractor who "uses" that data. >Plus, and this is the most important part, we already agreed to give away this freedom by ignoring the contract when Facebook asks for control of our phones.

That doesn't only happen with facebook. My girlfriend's been speaking about finding a dress for a wedding. No searchs anywhere on my phone. Yet I've been seeing adverts for dresses on reddit......

But wouldn't Google be doing it? I mean, those things are all connected and we already know google does this shit.

What a fucking lieing cunt.

Do you realize that whether or not FB can listen in on your conversations is an incredibly simple test? People have and will continue to test for these things, and to this day, not a single thing has ever been discovered to even remotely indicate this is a thing...

Yeah I'm calling bullshit. I was talking to my mom about a sitcom on Netflix and couldnt remember the name of it. Not even 3 hours later when i went home, I saw Netflix ads for the sitcom.

I've never had a Netflix ad before this point on facebook.

Seriously, every time this comes up I say the same thing: There are tons of ways to figure out what you are interested in. The second you stop scrolling through your news feed and linger at a content item is enough to target you. And yes, you do this subconsciously. So yes, this means the algorithm knows what you're interested in before you do. Facebook is not listening through the mic. People would have found out already by monitoring the upload on their network.

I don't post on this sub, but this has definitely happened to me.

I was telling my boyfriend about how I was in a Little Mermaid play when I was younger.

Later that day I got an ad for LITTLE MERMAID ON ICE.

That was way too specific for me to believe it was just a coincidence. I've never had an ad like that before.

I would guess that, if he's not just lying, he can truthfully say no because some other service takes the data and sends it to Facebook, so fb products are technically not doing it.

I stood outside work talking to a friend for about 5 minutes in which we discussed her Goosebumps t-shirt she was wearing and said ONCE out loud what it said on it. I got an ad for her specific t-shirt on instagram 2 days later. I know I haven’t looked at anything Goosebumps related or spoken of the books any other time than that in years. That proved it for me.

The Reply All podcast investigated this. It’s a good listen.

Google dies that shit too, along with tracking your browsing

avid M. Wehner is the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of Facebook.

Education Wehner attended Saint Louis Priory School(Catholic) and graduated in 1986.[1] Wehner graduated from Georgetown University(JESUIT) with a BS in Chemistry, where he was an editor for The Hoya. He graduated from Stanford University with a MS in Applied Physics, where he was a National Science Foundation fellow.[2]

Career Early in his career, Wehner worked at Monitor Group and Hambrecht & Quist. Wehner worked at Allen & Company for nearly a decade until 2010, when he became the CFO of Zynga.[2][3] At these firms, he held series 7 and series 24 licenses.

Wehner joined Facebook in 2011 as VP of Corporate Finance and Business Planning.[4][5] Wehner succeeded David Ebersman as CFO of Facebook on June 1, 2014.[6][7]

JESUIT

Do you think that means Jew or something? Because it doesn't.

No you dingbat.

Yea that is a blatant lie

Not necessarily. Zuckerberg was asked if facebook products listened to you, not third party advertising companies. He may have answered the absolute truth to the question, while still indirectly violating our privacy.

That's exactly it. He can say no because the third parties are doing it. Everyone with a modern phone knows this is happening.

"Private contractors"

No they don’t because it doesn’t. My Facebook/messenger apps don’t even have microphone permission, and there is no way to covertly use the microphone on iOS anyway.

Read the fucking comment you moron

Yeah, I'm sure that's what happened here. Doing that lawyer talk so he can't legally be held accountable and never "lied"

I like how Mark called it a conspiracy theory...

did you see that cunt behind him shake his head in agreement.

One usually nods in agreement, and shakes one's head in disagreement.

I think you and I are the only 2 people in the planet who know this.

shakes head.

Nods head..

Shakes head with pouty face

Nods head with poker face

Pokes face with nodder head

You and two guys ahead of you in this comment thread are all my friends now.

Those guys said to tell you you're not friends?

They are practical jokers, like that. Real characters.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGskWZCuCXI

smh my head

Omg my god

Stfu up

nmh in disagreement

Nods balls

You haven’t been to India.

https://i.imgur.com/ieXttUY.jpg

Holy shit, he really has that creepy, inhuman, alien-like look to him just like the Rothschilds have. https://imgur.com/a/HVHRg

inbred.

Inbred and frightened lmao

GIVE ME SUGAR IN WATER.

Moisturize me!

Your skin is all weird.

Like a Edgar suit

It's actually kinda comfortable, like a giant, wet, house slipper.

Eggar suit

FTFY

Moar!

Removed. Rule 6.

It's like the Habsburg, after a while they just started to look wrong.

Those soulless eyes

like an android

And a nazi youth haircut.

That guy mainly looks weird because no eyebrows

What in the fuck

That and it looks like all of his facial features were cut and pasted from different people in magazines.

I see weirder dudes at school.

So you have inbreds at school

homeschooled?

Same complexion and eye color too...uncanny valley...hmmmm https://i.imgur.com/1TyCwAg.jpg

I <I>hate</i> that

I strongly dislike that.

what the actual fuck

I did not need to see this at 3 am before going to sleep. I got serious fucking chills.

reptilian?

That's just a few centuries of inbreeding.

nepotism has its downsides longterm

Holy shit, he really has that creepy, inhuman, alien-like look to him just like the Rothschilds have. https://imgur.com/a/HVHRg

That just looks like a smidgen of inbreeding to me

"They Live"

Google that film

In both these examples it’s the extremely high IPD.

lol you created your account to post about sandy hook being fake and jews

classic

lol you creeped on my post history because I posted a picture of a Rothschild

Jesus which one is that...ew wtf

Nathaniel. He use to bang Natalie Portman.

I will never be attracted to Natalie Portman again.

Wait. This is a Rotschild? This fucking lizardface is enslaving humanity? This is the reason why I have to get up at fucking 6AM and eat processed shit???

This reality is jumping the shark.

Zuck is fucked, but that guy looks pretty much normal.

He really is a weird-lookin' unit.

He should really change that haircut

He should also work on how weird his face looks

If only he had a book of examples...

The book of faces.

No. Just book of faces. Sounds cleaner.

This, is just shit.

This is just shit spelled differently.

BookFace?

A girl has no name

He looks like the type to be the first wildly successful mass shooter if things don't pan out. If this happened in South Korea he'd be going to jail and possibly would be honor bound to kill himself.

Comments like that probably help to create monsters like him.

The red eyes are an interesting design choice.

No doubt, if I spent the money on an android, I would get one that looks like Bishop at the very least.

These new Synth Models are worse than ever with the realism

I'm on awe of the weirdness of this unit

he looks like a sociopath/killer in the making.

He's a fuckin lizard, or alien, or cyborg.

Zuck my unit!

Its the lack of eyebrows I think.

So you think you can block me??

You can't block my schtoyle!

God damn, if that's not a goblin if i ever saw one. On a side note, i'm pretty sure its listening via mic for key words.

Example, Talked about something we never use around the phone while the app was open, day or so later, add for the exact thing popped up. There was also an article here a while back on a security guy tearing apart that app and showing all the things that were being processed and sent out, it's ridiculous.

With ears like that I don't think he needs a mic.

When shit gets real

Fuck that face ugly af

He looks like he’s been on an addy binge for days..

He looks like he's on a very large amount of drugs.

Time traveller?

somehow looks less human than Data

What really weirded me out is that he didn't make any facial expressions, like almost never... I was thinking he might have had a few Xanax prior to the hearing. But then it also looked like he was both scared but arrogant... Like trying to look tough.

If only you knew how bad things really are.

According to a post here the other day, they were using failed password attempts to guess the passwords of other related accounts. Just think for a minute how anti-ethical that is.

By the way.. the hearing was a complete joke, what a boring predicatable soap opera, at some point everyone was laughing and shit...

He is a fucking elf

HIS EARS AHAHA. IS HE DUMBO?

All the charisma of a presidential candidate.. did they ask about the mind reading interface he s working on.. and the medical data he was after.. cause selling your mind to his advertisers seems sop for this guy... marc fuckedburg..

If only I knew or if only Zuck knew? NM, he does know, right? So it's me. If only I knew...

Damn he really does look like an alien here

I feel kind of bad for him, to be honest. He started this company when he was a teenager and was filthy rich before he was old enough to drink. Things were probably beyond the point of no return before he even knew what was happening. He's likely afraid of the monster he created and might be more of a slave to it than the everyday people it spys on.

I think hating on Zuckerberg is a useless distraction. A good meme to keep people placated by giving them a bad guy to throw rotten fruit at. Facebook itself is the real evil, and we should focus more of their attention on bringing that down instead of crucifying the guy who created it.

WTF is up with that chick's eyes?

If it's not a theory, then where's the hard evidence? Not trying to be a dick, just genuinely curious if this is fact or not

A theory is an idea that already had some provable concepts backing up the claim, otherwise its just a hypothesis.

People commonly confuse the word theory with hypothesis which I find rather annoying.

Not directed at you in particular, I just get annoyed when I see this miss used over and over.

Your definitions are correct in terms of technical (or 'scientific') usage.

In general parlance, theory and hypothesis tend to be used interchangeably.

Is it any wonder that so few people are familiar with the scientific method?

Most of the time when I hear 'science fans' discuss 'science', they are in fact discussing their faith in authority.

A classic example is the Cavendish experiment. lulz galore.

What a time to be alive.

A classic example is the Cavendish experiment. lulz galore.

Am I reading that article and your comment right? Since someone performed an experiment in their shed to try to figure out the mass, density, etc. of objects that we're not able to actually weigh or measure, all of science is a joke?

Haha what the hell is that shit.

However, among those who have been involved in one way or another with the ‘Flat Earth renaissance’ which has swept the ‘alternative’/independent media scene since early 2015, JLB has played a leading role in bringing attention to the topic.

All written by himself, about himself. How can you be a flat earther and at the same time criticize astrophysics for being unscientific? Lol.

You have misunderstood that page.

Clearly. Please enlighten me?

Please do enlighten us. All I saw were attacks without facts. There were two facts on that page. One being that a man performed an experiment in a shed without electricity, the other being what you would find in the sidebar of Wikipedia. He made a lot of claims and insults but provided nothing to back it up.

I bought deodorant the other day which is some random brand that I’ve never ever seen an add for. I showed someone the deodorant and today I received an add on my Facebook for the exact same deodorant; scent and all. Now my phone was a few feet away so A. It picked it up from my microphone or B. It tracked my purchase through my debit card. Both options are equally disturbing.

Save your receipts & screenshot it next time. That would be somewhat proof.

Just uploaded

And a pic of the debit card. Front and back

Please don't take offense, but who are you and why should I believe your story? I'm not calling you a liar, but unless you quantify this claim in someway, I have to take it with a grain of salt, you know? I'm looking for real, hard evidence from a reliable source. I believe the only reason this theory even came to light is because of people making claims like this. How sure are that this is why you were receiving these advertisements? What proof do you have to back it up?

FWIW, I've had the same thing happen to me, and so did my wife. I guess you could prove it to yourself and give FB full access to you mic, but I don't think it's worth it at this point.

I think something like that is necessary and definitely still worth doing. Maybe I will do this kind of test with multiple random products and post a video of my findings. I watched a good chunk of the live feed from today, but unfortunately no one asked him this specific question. The closest they got him to talking about this topic was a response of his which was something like "Facebook users have to opt-in to allow microphone access"

This kind of thing happens all the time. With me and my peers it’s just a known thing that Facebook/Instagram does this with ads.

It happens "all the time" because humans are prone to confirmation bias.

Sure they are, but in this case it's because it actually does happen/is happening.

Dude....the same thing happened when my girlfriend and I were talking about pizza. The next day an ad for pizza hut showed up.

This has happened to me before & I know it didn’t get mentioned, I was alone. It’s pulling from your bank card. Not to say it’s not listening as well, I’ve had that happen as well. They are completely invading our privacy.

The ad was March but the receipt was april....i believe they listen but this is weak evidence no offence.

I know now lol. But honestly I just received the add today. I don’t really know how to prove that though.

That's just the ad creation time. It can Target users however long the ad is running.

Did you happen to use a rewards or discount card with that purchase? If you did and you linked your phone number to both the card and Facebook, it's possible that's how it happened.

No just debit.

Most debit card agreements allow sharing data with advertisers.

My friend and I were talking about a certain type of pop up suitcase which turns into a shelving unit so you have somewhere to organize clothes during travel... later in the day both me and my friend got an add on our FB about it. I thought it was a little strange...

I tried to get hard evidence. I captured packets through WireShark and analyzed the data. I didn't come up with anything concrete. I think I established some ground rules if Facebook were listening. For a long time, I believe they did. It's certainly not implausible. I just don't have any hard evidence to back it up.

My current assumption of how this works:

• Audio is recorded in small samples, maybe 10 seconds or less, with a very low-quality compression algorithm (like 32 kbps compared to a bad Napster mp3 of 96 kbps)

• Audio is stored in a temporary cache after recording

• Audio is uploaded to Facebook via FB_ZERO encrypted packets whenever Facebook/Instagram are accessed. The audio upload is hidden in three ways - the compression makes the file size pretty small, it's injected with all other traffic when the app is being loaded, and it's encrypted with a proprietary protocol.

I'm learning to use WireShark in school right now. This is extremely interesting! Thanks

good work man, I've been waiting to read a post like this where someone tried to prove it.

Here's my worksheet. No, I didn't see anything audio related. The experiment involved reading a script with a few famous brands to my phone, then logging into Facebook, and then seeing if I saw an ad for those brands. I never got a positive hit. I could only see the packet sizes going to and from Facebook. Because the packets are encrypted with a proprietary method - FB_ZERO - they can't be analyzed. FB_ZERO was made to be a zero-round-trip encryption handshake, which optimizes content delivery, but it also has the additional benefit of being a black box.

Maybe microphone access can be detected and logged. Then we can pinpoint facebook vs. google on androids.

Theoretically a malicious party with access to a powerful computer and a microphone could do on device voice analysis and later just upload only the keywords it's listening for.

Using stenography they could hide data in other data. Look into chaffing and winnowing. Hell you can encode data by using a delay where the variation in pause time between messages sent (time stamp) is the encoded data itself.

Could use your phone's hardware to apply some machine learning algorithms to classify the audio it picked up. Then it sends the classificatiobs to the FB server. This is technically not "recording".

I'm not an expert, but that seems beyond the capabilities of the hardware. Most of the practical applications for machine learning you hear about are being run on pretty powerful computers.

Hell yes in my opinion.

With the cellphone chipsets getting more complex, it'll surely be able to analyze a compressed audio file for keywords. Maybe even transcribe the entire audio file.

Digital diction programs have been out since the 90's. A lot of young redditors don't understand what mofo's were already doing on Pentium 1's and even before that.

It could be argued that it's not recording, but it is listening, which is the word they used in the interview.

computers use 1s and 0s; it could be encoded as 2s and 3s instead--nobody will be looking for those!

/r/shittylifeprotip

wow I didn't think of this... do the analysis locally. Would explain why the battery only lasts 6 hours.

Also could easily be 'not technically facebook' but a third party, eg, a game or something downloaded with FB. The t&cs of most apps are so broad it would allow this.

It's not very viable for Android devices and Chromebooks, though. Most of those are built the way they are with the price tag they have because they don't need to do anything locally. Privacy is why Google analyses media in the cloud and iDevices do it locally on every device (there's a reason the A11 bionic chip is so powerful).

My LG G4 came with FB preinstalled, and requiring a hack to remove. After removing it, the battery life improved dramatically. I never once opened the app.

Reminds me of the hack they used to get data out of airgapped computers in an Iranian (IIRC) nuclear power plant.

Mainly by modulating the frequency of the CPU fans and catching that slight alteration in noise on mobile phone microphones.

I think something may be happening even when cellular data is turned off too. I noticed that when I had cellular data off I'd still get notifications when people went live on IG. Only notifications for that.. I thought that was strange. I do like how you mention audio stored in a cache and uploaded when other data is accessed, very interesting.

wifi data. nothing strange about that. You can even place calls over wifi with many phones out of the box.

There was no wifi with where I was at

!!!!

So I am extremely minimalist on my phone, absolutely avoid notifications and ads. The Facebook apps (including Spotify and Instagram) were the absolute worst at constantly requesting me to turn on notifications every single time I opened the app to use it. It got more and more aggressive on requesting it and even disabled features for a while. If I were a betting man, I would say they did a lot of data transferring through notifications.

Another fun one is that my phone is Jailbroken and has a feature where I can specifically give apps permission even further than iOS. Instagram had access to my camera, but still it would have to ask for access to front or back camera when it would use them. No joke Instagram requested the front facing camera when I "Liked" a photo. Why it would want to look at my face when I'm liking a photo is beyond me, but it absolutely requested it and I stopped giving it permissions to my photos or any location data or cameras after that.

Shit man, could post that somewhere and share a link? That’s not good. People should know about this

You don't communicate through notifications. They are one way communications. If FB already has a long running service that listens to you then they can simply send data any time they want. There is no way a notification would help that in any way.

The reason they push notifications is that it is their way to drag into their hell over and over. If you only use the app when you want to look at FB you open it maybe 1-4 times a day. If you click on every notification FB thinks is important for you then you load their ads 20 times per day.

Spotify has nothing to do with Facebook outside of them maybe owning a small percentage (not large enough to be listed in a pie chart of biggest shareholders -- Spotify just went public a couple weeks ago).

That's awesome. I thought Facebook owned Instagram, What's App, Spotify and Facebook.

Instagram worries me much more than Spotify.

Instagram and WhatsApp, yes. Spotify, no.

Which tweak are you using for this and on which firmware?

The tweak is PMP - Protect My Privacy. Pretty sure it's just in cydia.

Yeah, it's not compatible with iOS 11 and became available on 10 a bit late and incomplete for awhile iirc.

What a bummer. It's such an amazing app for keeping control of your device. I don't know if I'll ever update to 11, is it worth it?

Yeah, I could never stay on out-of-date iOS for too long. Too many apps that would stop working or stop receiving updates, too long the same, too little security patches… Don't get me wrong, we get plenty, but the little things don't always get fixed.

I call bullshit without evidence or hard proof, but interesting either way. I am no expert in jailbreaking a phone but I would assume that knowing HOW the phone is jailbraked and what, in terms of code, it changes would also be interesting to the story. As a hobby programmer I know that making code is never easy and changing someone elses is even harder. Please share evidence is you have.

What do you mean "you call bullshit"? Why? You don't think it asked to access the front camera when I liked a photo?

If I do provide hard proof, what do you plan on doing then? I guess I can sit here and tell you what happened and you can call bullshit all you want, but what would it possibly benefit me to say that, and how would it benefit you to not believe random advice on a situation happening.

If you absolutely need hard evidence, I'll see if I can provide it. But I promise you on the word of God or whatever the highest belief you have that it's true.

As far as my highest belief goes, objective and logical perspective. The reason to why I am questioning your statement and demand evidence is because many other just took what you presented and accepted it as facts.

Now obv this is reddit and people should be aware of checking their sources but conspiracy believers are created due to lack of evidence. They are satisfied with what is presented. I, myself, do not want to leave any "ifs" unsolved. In this case it might have been the jailbreak that cause the app to act up the way it did. We dont know, we can assume but we dont know. Assumptions are very handy whenever the result is very little affected by them. But in this case it is determining true or false.

Am still curious and intrigued by the idea of them using the notifications and "like-data" to tap the microphone, it is genius but scary. If you get any screenshots or clips, I would love to see it

Just reinstalled it. I will try to recreate it happening. Not sure what the conditions were (if it was a sponsored post, or if it was am advertisement post that was somehow special or if there are packages you can buy where they offer that kind of info), but I'll try and recreate it this week and take pics.

You should upload the screenshots to Imgur and make a post here are /r/conspiracy

https://lowbitnet.wordpress.com/2016/01/28/ultra-low-bitrate-audio-codec2/

If all you care about is capturing human speech, very specialized compression algorithms can reduce your bitrate to 700 bits per second. Considering the fact that noise will be more common from a phone mic, i think 1kb/s or maybe 2kb/s is the bitrate used.

Interesting. That could certainly be at play. I think low bandwidth is actually a help for voice audio, because it helps block out background noise and focuses only on the vocal spectrum. The Nyquist theorem says the highest frequency captured is half of the sample rate, or the sample rate is twice as high as the highest frequency upon playback. Cutting down the sample rate, and using only mono audio, which helps cut down the file sizes, would be a huge help to focusing only on vocal noise. I'm surprised they still use 16 bit PCM, cutting down the bit depth would also save on file size, but would cause distortion and cut out lower volumes.

I know if I'm engineering that audio recording.. I'd want to take out all low and high frequencies and focus on the mid's to upper mids. Meaning erasing more and trimming down the file. Seems very plausible to send that on.

Now that's a small fuckn' file size.

That shit is digital midi ringtone territory. Which is great for sending over the internet. And even better for AI to analyze.

Perhaps the processing is handled locally - which could explain part of the app being so bloated and battery hungry.

I doubt it, after having talked to several different experts on the subject. Both programmers and advertisement data analysts have told me that Natural Language Processing (NLP) is so processor-intensive that it would have to be cloud-based parallel processing. Siri, Google, and Amazon Echo are all cloud-based for example. One programmer told me it would take five minutes for a phone to figure out what you said, while it takes Siri only a couple of seconds. The speed at which you talk, the language that you use, the differences in tone of voice and length of saying each word, the accent with which you speak, and your gender, create a huge set of variables that a phone could not natively process.

I think the app is bloated because it's constantly trying to load content (especially video content, nearly every post is a video now), and also trying to upload your interactions with everything. Every click, every letter typed, every like, is all uploaded. Watching WireShark while using Facebook creates a huge flurry of activity. One Facebook session could be 60-100k packets.

Wouldn't the Facebook app be doing straight up digital diction, creating a small file to upload, analyze that audio and serve it to it's ad code?

If a 300MHz Pentium II can run dragon dictate, I would think a phone could listen in abs pick up some words without using a lot of CPU power.

After reading enough, I'm not 100% convinced these "app programmers" don't know what in all hell digital diction and transcribing programs actually do. They simply write it off like it's a complex procedure.

You are exactly write-- this has been capable since the 90's. Either the programmers chiming in saying it's not possible due to computational times don't understand the question, have never tested that theory, or simply are so young they have zero reference point to start from.

I used to read about the digital diction / transcribing software in my fav pc magazine during the 90's.

Either the programmers chiming in saying it's not possible due to computational times don't understand the question, have never tested that theory, or simply are so young they have zero reference point to start from.

Or someone is a lying sack of shit.

Very strong possibility its this.

The other part of me thinks it would be hard to keep programmers from leaking the info-- that's the only hole in these theories.

Think nefarious programming can happen under wraps without it leaking? Maybe international contract programmers with NDA's?

Or programmers under the literal gun.

I admit upfront I'm not networking tech savvy, but I used to always play devil's advocate to the notion they were listening in on a hot mic. I always said basically "why not just connect your phone to your home wifi, disconnect all other devices, and watch the outbound traffic."

But then I played devil's advocate to my devil's advocate and wondered a conjured up a very similar scenario to the one you've described. The only difference in my imagined scenario is that the audio is analyzed locally by the Facebook app and keywords are noted in more of a simple-text format and then that string data is sent off to FB only while the app is being used so it not only helps mask the transmission but also keeps the data file size numbers very low.

Is that at all feasible in your mind -- the local analyzing of audio bit?

I doubt it, after having talked to several different experts on the subject. Both programmers and advertisement data analysts have told me that Natural Language Processing (NLP) is so processor-intensive that it would have to be cloud-based parallel processing. Siri, Google, and Amazon Echo are all cloud-based for example. One programmer told me it would take five minutes for a phone to figure out what you said, while it takes Siri only a couple of seconds. The speed at which you talk, the language that you use, the differences in tone of voice and length of saying each word, the accent with which you speak, and your gender, create a huge set of variables that a phone could not natively process.

I think the app is bloated because it's constantly trying to load content (especially video content, nearly every post is a video now), and also trying to upload your interactions with everything. Every click, every letter typed, every like, is all uploaded. Watching WireShark while using Facebook creates a huge flurry of activity. One Facebook session could be 60-100k packets.

(Just replied to someone else with this 10 mins ago :) )

Gotcha. Much appreciated taking the time to respond. Thank you for the details and insight!

I bet it's not Facebook. I bet it's another app in the background (like one of the Google apps) and they're sharing ad keywords.

Couldn't they use speech recognition to transcribe it first on the phone? And maybe only upload certain keywords or phrases.

Speech to text, text to encryption, sent in small packets, packets assembled and decrypted on the server, generate ads to news feed. Rinse and repeat. Also look at your browser history to generate ads

First of all nice work. No expert on this at all (I studied ee some time ago)

Could it be that they check the background noise? Like are you in a car or outside? You could load a pretrained simple neural network onto the device and analyse the data, then it says sth like "outside", the nn gets some additional data, like the difference between a predefined status like"outside" and send it to train a bigger central neural network at Facebook. Update the nn Everytime the app is updated. This would give Facebook the ability to monitor extreme amount of data from you.

For example if you are inside a room but there is a high echo which fades over days than you just moved into a new home. The background noise of your car changes, well you just got a new car. I assume with enough phones ( so extreme amount of samples) and beacons you could pinpoint positions in puplic places to extreme accuracy, like is he stopping in front the TV's in the supermarket or the chairs or whatever. The other thing that is easy this way is your salary. The cleaning lady and me both work in the same complex sometimes at the same time, but my environment is very quiet hers will sound much different.

PS. I am not entirely sure that this is possible or reasonable. I will link someone that has a better understanding of how nn work and delete it if anyone points out that this is in fact bullshit. /u/benjaminhornygold

Yes, this is possible.

I work with and on such software. Example: say you're in the market for a haircut. Using a proprietary software and API integrations purchased from a digital agency, a user who has visited your salon's Facebook page can be retargeted and if they pull up at your salon, they will receive a notification on their phone from Google asking them opinions, questions about your location. You can also serve a greeting, advertisement, or message with this push notification.

If you want to read about the different methods or techniques used, do a search online for "digital targeting" or "retargeting customers" or "lead targeting" PM me if you have any specific questions.

Why would they send the audio? Just do voice to text and then filter for the keywords they're looking for, 100% on the device.

The counter to that is that analysis would take more computing power than a phone could handle.

Which I personally don't believe. It's not going to have to transcribe every single word-- just keywords like "food". It already knows where you are at GPS and definitely knows how to serve you an ad based on that geo location.

It doesn't, the phone is more than capable. You can do this with open source stuff.

Training the model takes a supercomputer. Using it just takes something small, even a raspberry pi

Your first assumption is correct. This is how the Alexas and Hey Googles work.

I like your thinking regarding audio and how it's not going to be a big file that gets sent over the air-- it'll be tiny. Just enough to scrape for keywords for being said daily and file that away.

It could just as easily live stream shitty audio for a server cluster to analyze at regular intervals, say every 5 minutes it listens for and uploads audio for 30 seconds. Shitty, compressed audio, but just enough as field testing would show them.

Why are they lying? They have to knock w it will be proven eventually, why not stop or come clean? Isn't that the best long term business decision?

Recording the audio itself seems like a huge waste of space when dictation technology is now extremely accurate. Any ad targeting AI would need a text transcript anyway. That's probably how it would be stored.

This would also give them a wonderful little loophole if anyone ever asks "does facebook record audio for data mining purposes", which is what happened at the hearing.

I wouldn't be surprised if somewhere in the hundreds of thousands of classes in the Facebook app, it's doing crude speech recognition. That would be much less noticeable, less data-intensive, and less load on their servers, than transmitting audio. It doesn't have to work great either, just well enough to pick out key words fairly reliably. And it doesn't even have to send back the actual words, just a list of frequencies (how many times you said keyword X, keyword Y...), so you also wouldn't see the words themselves in outgoing data.

Much of this sounds paranoid, but it's really just "if I were designing such a tool, how would I do it?" It's only taken a few minutes to come up with something relatively simple, which encodes the result into very little data - a feature which is meant to reduce server load and bandwidth, but which has the handy side effect of being harder to detect. You'd probably design it this way even if you weren't trying to hide anything.

It’s proprietary. Anyone can do the experiment. One couple did it with cat food. They left the Facebook app open in the background and just talked about cats and cat food even though they didn’t own any.

I did this myself with the Porsche Cayenne. I have no intention of ever buying one, I’m not an owner, and I did not ever search for it.

AFAIC, the only way Facebook could legitimately say they don’t listen to your voice is if they’ve hired a third party company to do it for them.

Can you like me to the cat food video? That's exactly what I was about to do myself

https://youtu.be/U0SOxb_Lfps

/u/_jukmifgguggh don't just go clicking on that link willy-nilly with a device that you've also signed into your FB account with. Because of course then you're eventually going to get cat food ads after viewing a YT video about cat food.

I'm confident it's a third party. There's 80 major data providers all sharing data with each other and who knows how they get their data. Any app you have could be doing it and then sell the data back into Facebook. It's way more complicated than anyone can imagine. Look at the programmatic media buying industry - The Trade Desk, all their data partners. Facebook is just a small piece of it. TTD hooks into a data provider called Gravy that sells data on what recipes you're looking at so they know what ingredients you might buy. There's PlaceIQ that tracks where you go with your phone and sells that data. But all these things can be mixed and matched with each other.

Google may be opening the door for them?

I like where you are heading with that. Google and Apple themselves could very likely have digital diction and speech to text running damn near perfectly already on all devices. The OS itself must also be analyzed.

It’s not “very likely”

They do have that tech. There are garden variety open source projects that can do this shit.

I'm well versed-- I've already stated elsewhere digital diction software was being used since the 90's. Been recording digital audio myself since Pentium 3's.

It wasn't perfect tho.... now it probably is an order of magnitude better.

The audio stream doesn’t have to be compressed as previous posters have mentioned because all processing can be done locally and the keywords can be extracted and only the keywords need to be transmitted

What is the end game? Money, power, they had that. I don't get the c collection of every persons' data in our country.
I think we are a step behind the ccollection on what they are doing.

My wife and I have done this experiment with tennis and weeks later with curling (pre-Olympics). She has Facebook on her phone, and she got ads in Facebook both times within hours. I do not have Facebook on my phone, and I did not get ads about either topic.

Not really trying to defend facebook's but it could be any another app, unless they tested it on a phone with literally zero other apps.

The cat food one was unscientific bullshit. They just fell for confirmation bias.

This is just anecdotal, though. OP wants hard evidence. A double-blind peer reviewed study with a large enough sample size to mitigate the probability of coincidence. I've tried this experiment myself and it didn't work. What am I doing differently that's preventing Facebook from targeting me?

or they're under a government order to not disclose due to spying purposes...

You could decompile the code in the Facebook app, and see exactly what it does, but you would need someone with some expertise. Probably at least 100 people on reddit who could do it though. I maybe could, but I work 70 hours a week.

I think its far more likely that Google services would do it. Google is evil anyways, facebook maybe too but not as evil as google

The last binary analysis of Facebook was over 8 years ago.

We need security firms to step up to the plate now more than ever.

I agree

I was on Some thread on Reddit talking about mineral water (yeah the movies coming soon), anyway I googled a few brands of mineral water looking which ones are owned by large companies (nestle etc).

A few hours later I go on YouTube and one of the top suggested videos was about mineral water and where it comes from etc. Never watched anything remotely mineral water related or from that channel on YouTube before.

Well YouTube is part of google so that kind of makes sense. Especially since Google and Youtube accounts are usually one and the same.

It probably wasn't a related video, but a sponsored video. And yeah, seeing as YouTube is owned by Google, that's pretty expected.

Pro tip actually, if you get a bunch of shit ads for mobile games look up travel shit, you'll get really nice ads for exotic locations.

Problem is that app is gigantic.

I mean.. try it yourself, lol.

Talk about travelling to Africa, or buying new dog food, or talking about going back to college.

Try it, just talk about it few minutes a day around your cellphone with facebook open.

You will have your evidence. This is the best evidence you can get. Ive tried it myself 1 year and a half ago. When I started seeing diapers ads, (was talking about having a baby even tho i'm 100% against having children), this is when I deleted my account. Never went back. No ragrets.

If you are lazy about testing it yourself (because it can take 3-5 days before seeing results) watch this video : https://youtu.be/U0SOxb_Lfps

People only dismiss something as a conspiracy when they know it’s true, otherwise they just dismiss it as false.

There is a clear distinction between a false fact and a conspiracy theory. If I say the sky is green it is a false fact. If I say it is green because the Illuminati hollow Earth raptilian Jews want to make us believe than that is a conspiracy theory.

I call it a felony (lying to congress).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0SOxb_Lfps

well?

I quit drinking two years ago and almost never talk about alcohol any more. I went to California to spend time with some people I know. I didn't drink but went to some parties with them. I was telling them how Costco had higher rates vodka than grey goose for a fraction the the price while going in and out of the Instagram app (owned by facebook). not even 10 minutes later I open Instagram up again and the first thing I see is an ad for grey goose.

Well it literally is.

Oh, how mark!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Okd9xTDD2Mw&amp;t=352s

The best solution is ....i called it the end of FB everything Comes to an end

That’s funny considering FB stock has been rising since the testimony started. Last I checked it was up 7.11

Haha that's totally believable maybe i should have worded it differently.....I called it the end for me lol.

I think Facebook is too big to come to and end, no? Was MySpace ever this big ? Social media is used by ALMOST every single person now compared to what it was before...
I Fucking hope it does. I hate Facebook, I don’t get why people aren’t more worried

Can’t wait for that comment to come back and bite him in the ass. The astounding “No” to invade his privacy is all telling of his morality: its nonexistent.

Be honest: are you just jelly that this guy is stinking rich?

I know I am. And I can admit it.

Aren’t we all? They “allow” us to be part the of giant platform to appease us while Zuckerberg banks. And oh let’s not forget we can follow (only) him just to make ourselves feel more important.

Facebook products might not, but 3rd party marketing ads/apps probably do. Someone certainly is listening in for key words via FB.

MZ probably should have left himself some wiggle room.

This needs to move up, Facebook/youtube does not listen on their platform. Ads they host do.

Thsi may be, but the ads would listen in via the FB app, as no other advertising apps are installed on my phone in conjunction with FB, let alone with microphone permission granted. This is all done through the Facebook app. Maybe that will be his escape. "Well you asked if Facebook listens, which the company does not. The app however..."

The fb app would be considered a fb product, no?

Yes, absolutely. But in court technicalities can make a world of difference. I was half joking, but I wouldn't put it passed him.

But in court technicalities can make a world of difference.

there could even be a separate company that FB encouraged someone in-house to create, then contracted specifically to do the questionable stuff.

This may be, but the ads would listen in via the FB app, as no other advertising apps are installed on my phone in conjunction with FB

Would it have to listen through the FB app? If I search for power tools on Google Chrome (keeping my mouth shut about power tools at all times), power tool ads still show up on my Facebook feed. So, clearly, there is some connection between the two.

What if it's actually Chrome or, hell, Angry Birds that's listening to you and FB just has some way of tying into that?

What do you mean? Ads they host do? Facebook ads is a closed environment meaning you buy ads on the Facebook platform and they stay there. Inversely, Facebook does not accept 3rd party ads.

There is no option as a media buyer to buy "audio" targeted data or to implement tracking script into a creative to enable it to track audio.

Not saying it's not happening elsewhere but it isn't for ad targeting.

Ads listen? How do ads listen ?

But what about some people's experience where they talked about a certain person who showed up in the suggested friends the next day?

There could be a confounding factor which is causing both you to think about that person, and them to show up in your suggested friends.

Even if Facebook isn’t listening to your mic, they already have an incredible amount of data about almost everything you do online, whether through posts you like, friends you keep, or even sites you visit with a widget on the page.

It wasnt a mic though. We were chatting in Messenger. And we are Filipinos so we write in our dialect but this one time we talked about this philosopher, we were chatting in English and he came up the next day in my feed.

It literally gave me goosebumps. There were already rumors of course back then but it's surreal to see it in action.

Interesting, I’d say text analysis is more likely to be happening than hot mics.

Who was the philosopher though and do you remember why you were talking about him?

I think I posted it in my timeline immediately. I'll go look for it.

(ps. My previous comment was deleted accidentally so I apologize if others see nothing there)

What I'm wondering is if there was something else online which Facebook was aware of and which they knew you had seen, that caused you guys to talk about this philosopher.

For example, if I showed you an ad for gum and then a couple days later you were talking about gum, and then the next day i showed you another ad for gum, you might have just forgotten about the first ad and thought that the second was because you were talking about gum.

I once talked with a coworker about VIA rail (like canadian version of Amtrak)ans the next day, guess what I was seeing ads for?

Glad to hear someone speak rationale about this one. Not to mention all this is huff puff because a scary amount of people don't understand what a service agreement can mean when they sign up to connect and share stupid pictures of themselves.

Yeah I think this whole "interrogation" was just to create the illusion that Facebook is actually being reprimanded, when actually the government has probably been one of the biggest consumers and customers for the data Facebook has collected.

At the end of the day Facebook will continue spying on us and the government will continue to do nothing, especially considering how crucial this spying was to our president's victory.

Like maybe if Hillary had won and she didn't use Facebook's data and then this all came out, then she might go after them, but arguably Facebook through CA helped Trump more than almost anything else.

More confirmation bias.

What about the cat food experiment? They didn't have a cat and talked about it all day without googling it. Cat food ads.

Confirmation bias.

It's that fucking simple. They didn't notice the millions of times cat food showed up when they weren't doing this experiment, or the hundreds of irrelevant ads that show up at other times.

Facebook are shady fucks, but Reddit is literally turning into conspiracy nutcases with this "DEY LISYEN TO USSSSS" bullshit. It would be technologically impossible and would give Facebook no useful information that they couldn't get elsewhere.

They said they picked something that they didn't get ads for before. Zuck admitted in hearing that they listen to the videos and phone calls and scan the IMs, so I don't know why it is so hard for you to believe.

Do you know what confirmation bias even is? I suggest you look it up before replying.

Saying "I have never had ads about cat food" just shows how utterly ignorant you are about confirmation bias. You don't notice when you get irrelevant ads to you because most people don't focus on ads.

Facebook 100% does scan IMs and phone calls because it's actually technologically possible. To constantly record and parse language in noisy environments without any visible trace in network analysis would be an incredibly feat, yet would provide Facebook with barely any data in comparison to their other methods.

I fully believe that Facebook would record 24/7 if it was possible and profitable, but it simply isn't.

so I don't know why it is so hard for you to believe

Because I require evidence to believe something, not just a hate-boner for a company.

Well you need evidence to support confirmation bias too. I've taken a stats class.

Burden of proof is on the one making the claim.

There is no sufficient evidence to suggest that Facebook records everything.

There is a TON of evidence to suggest it would be both impossible and useless for Facebook to record 24/7. It would require significant processing power or significant data usage, both of which you can see yourself are not the case.

Furthermore, you can install applications which track when your mic or camera is being accessed on android. Surprise surprise, it isn't constantly being accessed by Facebook.

You're literally just making shit up and saying "well it feels like I see ads I spoke about so it must be true!!!"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBnDWSvaQ1I&amp;feature=player_embedded

Firstly that's Google, not Facebook.

Secondly, he is LIVE STREAMING ON YOUTUBE. i.e. he is using his microphone to stream on a Google website. That's simply not a fair test at all, and completely invalidates the results of the experiment. For this to be accurate the only source of information gathering must be through the mobile phone.

I fully believe that Google/Facebook will record what you're saying if you're livestreaming on their site, the question is whether they do it 24/7 from your phone (which isn't really technologically possible)

Furthermore, he completely ruins his own experiment by clicking the first dog toy ad he sees. Clicking on an ad will result in you getting more ads that are similar to that one, so anything past the first one is completely irrelevant.

I am about to conduct the exact same experiment myself, I will respond again with my findings to see if they compare at all.

I will be leaving Facebook open on my phone to the side while I talk about a search item (as with the video I'm not going to type or say it yet) once I have done a control.

Ok, so I've just done my experiment.

I wanted to try using both Edge browser and Chrome, to see if being logged into my Google account had an effect.

My keyword was "Cat food". I do not own a cat, I have never searched for cat food before.

In my control I browsed the fark.com website that the video creator used, and clicked random links as he did. I received 3 main types of ads: gambling ads, insurance ads, and ads for mobile games. I did not see a single pet advert, or anything that referenced cats.

I then started talking about cat food in a similar manner to the guy in the video, saying things like "We really need to pick up some cat food, could you get some at the shop" and referencing individual brands. I did this with the phone locked, unlocked, and with the Facebook app open.

I then opened a new instance of Edge, went to fark.com again, and observed. I still received no pet ads or anything referencing cats. The only "new" ad I received was an advert for hearing aids.

I repeated the entire experiment in Google Chrome, using a different keyword (in this case it was women's razors). Once again I saw no increase in ads of that type, nor did I notice a significant change in the ads that were being served to me.

If I had to guess, I'd say that either the OP of the video was having his mic analysed through YouTube streaming, or he intentionally messed with the results to get views.

I recorded my screen during the experiment, but not my voice. If you desperately need to I can post the video but it won't prove anything, just like the above video also proves jack shit.

I found this podcast pretty interesting, it is about this very issue. They don't necessarily solve anything, but there is some interesting information about how facebook connections work. This podcast is also pretty awesome in general, it's my new RadioLab.

It's called a coincidence.

It's a blend of confirmation bias, The Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon, and smart data engineers. It really all comes down to patterns.

To start, and this is something you'll probably recognize, but The Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon is when you become aware of a new idea and then it suddenly seems to be in your life a lot more. Maybe you learn of an obscure composer and then notice a concert for him in town this week. Or you watch the Food Network and then go to a restaurant and notice a new dish you'd just learned about.

Ok, here's where data science kicks in. Google has been working on learning what kinds of ads you're exposed to in real life, as well as online, so that they can better preform on digital.

2007: http://www.seobythesea.com/2007/06/google-radio-and-tv-personalization-ratings-and-advertising-patent-applications/

2009: http://www.seobythesea.com/2009/05/measuring-google-tv-advertising-and-privacy/

2014: http://www.seobythesea.com/2014/09/google-patent-watch-tv-as-ranking-signal/

2016: http://www.seobythesea.com/2016/01/google-cross-device-tracking-and-audio-watermarks/

So let's say you're in the car listening to radio, or maybe watching TV. The commercials start and you zone out. Your subconscious mind is listening. Then, later, you're hungry. You tell your friend you could go for a sandwich from that new sub place down the street. Little did you know, you heard an advertisement for it earlier. And not only that, but Google heard the advertisement earlier too. And it knows you usually eat lunch at 12pm because of your Google Location History.

Meanwhile, that sub shop has a marketing agency running an ad campaign online and offline. They probably use a product like Adroll to remarket things to you. They can ask Adroll and Google to use combined data to run ads not only on Google's platform, but also using Facebook's data and Facebook's platform, along with many others.

So now you're creeped out... it really feels like something heard you. And it did... kind of? It just heard what was happening around you.

And finally, you probably don't remember the 100 other times Google showed you an ad for a place that you hadn't otherwise mentioned or heard of in the same day. So it all just seems sketchy. Really, it's just patterns.

They do use locational data for stuffads and suggestions. If you go to a place with a bunch of your friends, and they bring someone along who is also their friend. Now you had two people who aren't friends and a bunch of mutual friends at the same place at the same time. It's not hard to figure that one out.

They were probably suggesting that person already too and you just didn't care befoee

CONFIRMATION BIAS

Digital marketing person here! I think Facebook does a lot of shady stuff, but microphone-assisted data collection isn't one of them, not by Facebook or by their ad partners. The way that ads are served in the platform doesn't allow anyone to siphon off data recorded by microphone, either officially or illicitly. Also, even if it could be reliably collected, the value of that data is surprisingly limited, natural language recognition is still not where it would need to be for this to build reliable targeting pools. Honestly, Facebook has more than enough data on you without recording you!

I say this because I want people to focus on the dodgy stuff that Facebook definitely is already doing, rather than inventing things that they're 99% likely not to be doing. It's a waste of energy.

Facebook buys data (in addition to their in house collection) from data brokers that do purchase from data collection groups that utilize this tech for keyword recognition. It's not from their ad partners within the facebook ecosystem. Oracle, for example, is one of Facebook's brokers and has on average 10,000 data points (emotional states, recent keywords, credit score, etc) per individual in the US. Their marketing copy brags about this.

Completely aware that Facebook offer third party data segmentation, but those segments do not include data gleaned from microphone tracking. That's pure science fiction.

So why do apps ask to control the microphone?

Correct- Alot of people do not know about http://alphonso.tv/ and their clones out there. This is seriously creepy stuff.

They all connect to each other though. So yes, indirectly, Facebook listens to you through your microphone.

Of course the microphones can’t listen AND serve ads. That’s crazy talk. Why would a microphone serve ads? /s

I see a future career for you in the public relations field.

The /s wasn't necessary

they shouldnt have been so specific

Odds are more likely that the phone manufacturers themselves are listening and sharing/selling that data, in real-time.

Which means he's telling the truth, but not the whole truth.

All he is saying is that "if there's something listening, it's not software that my company developed"

Odds are more likely that the phone manufacturers themselves are listening and sharing/selling that data, in real-time.

That would be completely infeasible for them to do and laughably easy to prove.

it's already been proven that the microphones are default to an always-on state. they can easily allow facebook's app to use that information. Facebook is like "no we aren't listening" the second half of the sentence is "the phone's microphone is listening haha"

Unless there is a public audit on source code no one can refute that with certainty and he knows this. Obviously only an idiot would believe him, but proving anything remains difficult.

I suspect it utilizes the same backdoor to the camera/mic the ABC entities utilize. They are united in deceit, and keeping up the illusion.

No back door needed. You consent to the mic access when you install the app.

This man may very well be correct. While I fancy myself as moderately educated, I could not argue this fact in court where it matters. Luckily I threw in my hand many years ago and opted on the side of cautiousness over convenience, ridicule be damned.

but proving anything remains difficult.

Empirically proving this hypothesis is actually quite easy, yet no one was able to publish scientific evidence. That's why this theory is complete bullshit.

"...no one was allowed to publish scientific evidence".

Agreed. And yet, they come to concrete conclusions? This is why I drink, apparently.

"...no one was allowed to publish scientific evidence".

Able, not allowed.

You just quoted yourself, then proclaimed that someone else should publish a scientific study on the matter.

This is quite possibly the worst attempt to illicit an emotional response I've ever seen. Please, carry on.

You probably never heard of the burden of proof. Those who make a claim have to prove it.

I didn't quote myself. You misquoted me. You seem to have some issues regarding comprehension and context.

to illicit

That's not even a verb.

I like how you change his words to mean something else entirely and then agree with it. Good job.

Actually, you're right I made a mistake and changed "able", to "allowed".

Supposing I didn't misquote, being as it well past 1 am, what is it that changes, exactly?

There is no public availability to the source code. Therefor we cannot properly audit Facebook's code and decipher whether, or not deception was purposefully planted, and lied about before our elected officials. And?

You would not need source code to prove they are listening. It's trivially easy to prove if it were happening. You can see what an app is doing if you monitor it. When it's sending data and when it's not, if and when it's using the mic, etc. The app can't hide this info from the os.

There is no public availability to the source code.

You don't need to prove how this technically works in detail. Just try to scientifically prove that it actually happens.

Take four identical phones, create a fresh identical Facebook accounts for each and use them under the following conditions:

1. Mic permission granted, conversations with certain keywords.
2. Mic permission granted, no conversations with certain keywords.
3. No mic permission granted, conversations with certain keywords.
4. No mic permission granted, no conversations with certain keywords.

If there are multiple times significant differences in advertising and the Facebook stream of either (1) or (1) and (3) show specific ads matching the keywords of the conversations you've successfully proven that Facebook most likely indeed listens to your conversations. Precisely document your test setup and analysis, so everyone can repeat it and independently confirm your findings.¹

It's a pretty easy setup that almost entirely eliminates other variables and doesn't even require a ton of resources.

¹Pro tip: Before you publish your study and uncover Facebook's biggest scandal to date, make sure you short Facebook stocks. As soon as this story goes around the world you can watch stock prices plummet while you make a ton of money.

'No... it listens to improve our services, not only to serve ads'

He's laughing all the way to the bank

Put your phone next to Spanish radio or tv for a few hours and see what happens to your ads

I'll bet nothing different.

Something might change and something might not. But the people who do see something change are going to tell everyone about it, thus furthering the myth that the microphone is listening to you.

I was thinking some of that language-based stuff was history of the IP/Bluetooth unit capturing the data. If you’re in an area where a lot of Spanish speakers were around perhaps it kicks in the Spanish ads?

Yeah, I'm bilingual and when I just talked to my grandma in Spanish, I had a bunch of ads in spanish, and when i got back home where I speak English, I got English ads

Were you using her WiFi?

Yeah

That would do it. I'd bet her Internet browsing profile is full Spanish, and that address got tagged to you.

Probably has nothing to do with the microphone.

Bad bot

THANK YOU!!!! Seeing as they are on wifi and there are lots of cookies being thrown around and they can link up the Grandmother's account to his account it becomes trivial to make the distinction. You don't have to listen to the microphone to start to see lots of creepy things.

I quit drinking two years ago and almost never talk about alcohol any more. I went to California to spend time with some people I know. I didn't drink but went to some parties with them. I was telling them how Costco had higher rates vodka than grey goose for a fraction the the price while going in and out of the Instagram app (owned by facebook). not even 10 minutes later I open Instagram up again and the first thing I see is an ad for grey goose.

Even location data can be used to target ads. Hanging out in a house with people who often talk about or search for alcohol? You'll get alcohol ads.

it was a random air bnb

People rent AirBnBs and Party it up, look for bars, etc.

A number of devices all coming from different places with alcohol search cookies coming together? Sounds like a party. If i was an advertiser I would definitely advertise booze to you.

You fail to grasp how detailed these advertising algorithms are

You trust the dude they didn't even put under oath?

That's literally being released to appease people like you. I don't think you understand how easy it would be to tell if they were actually using your microphone

You, sir (or woman or whatever (jesus its 2018 people)). I will buy you a virtual drink.

It's probably far easier to just have the AI work out what your specific area demographic is into, than to solve the battery drain of constantly recording the mic and transferring that data.

That's a stretch considering it's an age prohibited item that needs a lot stricter profiling for advertising. Microphone is more apt to be the cause in that scenario.

I understand the appeal of the story, and Grey Goose isn't exactly the gold standard, but that's 100% objective horseshit.

I went to NASCAR last Sunday and my buddy was explaining that you could refurbish a school bus for about $5,000 and drive it to NASCAR and it would be really cool and cheaper than buying a new camper. Scrolled through Facebook about 15 minutes later and on my ads there was a refurbished school bus turned camper for sale. And you guessed it, asking price was $5,000. No WiFi and I’ve never been to NASCAR before this.

Is your buddy your Facebook friend...?

Yes we’re friends on Facebook. Still doesent explain why we are having a private conversation at 7AM and then exactly what we are talking about pops up on Facebook 15 minutes later. No WiFi just two dudes walking down the street at 7AM.

Because probably he searched related terms.

Lol nah man. Private conversation walking around at 7AM. No searches included. And this isn’t my first experience with oddly specific ads popping up after private conversations. If you dont think your microphone is listening to you to target ads your being naive.

Yeah, because he definitely thought of this completely out of nowhere and had never searched anything related before either.

Facebook is bad, I fully agree. But to the best of my knowledge they have never outright lied about what they do. And why would they? People are perfectly happy to let Facebook keep logs of their calls, or at least not read deeply enough into user agreements to prevent it. They would still install the app if it was honest about listening to them. So why on earth would Facebook lie, breaking multiple laws, just to garner a small amount of data of questionable quality without users' consent instead of with users' (implicit) consent?

Cookies have absolutely nothing to do with what you're describing.

No, but IP addresses do. When you see two cookies have the same IP address and you know that the IP doesn’t have many cookies that get run through it (like you can tell it isn’t a business or library based on different cookie frequency), then you can tell it is a personal residence. Then you can assume your preferences or discussions could revolve around what was being searched at that time. Isolating that case is trivial.

I was talking to someone recently about vocational schools. I have never discussed it or even Googled it before. And then I got a Facebook ad for vocational schools

This is the last sub I thought I would see people discussing how they use facebook.. smh. Why does anyone still use that trash?

Nice try Zuckerberg

Exactly, I don't think people realize how expensive both memory and processing-wise voice recognition is. The products that parse voice almost exclusively are hardwired to recognize one single phrase, then the rest of the voice is sent to massive server farms because it is so computationally expensive to parse.

On top of that, all the other metadata about you is super cheap and extensive. People have no idea how much is known about them from metadata. So not only is voice expensive to work with, in most cases it's not needed.

Still fucked though

my next door nabor is going to disney vacation and i go over there and use his wifi alot and i get ads for disney vacations even when im on my own wifi but im sure it was because i was using his wifi alot

That would suggest that Facebook also does some of its catered ads based on the IP address, given to a household by their ISP, that you are accessing the internet through. Not necessarily that it gave those ads based on what language you were speaking.

That's actually kinda cool. Not sure why people get so upset over that shit it's just fucking ads. Most of us ignore them

Zoom back a little bit...

You guys are doing great.

I live in Switzerland and I get ads based on the provider im connected with at the moment. If my connection is routed via the frech speaking part, I get french ads. When it's the german part, I get german ads.

I use my phone pretty much exclusively in english, besides phone talks which are swiss german 99% of the time.

Schweizerdeutsch! Such a neat sounding word.

My dad tried to tell me targeted ads were based on what you typed. I told him I listen to Chinese hip-hop and I get ads in Hanzi. How does that happen? Did I switch my phone over to mandarin the last time I was looking for the closest burger joint?

there is a non-audible signal broadcast from all TVs. The mic doesn't need to listen to audible speech, just know what TV show/channel you're watching and start updating ads accordingly https://www.wired.com/2016/11/block-ultrasonic-signals-didnt-know-tracking/

It's literally the whole basis of this app: http://get.viggle.com/

Here's something to draw your pickle out.

The line noise of every power plant is recorded. A perfect 50/60 Hz isn't too easy to maintain, so powerplants record their frequency. This allows them to ensure they keep time, by either raising or lowering their frequency to average out a day, or a week, or a month to the ideal 50/60Hz.

This variable frequency manifests itself in our daily lives. Such that a video recording, for example, can be dated and located precisely.

If you record a video and your A/C unit motor can be heard in the background, that data can be dated and matched to these recordings the powerplants keep.

Is this real?

https://youtu.be/bij-JjzCa7o

Think about the quality of microphone you'd need to isolate and accurately record the frequency, down to a thousandth of a hertz, of an ac motor running in the background.

The bigger problem is that video records 24 to 60 frames a second. You're not going to get super detailed with that resolution.

Quick honey! Take a video of the sound before it gets away!

It's detecting through audio, not video. Even shitty voice recording is capturing at at least 8000 samples per second.

The video frame rate has nothing to do with the audio quality.

You're not going to get super detailed with that resolution.

Audio resolution is in no way bound to video framerate.

For example, an iphone can record at 240fps but the audio is still 83Kbps across the board, even at 30fps the audio is still 83Kbps.

Even crap quality would have a rhythm to it. Just need the gaps to pin point the frequency

It’s legit http://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib=14411

I can't read that. $33 is a bit steep.

It was the first source in a Wikipedia entry on Mains power forensics

many AC motors are speed controlled by the frequency of the power coming in from the drive controller circuitry. the frequency you'd "hear" from the motor would be tied to that freq instead of the line freq.

unless you're looking at data from a motor running straight off AC (like a fan or something) you'd be getting bogus data.

It's not yet good enough to take an unknown time video/audio recording and figure out when unless you've already got a good estimate, but it is definitely used to be able to detect if a recording that's being used as evidence is not from the time that it's claimed to be, or if it's been spliced.

No. Your phone cannot record sound accurately enough to detect the difference in frequency of sound to that precision.

Yeah it's even better then that....trust me :)

source: have friends who work in TLAs who get drunk and like to tell stories of the tech they use!

Complete bs.

well obviously I can't provide any proof to back it up w/o ratting out friends with clearance, but think about what sorts of SIGINT could be done once you know the facts that /u/Derkek posted. Let your imagination wander and now you're thinking like a DARPA researcher. There is some pretty crazy stuff that can be observed and manipulated related to the electrical grid

Imagination is fine, but implementation is something else. It might be possible theoretically but it doesn't mean it has or will.

http://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib=14411

Your imagination is so lacking, it can’t even compete with reality

It's a real thing, literally, and your negativity is without base

Not if you're off the grid! Maybe another reason they keep trying to make it harder and harder to do that legally :P

Is that why solar panels have to be attached to the grid and face such insane regulation?

I'm sorry, draw my pickle out?

If conspiracy theories don't make your penis erect, then maybe you're on the wrong sub, Bub...

You know, bake your noodle.

If by ac motor you mean the outdoor fan motor in your condenser unit, if it's running generally your compressor will be running as well. How would they differentiate the noise from the fan motor and the compressor?

The difference in motors or application is immaterial. Not relevant. Any device that makes noise that is to the tune of the electrical grid are what contain measurable data.

It could be a blender or a transformer humming on the street.

I got ya thanks for the clarification. So it doesn't matter what electrical device is, if it makes noise it's hum will align with the frequency coming from the power plant.

Lol as an EE this cracks me up

I've been dogsitting for my mom the past week, beyond that, my gf and I never talk about dogs, never are around dogs, 0% of dogness in our lives. Two days after I have him in the house I'm getting served ads for dog food. Let's get real here.

Are you on their WiFi? If you go back to your house do you still see dog food ads?

Not doubting you just trying to see what factors are all there.

so anyone who logs in the mom's wifi would automatically be served up with dog ads? that sounds ridiculous imo

What, you don't think advertisers target by IP? Why wouldn't they, that's a super valuable form of tracking.

https://www.dbswebsite.com/blog/2016/03/16/ip-targeting-101-smart-display-advertising/

/u/DefinitelyNotThatOne took the dog from his mother's house back to his place, as his wording indicates

Two days after I have him in the house

the above also implies that he wasn't served dog food ads in the initial two days of taking the dog home. so even if he logged in his mother's wifi, there's no chance it automatically serves him dog food ads based on that alone

Yeah I just have misread the post I was responding to, j thought he was also staying at his moms house, where it could have been a WiFi thing but obviously not at his dog free home.

i think the wifi aspect is really overblown, there's no way you get the exact same ads as the wifi owner simply by just being connected. too many scenarios where people under a shared connection don't necessarily have to have the same interests e.g. public wifi, school wifi, one off connections, etc. since the ads are always so accurately tailored to the specific individual's scenario, there has to be a combination of other factors at play as well

I think it’s more of a combo of every app you use is reporting data. I just think of all the things I have on Pinterest, Reddit, games I play. They’re getting info from all of those sources.

Hell even my grocery store app can tailor ads to me based on what aisle I’m in at the store.

You take a photo of the dog? Where'd you get the ad served to you? You buy any dog food or dog products? How'd you organise taking the dog? You sure

Yeah I feel like this microphone recording thing speaks more to the public's lack of education on how their data is being collected more than anything. It's still a problem, because it just means all of these more legitimate privacy invasions go unnoticed.

Yep. If people said, oh freakiest thing, I was using Messenger the other day and we were chatting about my dog, and I got pet food ads, you could educate them on what exactly they're trading for these free services.

But people already know. The cat's out of the bag, the uproar never came, so now it's moved onto "I'm being fucked, I'm being tricked and I'm being lied to." when the sad fact is, they chose this all this. No one pulled the wool over their eyes in the same way Coca Cola doesn't pull the wool over your eyes when they don't call their drink mostly "sugar and carbonation".

So people get angry, maybe a little guilty. They feel hard done by and wanna be vindicated, "oh we all know that Facebook was selling our data for ads, who'd have been silly enough to not expect that?! If i products free they've gotta make money somehow! I just am not okay with being tricked!"

Many underestimate, for lack of english, ad-algorithms. I can see how the microphone would be the first thing that pops into peoples mind but, they spent 10 seconds on that thought. You on the other hand, took probably a minute or two and came up with several more ways that the data could have been collected through. If then a professional team of 10 programmers and software designers would sit down for a week I bet they would have something that is uncomprehensable for the average user. Sorry for bad grammar.

I never talk about mentos. I was at the store and told my friend that I wanted to get a pack for something. I never searched it. Never even think about it. After I left the store I got ads for mentos

I listen to k-pop and after hours of listening i have ads about planning a trip to korea...

Do you listen to it on YouTube?

I was unable to pay my spotify account that time so i used my cds

I'm sceptical of that. I live in Spain so all the radio, TV and most of my conversations are in Spanish but the only ads I get in Spanish are for places I've checked into locally. Most of my ads are in English because it's the language I have fb in.

I remember in retail someone returning that magical TV hose thing, not even talking about it and sure enough it shows up as an ad on Facebook.

My roommate and I will set our phones next to each other and talk about a topic we never talk about or even care about. Almost every time a few hours later we are seeing ads based on the topic of conversation. We’ve done this about ten times now. The topics were just random stuff from yogurt to specific camping supplies.

My French roommate was talking loud enough in the room next door that I started getting French ads on YouTube it’s not even a question for me if it’s listening in or not

I don't think Facebook is is the one "listening"

https://imgur.com/a/1M6kW

Why would anyone believe anything this cunt says?

He's gonna say whatever necessary to keep his stock price up. Also he's not under oath so there are no real legal repercussions.

EXACTLY! He wasn't under oath because most of the people questioning him have stock or have received donations from FB. This whole thing is a shame

No hate but I Think you meant sham? Shame works though, why hes not under oath when you spend all that time to drag him in is beyond me. Its kind of a waste of time.

*sham

¿por que no los dos?

lol he sold his stock long before he got thrown into the limelight. Look it up.

Not all of it

well duh, but more than enough.

he wouldn't sell all of it so he can, y'know, own his company.

but he's cashed out hundreds of millions so at that point, fb can crash and burn and he will be fine.

The same reason they still use facebook. Utter retardation.

Yeah no I’ll be ok. But thanks for the concern ;)

According to Zuck himself, you're a "dumb fuck" to trust him.

No, that was according to him when he was 19.

I'm kinda out of the loop. Why is Zuckerberg a cunt and also from one of the replies from you, why is using Facebook considered as "Utter retardation"?

Because it's technologically impossible to be constantly recording like this without obvious battery or internet usage patterns.

There is ZERO evidence of this happening.

What's the difference he isn't under oath.

Bingo. Not that it matters, as Clapper showed us.

Why wasn't he swarn in to oath? What even is the point then 🤔?

Lil bread here, lil circus there, for the people.

This, how can they care when they repealed internet privacy laws allowing our isp's to collect and sell our personal private data. These politicians acting up in arms is a fucking joke.

You mean people are just now realizing that Facebook and Zuck are just fall guys so the entirety of their online corruption and spying networks aren't exposed??

Nahhhh

People don't even realize that. Majority of the people I know aren't concerned. They seriously don't care.

Because its been known for years. Same for the nsa spying

I think we are normalized to it through different forms of media so that when the news breaks "NSA spies on its citizens." We've already accepted that idea for years so there is no real upcry.

I’m obiously not a fan of the Zuck but it’s kinda ironic to see him being used as a skapegoat for everything.

"scapegoat"

Thought there was something wrong with ‘skapegoat’, thanks for the correction.

I don't understand how people still believe these bullshit hearings. When are they going to call Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft?

It was a joke.

Not to mention all so many services and companies out there base their model on statically knowing your habits and selling that data.

The inly things they're upset about is facebook employees using their bias towards conservative groups. That's what everyone is cheerkng anyway look at the_dumbo they had something stickied about it

ISP should be regulated to prevent selling private information

Aaahhh. The ol' razzle dazzle

I've never seen this saying in English

It's an act. A show. It's not actually real

It shows the masses that something was "done" about it. Then everything will return to how it has been going.

i wouldnt be surprised if all of the top posts on r/all atm that feature him were preplanned. he was already getting mocked all the time, wtf is some more mocking by a bunch of powerless losers that will never be able to change anything?

Your last point is inaccurate. If enough people demonstrated, strikes, etc. things would change. But they don't, because the majority don't care

"I can't protest in the streets; I have work in the morning, and I'll miss 'the voice'!"

Yeah 300 million people is likely every able bodied individual in the US. You don't walk away from a protest of that scale without serious social change

This is slowly but surely changing, and I think TPTB are trying to stop this from happening by creating problems to make us fight amongst ourselves instead. Compared to 3 years ago, it seems nowadays like many more people are aware of all the BS that goes down in Washington. But still after seeing the stuff on mainstream media and social media and whatnot they set aside their problems with Washington to deal with the problem of white people being more privileged or gun control or what have you, because this is what they're seeing when they turn on the news or open reddit

well i hope im wrong about it too

yup, they call this optics

a quick photo op and it's out of sight and out of mind

But here's the thing, he technically didn't lie.

Do Facebook products listen through the mics on your phone to serve you ads?

"No"

The mic is there for the surveillance state, the ads are just the silver lining for Facebook.

So it's not technically "to" serve you ads.

Ah! So the State is in on it. They frame questions in a way to make sure Suckerberg doesn't lie? I mean, I have to marvel at the ingenuity and genius of it. But, one day, we are going to get ours. One fucking day. And I hope it is in my lifetime.

Why aren’t we revolting?... shouldn’t we be bringing up the fact that he wasn’t sworn into oath? I don’t know much about this, but it was just a first thought....

We should've revolted when Wilson created the Fed res. We should've revolted when Nixon got rid of the gold standard, and when Kennedy was shot. We should've revolted when net neutrality was repealed. We should revolt because of Big Pharma and the opiate epidemic. Every time the government has gone against the good of the people for private profit, we should've revolted.

But. People are sucked into the system. Instead of having a unified people. They have created political teams for us to choose. Then we fight against ourselves. We blame the two political parties instead of the government.

I got news for you people. Republicans and Democrats are sucking milk from the same titty. They're on the same side. There is some entity above them controling what each party does. They each blame the opposing party for giant fuck ups that have occurred which perpetuates us fighting each other.

Abortion, civil rights issues, tax bills, pornstar allegations, etc. All are distractions used to hide the fact that they are taking away our freedoms one step at a time. And people are so dependent on the system that they are a slave to it. They will fight for it, even if it goes against their own civil liberties.

Bingo.

Attack Facebook to distract the masses from the hoovering sound coming from giant fucking NSA storage facilities.

You're a sweet kid. Carlin explains it best

Because the House committees deposing him have revived more donations form fb and fb related individuals than anyone else

Because he isn't really on trial for anything illegal. Even if FB did utilize data collected from your microphone, it's not like that was illegal as I'm sure it was agreed to within the ToS.

Thanks for an actual answer. Oddly enough Facebook pushed out an update today, hmm.

Distraction from imminent WW3.

Wasn’t Clapper under oath for his most famous blatant lie to congress?

Yes, which is why it doesn't matter whether Zuckerberg was under oath or not. He's part of the ruling class, and rules don't apply to the rulers.

not wittingly

Clapper didn't know he was under oath? The NSA wasn't wittingly gathering information on millions of Americans? What are you talking about?

lol clapper is a treasonous piece of trash. I was joking.

What statement are you referring to?

“Is the NSA collecting data on thousands or millions of Americans?”

“No”

Not technically a lie under oath, as it was collecting data on thousands AND millions of Americans... /s

would it even matter if he was

It's still significant if he lied. Giving false statements to congress can be illegal even if you are not sworn in.

That said, it's rare for such charges to actually be pursued so it's still a crapshoot.

Even if there were no legal consequences. There'd be major publicity consequences and more political pressure if he lied.

Forgive me if I have my doubts. Government officials have lied to Congress (Clapper) or even being held in contempt (Eric Holder) and the media has completely ignored it.

publicity consequences and more political pressure if he lied

only if it's in their plan. otherwise he will be fine.... absolutely fine.... just like Clapper.

Publicity where? In the media they control?

but are they really going to harm a profitable company who's stock was just artificially lowered significantly through the revelation of a conspiracy that a majority of FB users had to of thought would happen sometime in their lives?

So in other words, if he were to get caught, he wouldn't serve any time because he's Mark Zuckerberg.

Ridiculous how we're so complacent with people literally lying to the nation and our elected representatives in an official capacity.

He can lie to congress easily because they're so old and ignorant they probably think phones and computers are still made of magic.

These interviews in front of congress are just circlejerks. They never, ever have any relevance or effect anything. Its just a chance for the senators to appear to not be influenced by the person before them who is funding all their campaigns........

Exactly. No different than when HRC straight up lied, or when the head of the NSA lied about mass surveillance. No consequences for these types.

Still a crime to lie in these hearings

What difference, at this point, does it make?!

Still a crime to lie to congress with the same penalty as perjury

Story time. A few weeks ago, I asked my mom what kind of joint health supplement she wad giving her dog. She said it was called Dasuquin and I made a joke that maybe I should eat some, too. My android phone was sitting right on the table.

The very next day, I start seeing ads on my phone for Dasuquin. I checked the backlog of texts between myself and my mom and we never mentioned it. I know we never talked about it over the phone, just that one time.

Now I keep music playing all day long and I leave my phone right next to the speakers. If I'm visiting somebody, I leave my phone in my car. If advertisers are doing it, so is the NSA and god only knows who else.

Need an update to that old bumper sticker "don't steal people's data - the government hates competition"

Is Facebook spying on you? Great podcast, interesting episode about this very issue. No, they don't find a smoking gun, but it is an interesting listen.

I was sepaking to my neighbo about getting a new garage door... pull my phone out of my pocket 20 minutes later and FB is advertising garage door installation... Zuck's a real dummy for denying.

I bet you ignore almost every ad that you're shown except a few that are applicable to you. And I bet it was in the spring, when most home repairs are conducted. So you happened to be served an ad that was applicable and you didn't tune it out for once, that's how advertising works.

I was talking with a coworker about high-speed roll up commercial freezer doors a few months back. Picked up my phone after and the first ad on FB was for high-speed commercial roll up doors. Never once had I used my phone to look up any thing remotely close to that. If that is a coincidence, I’m due to win the lottery any time now.

Fair point that it could be amazon or twitter listening to us and communicating that with some higher tech god that spreads our data far and wide. I spent a week telling my friend he should do yoga. He’s never done talked or thought about it; instagram gave him an ad for a yoga app to get shredded for men.

You were in the same location as your co worker, who we can assume was researching them. Boom, people tend to have similar thoughts so they sent you the ad

Negative. The person I was talking with was from another department and would not have researched them. We have wireless at the facility and several hundred employees. The odds of it randomly finding my phone is slim to none.

I bought deodorant the other day which is some random brand that I’ve never ever seen an add for. I showed someone the deodorant and today I received an add on my Facebook for the exact same deodorant; scent and all. Now my phone was a few feet away so A. It picked it up from my microphone or B. It tracked my purchase through my debit card. C. They tracked me in Walmart to that shelf location. All theories are fucked.

PS I know I’m stupid for having Facebook to begin with.

Or you fit the profile of someone who may buy that deodorant.

If they knew you just bought some they wouldn't show you an ad for it.

This is reasonable and maybe true.

Sometimes when I exit out of Instagram the red bar that tells you if your recording a voice message pops up and disappears.

Of course he'd say no. Facebook would never do something so insulting as to invade your privacy to serve you ads, they just invade your privacy to better your profile and send you better recommendations

He isn’t testifying under oath today, nothing he says matters, just all theatrics

They absolutely listen in on conversations and place ads accordingly- I included this in my statement for the Class Action Lawsuit

The only way he could deny that with a straight face is if Facebook hired a third party contractor to listen to you so they could claim Facebook doesn’t do it themselves.

Also, his use of the words “conspiracy theory” are a dead giveaway to me these days. When these people use that label specifically, they’re hiding something.

The only way he could deny that with a straight face is if Facebook hired a third party contractor to listen to you so they could claim Facebook doesn’t do it themselves.

OR, if they don’t actually listen, which I bet they don’t.

Also, his use of the words “conspiracy theory”

Well, it’s literally a conspiracy theory, though.

This! It’s such a convenient way to dismiss something.

It 100% does!! My husband was talking to me about some new TV he wanted to get, going on about its features and where it was on sale (Best Buy) etc etc. I was half heartedly listening and I definitely never used my phone to look it up in any way as I wasn't really interested. Anyway, next time I open Facebook it has targeted ads about tv's at Best Buy including the EXACT SAME MODEL my husband was on about. No other way it would have happened!

Welcome to confirmation bias.

Nope, especially considering that confirmation bias requires you to have a pre-existing belief you want to prove. I didn't nor did I even care anything on the topic. In fact, this happening made be go whoa, because I had vaguely heard this claim before but it had never affected me like this personally.

Your husband looked it up and your profiles are linked due to frequent communication and proximity.

Husband doesn't have Facebook and the only device I even have Facebook on is my phone, no other device and he never uses my phone for anything. So doubt this is the case

Facebook tracks you on any site with a share button on it regardless of if you have an account or not.

He doesn't have to use your device, if you connect to the same networks or you have him in your contacts or you cosigned a loan or you use the same postal address, they have numerous ways of figuring out that you two are married. Since married people make decisions about appliance shopping together, they showed you the ad as well.

I’m gonna call BS on this one. Not once in the last 3 years of living together has an ad resembling anything remotely close to any of the shit my fiancée constantly looks at on her phone, popped up on my FB.

Yeah my fiancé has lived with me for years and I know for a fact he would have his Facebook flooded with auto industry ads like mine is from work. His ads are almost all bodybuilding or sports themed.

Although now I’ve probably said too much on reddit and they figured out who we are. Time for a new username:

He doesn't need to have a Facebook account to have an ad profile. They link you in many different ways as other commenters said and therefore found you would likely want a tv aswell

Will he be proven wrong? Yes. Will this come back to "haunt" him? No. He's above perjury laws made for us peasants.

He's not under oath here, sadly. It's all quite pointless.

The whole “to serve you ads” was the exit for him.

They just listen to be fucking creeps who invade your privacy.

Anything

I wonder if he get's advertising for lawyer's when he checks his facebook?

Not two days ago me and my cousin were super high and talking about how cool it'd be to own a log cabin, something neither of us plan on doing in the future and have never looked into. 2 hours later he opened Instagram and the first thing he sees an ad for a company that builds log cabins. Zucc you lying fuck

Aren’t we all a little jealous? Isn’t that what they want us to be. Isn’t it obvious? We’re “allowed” to be a small part of this big giant platform Mr. Zuckerberg built for us.... This should appease us while he sits back and banks.

Guys, if they were listening through your microphone it would be ludicrously easy to prove.

That needs to be driven home more: it would be utterly trivial to prove they were spying on us.

You could look at an app's processor time, use of hardware, network traffic, etc to see that something was happening when there shouldn't be. You could run controlled experiments to try to elicit certain ads by repeating words around the phone over and over.

The fact that nobody has found actual proof really means that there is no eavesdropping going on. There is however a lot of confirmation bias and misunderstanding of current technology's abilities.

it’s hysterical this is consider controversial

But my anecdotes!!

And my confirmation bias.

Not necessarily true. Sometimes an APP can chew up your processes more than seem normal for no apparent reason except for a bug or a problem that needs to be addressed on the back end. Also, Facebook and messenger already use a ton of RAM as it is. There's a reason deleting Facebook greatly improves battery life on mobile devices. It might be too much to run the mic constantly but the mic might be programmed to become active under certain conditions, record and translate what it can gather (like Alexa or other voice services) and then read that input for keywords. If there are ads that match those keywords they could be called upon to display. The data could also be stored. I'm not an expert but I can see in a rudimentary way how it could work. With the brains, skills, and money at Facebook... Yeah they could make it work.

Facebook messenger on my phone used 60MB RAM over the last day on average. In contrast, my keyboard app used twice as much. Facebook have been good about optimization compared to a year ago

Maybe I'm using outdated knowledge because I haven't had the app on my phone in quite some time.

A big thing that people don't understand is the predictive power of the data they have on. That's what causes the phenomenon that people experience as their phone "reading their mind" and serving ads for products they've only thought of. Your phone isn't reading your mind, ad agencies are predicting your behavior based on the reams and years of data they have, and they ideas they've already put in your head

I honestly have never experienced this. Ads only pop up for things I have searched for, and even then, only from chrome on my mobile because chrome on my desktops is locked down with ghostery and uBlock.

It's mainly people searching for a product then forgetting about it honestly.

Aggregated Intelligence (AI) is predicting your desires in some way we can't quite understand or look in to. It seems like a misuse of the tech quite frankly. Such potential.

Thank you. I thought I was losing my mind reading through all of these insane comments. It’s obvious that many of the commenters don’t have a strong grasp on how technology actually works, as if Facebook uses magic to eavesdrop.

Not to mention that iOS puts a huge red bar across the top of any app using the mic and I'm pretty sure recent versions of Android do the same. If Facebook knew how to circumvent this, Apple/Google would certainly be able to tell, so they'd both have to be complicit in this.

Thank you, voice of reason!

It doesn't take much to get hit with targeted ads and people probably aren't aware of how subtle/sensitive that mechanism is. I once posted a status with the word "fabulous" in it and got bombarded with ads for gay New Years Eve parties for the next week.

What freaks me out is that people have conversation on what’s app or messenger it’s likely that what you speak about there is being logged and indexed in the mix, did they ask that question?

I have an honest question.

With the Spanish radio serving me Spanish ads, how does that work? I am not searching Spanish radio stations or buying a radio, how do they know to serve me ads in Spanish?

Liar liar

My friend recently got his Ultra Boosted shoes stolen in Las Vegas, he left them in a "hidden" area because he had to swap out shoes to get into a club. The next day I get advertisements showing off Ultra Boosted shoes, something I never even heard of the day prior.

I mentioned a kid i hadn't seen in 25 years and he popped up in my fb suggest a friend literally 5 minutes later. Zero mutual friends man. Zero.

Did you ever happen to be in the same place as this kid?

I’ve noticed a lot of people on that list I don’t know at all, it slightly recognize from working at a store I frequent or repeat customers at my facility. I don’t even have Facebook on my phone and have them pop up on my computer at home.

I’m wondering if google maps sharing my movements with Facebook could be doing this? I mean 0 mutual friends so it has to be a location thing right? So maybe all the randos I don’t recognize I just happened to be in the same area as them at one point?

I don’t know.

I thought about that too but he lives in Florida. I'm 5 states over.

There's a "chance" that he looked you up as then he appears in your might know list. Unlikely as that coincidence would be.

They should offer him some curry, deados hate curry.

Mark is full of it. You can even experiment and test it out yourself. Start talking about anything and you are going to see ads about it on FB and IG. They are absolutely listening to us every single day.

This is 100% real. It happens to me quite frequently actually. Latest was when we we're talking about SD-WAN solutions in a board meeting, and the next day I was getting ads targeting SDWAN solutions.

Makes me feel kinda weird knowing it analyzes everything it hears to target ads.

Confirmation bias

For a long time I thought people were crazy to think Facebook was listening to them.

Recently though, I'm on board. My wife was listening to a book on CD that mentioned an ice cream place called It's-It. A day later, she's got an ad on Facebook for it. Thing is the nearest location is thousands of miles away.

Zuck is full of shit and should be in jail.

Why would the advertiser serve and ad to someone thousands of miles away.

The very first item when you select an audience in the ad manager is location and radius around that location.

You should take a look at the ads manager, might alleviate some fears.

I don't think anything is going to explain that besides just saying the phone is listening in.

Willfully letting critical thinking go

BIG DISTRACTION from WW3 about to light off...

So if he’s worth $60B, a good haircut must be going for $61B.

Finally someone comments on the real conspiracy here.

The real conspiracy is always in the comments

LMAO

He'd have to find a barbers chair with a booster seat. Maybe he should check out kid snips?

We should all pitch in to help

I watched the opening hour and closing hour of the hearing due to being busy at work, I swear his hair grew a quarter centimeter over the course of the 5 hours he was there.

I think he looked ok

Do you have the same haircut?

No...

Check out the guy with the bowl chop Marge.

You could say "product's can't listen" we record through the mics... and not just on your phone ;)

Are we betting personal data or cash?

He wasn't sworn in so ... nothing burger.

I have a friend that works relatively high up in digital marketing, and he said what he's heard is that it's not Facebook, it's other apps / preinstalled / native software that does it, passes the info to third party after companies, and Facebook simply consumes and displays those ads.

What they didn’t ask him is if Messenger listens to help target ads so technically he is correct, Facebook doesn’t...

Bullshit. I'm about as far away as possible from being a conspiracy theory nutter but I am 100% sure that Facebook listens and serves up ads.

I've had the TV on in the background and Facebook has miraculously brought up relevant ads. I've had conversations with people within earshot of my phone and later on it's shown relevant ads.

But the most damning evidence? I was sent to a PR event for my work, and was discussing PR and promotions with people and afterwards Facebook was showing ads for PR and promotion agencies.

Facebook doesn't listen? Bull-fucking-shit.

I've deleted via the proper link. Good bastard riddance.

Could it be the Google app on phones listening in and serving ad data to Facebook that way?

I know Facebook shows me ads of things I've looked at in chrome for example, but never spoken (I generally turn off the voice wake up functionality on my phones when I remember).

This happens a lot to me:

A few days ago I was talking with my mom about solar panels, a few hours later, I get solar panels adds in Facebook . The conversation was in real life, i have never talked about solar panels online , nor in messager.

Other time, I rescued a cat from the streets, I walked a lot about the cat with my son , but never posted online about it, suddenly , the next day , I get lots of adds about cat food .

Every time I tried to talk about this in Redd it, it gets really down voted

Can confirm shit that I’ve only talked about face to face has popped up in the form of advertisements on IG and FB.

Did this yesterday. Tested it out by complaining that I couldn't sleep, over and over. Suddenly 12 ads/articles on insomnia cures etc. Lying through his teeth.

Zuckerberg is an add

He wasn't under oath so it doesn't matter what he said.

https://clips.twitch.tv/PlumpArbitraryHabaneroPeanutButterJellyTime

They've already admitted to it, and it's in the terms and conditions for the app

ITT: People that desperately need to uninstall facebook and messenger from their phones.

Of course it's listening. So is Alexa and so is Google Home.

There’s an interesting article on the Alexa processor that listens for the “on” word. There’s literally an entire processor that just listens for the command. It’s not recording all the time, architected that way

Just what some hacker living in a basement on the other side of the world was looking for.

He meant to say, “no.......t anymore.”

Booo-urns!

My girlfriend and I were sitting in Freddy’s eating burgers and listening to “Put You Head on My Shoulder” by Paul Anka and the next day she had 3 ads for the song on Facebook. This shit will eat him up soon.

He wasn't under oath, but we know that doesn't matter anyways.

No you missing the technical part. Facebook doesn’t do this but app that log in with Facebook can, and sometimes that it shared with Facebook through a different mechanism.

He didn’t lie...per se.

The nsa records it, then Facebook buys the data from the nsa. So Facebook doesn't record it, but they still target ads from your phone calls

Its not facebook that listens, Its google.

I call bullshit. I was discussing in person with someone a medical condition that I do not have nor have I ever even googled it, and the very next time I went into fb (later that day) an ad popped up in my feed about that very same obscure disease.

Considering how easy this is to test and no one has ever been able to show that facebook is listening and sending it seems truthful.

If someone proved FB was sending audio at all times (again would be very easy to do) then it would be world news for days.

it's just a conspiracy power fantasy - same with the people that tape over their webcams. doesn't matter if there's a physical hardwired LED people are still going to believe a hacker can get past it.

even if FB recorded audio at 32 kb/s that's 337.5 mb/day or around 10 gb of data per month. that means all phone providers are in on it too because they're not showing that 10 gb of data on your plan now are they?

This. A fellow redditor was trying to convince me that they can get 1 second audio clips down to just a < 100 bytes which is how they get around the data limits.

It’s just ridiculous made up bullshit to fit the narrative.

One second of uncompressed, 32kbps audio is 4096 bytes. You can probably get away with a much lower bitrate for just crude speech pattern analysis. Trim silence, vary the sample rate (eg drop every second 5ms period), apply a high pass filter, and compress. You can probably squeeze it to a few hundred and still be able to recognize key words reasonably well.

Or you can just do the much more sensible thing and do basic analysis on the device instead of storing or sending any audio recording. Even just a quick Fourier transform.

Or you can just do the much more sensible thing and do basic analysis on the device instead of storing or sending any audio recording. Even just a quick Fourier transform.

Which would still be easy to prove if it was happening. Unless you're claiming they are finding some way to transfer data from the device to the Internet without any of the devices along the way being provided the data.

Exactly. It’s like I know they could maybe compress the shit out of it, trim silence, all this shit. And it still would be a noticeable chunk of data. Plus the power needed to constantly be compressing and trimming audio on a mobile device. It’s just a lot to consider, I don’t see how they could’ve been doing it this whole time and it’s completely untraceable.

I guess technically you could split the audio into tiny chunks and attach with the other legitimate data and once encrypted for transport it would be indistinguishable but someone would have picked apart all the data before it was encrypted by now.

SSL? Or are you referring to volume of data? Because it would be very little.

Not sure what your actually trying to ask

Marcus Thomas, former assistant director of the FBI’s Operational Technology Division in Quantico, said in a recent story in The Washington Post that the FBI has been able to covertly activate a computer’s camera — without triggering the light that lets users know it is recording — for several years.

did you read what I wrote?

okay?

seeing as they had physical access to make this work they could have gone the easier route and just disconnect the LED altogether.

Where are you seeing that physical access is needed?

step 1: install new firmware

the only way to install firmware remotely on macos without user input is through already infected firmware as far as I know.

means you have to somehow get the user to connect a physical infected unit to their computer.

You don't think it's possible to hack into a Mac remotely?

I would bet everything I own that he is going to be fine. I don't believe for a second that he's in real trouble. The dude is going to get away with it with little consequence. That's how this usually goes. I hope he gets taken down but I'm not holding my breath

Is there not a way for someone to modify an android OS to alert when an app accesses the mic after receiving the permissions

This lying cocksucker talking to a plethora of lying cocksuckers he's given $$$ to. Fuck Zuck and fuck his shit social networking platform. I'll Facebook your ass in public son.

He has the kind if haircut many crossdressers do, so they can wear wigs...(thinking)

Hes not lying if told his folks down at HQ to turn that feature off before we went.

They asked him a present tense question and got a present tense answer.

Yeah facebook doesnt listen, it just retrieves the audio file from phone and performs analysis on it. Facebook listening to ppl is a conspiracy ppl

rom phone and performs analysis on it. Facebook listening to ppl is a conspiracy ppl

It's not. It's true. Messager does listen to you.

No way, the zucc denied it. He couldn't be lying in front of everybody!

It won't. He probably lied in front of professional liars. If it does he'll have some lawyer argue that "no doesn't always mean no." He's probably used that guy before.

I don’t believe him at all. My personal experience with seeing ads for a specific model of car I had been talking to my wife about before doing any shopping is way too much evidence of fuckery for me.

Maybe it was a coincidence but I promptly uninstalled their app.

it doesn't seem to be listening lately, to be fair. it seemed to in the past but im not noticing that now. maybe if it's not a current feature he's not lying?

He wasn't under oath. Guarantee you he won't be held accountable for this circus clusterfuck we witnessed today until GEOTUS starts putting down the whole cabal in a big way

Zuckerberg is known to cover and disable his own microphones on laptops and such.

i dont even see any ads so i can neither confirm nor deny this

Holy shit, you people are insane.

Please explain.

i know facebook/google uses your mic because if i’m talking about something and never typed it in i’ll get ads for it unless computers can read minds

Did anyone notice his face when some of the questions became uncomfortable for him? I could only watch for about an hour or so, but I noticed him doing some hard swallows during a few rounds of questioning. This jerk evaded some direct answers or just deflected. What a liar!

so I was just talking to my dad about this... My business partner and I were in a store one day and we struck up a convo with a random person. We didn't exchange numbers or emails or any information just spoke to them for a few minutes. When we left the store he pulled out his phone and low and behold in the "People you might know" area of FB was THAT PERSON we were talking to. I am glad I haven't used FB in years because that was crazy!

Location tracking does wonders! I like to watch mine change based on where I am. Coworkers I’ve never spoken to or customers pop up on mine all the time just because were frequently in the same location at the same time.

And this is the tech they most likely use.

SilverPush

The use of SilverPush to track users across multiple devices has privacy implications and allows for more detailed tracking of users. Data can be collected from multiple devices used by a single user and correlated to form a more accurate picture of the person being tracked.

https://www.silverpush.co/about

i had a creepy experience like that the other day. I was drinking with a buddy and I said "Oh man, I am gonna drive us to the outback steakhouse." this was a joke because the nearest outback was over an hour away and we were shitfaced.

Then I get on facebook to drunk msg xgf's and sure enough it's filled with ads for outback. so was his.

I'm pretty fucking sure that bitch Siri is in on this

It listens even when you're out of service and stores it until you get back to town. I went backpacking and saw ads for shit we talked about while out in the middle of nowhere.

100% they do. I was on a bachelor party and in the hotel our one friend's feet STUNK and we kept talking about it. We get on the train and I opened Facebook and what do I see? An ad for foot powder or some product like that. It even said something like "stinky feet?". The whole group of friends I have between these guys were there so there wasn't any texting about it or anything. Even then that's still them reading/listening to advertise instead of just using your search history

I went to church with my boyfriend’s family last Christmas, and it was the first time I’d been to church in years. I was telling my mom all about it the day after, and the next day I received an advertisement about a church on my Facebook. The product can range from online shopping to church apparently.

I don't think he was ever sworn in. Shit like this is probably why.

I wish he was also asked if they use information from other apps that listen as well. It's possible Facebook or whatsapp doesn't, but Shazam does and Facebook uses that data...although I'm sure Facebook is listening as well

Can you lean in towards your laptop and say that again?

Reminds me of "I did not have sexual relations with that woman" Clinton

A few weeks ago I was talking to a friend about casinos in the San Diego area while driving her to the trolley station. She mentioned her mother likes to go to Tijuana to play at “Calientes,” a casino id never heard of (so I couldn’t have searched it). The next day, I’m scrolling through Instagram and boom! Ad for calientes. And no I didn’t search it up after we talked, I had forgotten about it until the ad came up. I had heard these stories but this was the thing that made me 100% convinced our phone mics are being hijacked.

I don’t understand why people think this is fake. I planning on buy a preowned iPhone 7 Plus 32gb from sprint with my mom. We have Verizon and never even talked about sprint. Plus the nearest sprint store is like 2 hours away. Anyways I go on Instagram and guess what shows up. A sprint ad for a preowned iPhone 7 Plus 32 gb. I wish I was making this up

That whole testimony stunk. We just witnessed a live incrimination.

Facebook doesn't.

Their partner companies listen on Facebook's behalf.

Exactly

I bet this is the beginning of the advertising bubble starting to pop.

lol wut

He is the CEO of a multi-billion dollar company. I'm sure there are several people that would want to spy on him.

You are correct, everyone should practice covering their webcams to protect their privacy at home. There's tons of nefarious people out there who are looking for any way to screw you.

Wait, is the your question "does he listen" or "will lying that he doesn't bite him in the ass"?

Because, he definitely does, and I'm like 90% sure it won't, even though I would prefer it did...

I'm an Australian, I once met a girl from Scotland and got her phone number, nothing else. A day later she was in my recommended friends list.

Facebook app can gather nearby WiFi data and compare it to other users'. Just the fact that you were near the same WiFi networks shows you've been in physical proximity. That's just one trick they can pull.

Met her on Tickld, we were never in the same vicinity. Also Tickld didn't have any sort of friends system and it was months after that anyway

Now that's strange.

I remember a while back facebook would automatically access your microphone while you were posting a status to include whatever music/ television you were listening to/ watching in your status. Obviously what you post influences the ads, so wouldn't this mean it does, even if indirectly?

It all depends on who he donates to and how much.

I shouted “bull shit!” at my radio

Alot

That is a completely and unabashed lie. He said this maybe because they disabled just prior to the trial and Instagram still does for a fact.

I work for a major insurance company. Have my phone on my desk throughout the day, with all kinds of apps including Facebook running while I work leads and make dials. I have constant ads for home, auto, life and health insurance pop up in my news feed. From all carriers and companies that offer those services, not just the one I work for. I hardly ever talk about work when Im at home or out with friends, especially try hard not to open any social media apps then either. If he's not under oath then he can say whatever he wants, I think its pretty clear that Facebook is obtaining the data to show you specific ads through SOME means of "observation".

This isn't even a theory anymore. It's a known fact.

Well they technically probably don’t, but the company they hire to serve ads does!

Holy shit this is my life right meow.

Facebook and Amazon consistently get suggested stuff wrong for me. Google is sometimes very accurate but less lately as I have moved to using DuckDuckGo. Also I logged out of Chrome and removed it from everything and started using Firefox again after so many years. Use Facebook via web browser only now too.

Funny how apparently every other person in this thread has a story where this happened to them, yet NOBODY is able to provide any actual evidence.

What would you accept as evidence?

When the number of anecdotal accounts becomes this numerous it starts to have legitimacy as evidence.

After 1 person gets lung cancer who smoked, sure where is the evidence?

When thousands and thousands report it, it is no longer simply anecdotal.

All anecdotes are confirmation bias.

/s ?

After 1 person gets lung cancer who smoked, sure where is the evidence? When thousands and thousands report it, it is no longer simply anecdotal.

There's verifiable proof of the existence of lung cancer, though, not just anecdotes.

there's verifiable proof of fucking cat food ads too dumb fuck. what is in debate is what causes the cancer / cat food ads to appear.

Is there verifiable proof that cat food ads show up after you talk about cat food, never browse for cat food etc., you fucking retard? Because the answer is an easy "no". So go fuck yourself.

Removed. Rule 10. 1st warning.

So is "dumb fuck" okay? Because either is fine for me.

Neither are okay.

Your comment was reported which is why I removed it; his was not. I've removed his comment and given him a warning. Your comment is still removed, but I'm rescinding your warning. Next time please just report the comment rather than descending into personal attacks yourself.

Removed. Rule 10. 1st warning.

Evidence of certain Ads popping up? I can provide that if you like

See my reply to the retard.

I want to bet Google+ much...

I know it's bullshit. I've seen ads on facebook for something I just talked about way too much for it to be a coincidence

I think they don't need to. Predictable patterns make society from individuals. There's so much potential.

I don't understand?

How's this different to using an Android phone? Google already tracks your calls, vocal patterns and conversations?

Phones that capture facial and fingerprint recognition data, matches that data with your identity hosted by government and 3rd party companies.

Sure Facebook is bad. Are Android and Apple so different? Microsoft? We're part of a pattern, where AI is leveraged to monitor.

Well. We've been discussing with my friend, about a certain hotel in a room where we had two phones. After an hour my friend left and I've checked my phone. Guess what? I received a sponsored message from the hotel that they are holding a marathon. It was the first time my phone or me heard about that hotel, no Google search no nothing. Yes this could be just another reddit story only. But think about if they were just testing the service on couple of thousand users at a time.

Then why Mr Zuckerberg, are you photographed several times with the mic and Webcam of your laptop covered with tape? Not one of those questions?

Has Mark mentioned anything about the NSA? I guess it's fine for the actual government to collect data?

Clearly they're getting the info from somewhere. It's not difficult to prove that you'll get an ad after only speaking about a product that has no relevance to you. It's been tested time and again.

They need to show where they're getting the data. No more letting them talk around it. Specifically ask "where did you get the data for this ad." If Facebook isn't listening, is the OS? Another app? Who's their partner that is listening?

I’m pretty sure they do.

So the reason he can say that is the don’t listen the buy the info from the people listening. Go to create and audience on you Facebook page and you can see all the companies they buy data from. Most of them sell suggestions based on audio interceptions.

Have fun with that one.

I always remove the bottom half of my iPhone to prevent any chance of this happening.

I was talking to the wife about getting rid of some scrap metal that was in the yard. Nekminit ads for metal recyclers appear in the facebook ads. I call bullshit.

$0

Last summer I was travelling with my brother in the car. I mentioned a band he had never heard of. I told him about their recent concert I had went to. Less than 2 minutes later, my brother goes went on Facebook and there's an ad for concert tickets for the band I had just told him about. He said he didn't look anything up on it and had never heard of it before.

Really creeped me out and I deleted Facebook after that.

So this is super easy to prove with Android. Why don't we have a bunch of proof published? Someone get on this.

That's because it's not Facebook listening to us, it's our phones themselves. Samsung, iPhone, HTC, all of 'em.

"Is Facebook listening? No, just buying the data from those who are."

They don't listen in on you. If they did, it would have been caught by now (one of the many engineers and testers who worked on it would have said something) or one of the many people who checked the FB app and how it functions would have caught it.

Pretty sure they analyze your text messages and FB messages though.

They have a large amount of data on you, which they combine with very sophisticated machine learning and analysis to get a better idea of what you want

Well technically it's so the voice to text algorithm can serve ads.... so he's.... kind of not wrong.(?)

He isn't lying, HE doesn't listen to that shit, his learning algorithms do.

They dont need to listen to you. They have all your info, know what you like or dislike. The problem is that this info should be private, or only shared with who you choose. We all know its not.

Should?

What does the TOS say?

And what does that little flashy app that finds out what kind of kitten you are say? The one that has a little box where you have to click "agree" to continue with the quiz.

How long did you agree to the terms of the quiz service?

I mess with it often! It's fact that it listens to keywords and phrases for ad placement. On iPhone you can turn the setting off by turning off the microphone on the Facebook app setting. But it's still very creepy when left on the number of things you could say and then show up on your feed later in the day. They also have a connection that spies on your browser search history and targets ads for that as well.

It doesn't, and he wont. Ignoring the fact that he has almost complete immunity to prosecution and the short memory Americans have.

The amount of data for 1 person streaming voip is about 1 gig a day, which is not a lot of data, but when you think about the fact that they have 2.2 billion users (214 million just in the US) it's just too much data, even for facebook. Its the same reason Alexa and Google home use a hot word tied to a chip to start streaming, it just to much data to deal with.

Only if you keep insisting on thinking about computing in human bran terms.

A gig a day per person? Yes, it's cumbersome if you think the system has to be centralized. If it's localized to each person, it's a piece of cake.

Im not talking sorting and analysing it, just the sheer size of the amount of data transferred.

Ignoring the data size fact, constantly listening would kill your phone's battery, and it's easy to show how much battery you use with FB installed vs not having the app installed and realistically i only saved about 3% battery for a full day of usage. Plus the constantly running app would be a red flag, but on a tooted phone with a real process manager shows FB sends small packets of location and app usage about 6 times a day, the packets are to small to contain voice data even when converted to text.

I hate FB just as much as the next guy, but constant listening is not fesable, unless maybe if you are an important person... I wouldn't put it past them to have the option to always on.

You assume the app cannot be programmed to run in the background, without being counted by your phone monitors that show apps as they are running.

You are thinking "it's impossible because" instead of thinking "here's how they could do it."

Im not assuming anything, I've been writhing custom android roms since the original G1.

You cannot truly hide a process, even if a monitoring app can't see it, your battery will show a drain that isn't there when facebook is not installed. That And the FB app is easily dissected and reviewed.

Thinking "here's how they could do it" is how I came to the conclusion that it's not happening. I've dissected the app. I've set up controls and permissions to monitor the apps activity both data transfers and background processes, it's a shitty written bloated app, but it isn't listening to you.

Maybe you can't, but then, maybe you suck as a programmer.

Maybe I do, but I'm not the one making unfounded accusations about something I know nothing about.

I'm the one who is postulating solutions based upon system architecture that while I nothing about it, I do know everything we know about how our phones are working are programmed features.

The component that tells you when an App is using data is a program. It has inputs, and based upon those inputs, it makes a calculation and provides an output. You, Mr. Manager, come to me and say "Mr. Programmer, Mr. CEO wants this app to run silently so that it does not show up within the data usage sum."

And the I, Mr. Programmer along with a hundred other programmers or a thousand programmer, figure out how to make the app run without showing any usage metrics. Once we figure it out, we make the code a short block and it gets copy pasta across the company code whenever they want a silent app.

You think this is impossible because it sounds outlandish, and yet, its just programming. Rethink how your basic computing electronics work, rethink what those numbers are telling you. We've had hidden files and hidden processes with us since Windows 3.1, this is not a new idea.

K

Move along citizen

Depends on what your definiton of "listens" is.

YOUR HONOR, "LISTENS" IMPLIES SOUND WAVES TRAVELING THROUGH AIR STRIKING A HUMAN EARDRUM, NOT ELECTRONIC SIGNALS BEING CONVERTED INTO WORDS BY AN AUTOMATED DATA GATHERING SYSTEM.

"Case dismissed!"

It does. My mother-in-law and I were talking, she was talking about buying an electronic fence for her horses. I get on Facebook that night, there were ads for electrical fences.... Come on... That shit is self aware.

Put your phone in front of Spanish radio for a few hours and delete any app that give you Spanish ads.

The first thought that comes to mind is that maybe they stopped doing this once they realised how negatively people would react to it. Was he also asked if they have ever done it in the past?

Zucc said that if you upload video, they extract the audio and use it for "processing" ... so if facebook already has the algorithms to process audio, then what's stopping them from using your microphone anyway?

You do realise they have to do processing on the videos they get uploaded, right? You do know that compression is a thing right? Not saying it's impossible for them to analyse and use that video for nefarious purposes, but saying they are doing evil stuff just because they "process audio" is stupid. Also them processing audio has absolutely nothing to do with their ability to use your phone mic. That's a local phone permission which (in most modern phones) you can disable and stop them from accessing it.

This is true. Facebook always knows what’s happening in my life more than I do.

And other hilarious jokes you can tell yourself.

I'm almost certain it is true. The convo'w i've had with my wife and then gone to facebook a while after and there is an advert for what we were talking about. Happened numerous times.

Who ever in their daily conversations talks about the product “Bag Balm”, hardly anyone- right? Well I mentioned it to a coworker the other day after she was expressing to us that her dog had something going on with his nose. Later that same day, I was scrolling down Facebook and an ad came up for..... BAG BALM. So, if he was being technical maybe “Facebook” itself doesn’t listen, but their advertisers sure as shit do.

Bingo.

And you gave the advertiser the necessary permission to listen in on you 10 years ago when you took that "Find your spirit animal!" quiz and opted in to let them use your data.

Lies! A man shared a story with a group of us. He had been discussing a specific part of the world. Just casual conversation, no thoughts or plans of visiting. In the car, he scrolled phone & travel ads to that unique location popped up. He was totally weirdest out.

Bread and Circus for the masses while privacy is slowly being eroded everywhere...

He has no realm over "Find out what Fish You Are," which first asks if it can use your data before you start the quiz, and then never stops listening in on you now and then to harvest data for another third party advertisement agency that wholesales advertisements for Facebook.

At this point, what difference does it make? He could not recall being told that it ever happened.

This happened to me last month! Spoke with a coworker about adoptions and foster kids, never googled these themes and next day Facebook started having ads popping up about becoming foster parents. Creepy!!!!

They don’t fucking record audio randomly. This is fucking stupid.

I was in the supermarket the other day looking for oat cakes (quite a specific item) I was on my own, so I didn't mention it. I hadn't searched for oat cakes online at any point.

I got them, but that's not where this story ends. This ends where I look at my fb and all I have are adds for Nairns Oat cakes!! This freaked me out so bad

My cousin Jimmy was talking about what dildo to buy his 11 year old girlfriend yesterday and when he went into his iPhone, he saw an ad for dildos!!!! Facebook is listening to us!!!! !!!!

I fucking love that all 3 US major networks called Zux "millionaire CEO of Facebook!!!"

Like somehow it eluded all 3 of them & their crack reporting staffs that Zuckerburg is a billionaire many times over.

I guess they all decided to make him more "down to earth" while the bread & circus bullshit is going down.

huh? he wasn't sworn in lol.

Things to note:

• Facebook literally warns you about most of the shit it does

• You wouldn't have to worry about your privacy being tossed around on Facebook if you didn't put your private information up there for grabs in the first place, you absolute buffoon.

Bingo

I’ve been using my PS4 and guys in the squad were chatting about cocaine (their voices come through my TV) and then Instagram started showing me a heap of Pablo Escobar related posts after I finished playing. I no longer have Facebook, but seeing as Insta is owned by FB...I find Zuck’s reply BS

It won't because he isn't under oath, so this is just a dog and pony show to shame him (which he deserves) but more importantly to shoe in an excuse to regulate the internet more closely, censor your online presence etc.

seize your domains like they just did to backpage.com etc.

I'm convinced this is the case, on Sunday I was talking with Japanese friends about a particular old series, Captain Tsubasa, also called Holly è Benji in Italy, where I originally watched it. I hadn't thought about this show since I was around 12 or 13. Next day FB served me an ad for the new Captain Tsubasa video game app! I've never searched this game, series ever. I'm not even into video games anymore. There is no other explanation for this ad appearing.

Billionaires don’t get “haunted” by anything.

"No" (but you did give me a great idea)

I would like to hear Google, Samsung Amazon and Apple testify the same thing. I am certain my Android phone listens for my voice assistant keyword 24/7. I am certain it asked me if I want targeted ads for the same platform. I'm certain the same app asked me if I am willing to let it analyze my voice to improve targeted ads.

People really believe this still? Honestly, facebook does so much shit, but people can be CONVINCED that this is happening by a couple of shitty youtube videos or anecdotes. IT'S A FUCKING COINCIDENCE. With the number of people using Facebook, and the amount of data they already have to serve you ads, it's GOING to happen numerous times even with spying on you with the mic. Give it a rest, or reproduce it enough times that it's a statistical anomaly.

His word doesn't mean anything ....he'll lie through his teeth

I warned everyone for years about the day the slugs would take over, they have sent their bots to collect information about us. This truly is the end of days!

Another thing I noticed with FB, I was at a bar in a big city, talked to a girl for a while, exchanged names and she gave me her number but as drunk as I was the number I wrote down wasn't valid.. Anyways, next morning, I try to search her on FB, she had a very generic name like Mary so my hopes weren't very high, but here she was, first in the search results despite not living in the city, having no common friends or anything that linked us other than having talked to each other in real life the day before...

Aside from her giving you a false number being a possiblity...

I've had FB suggest a friend I hadn't seen in ~15 years, had zero contact with over anything resembling facebook, no shared friends / family.

Closest digital contact we'd ever had was MSN messenger waay back, circa 1999, and that fed into XBOX live accounts, which was no surprise both being Microsoft...

But to make the leap to Facebook seems a bit sketchy. No way they could have known without harvesting data from MS or MS having shared it.

This one is easy enough to verify by disassembling the Android and iOS apps looking to see what the apps do

I don't mind if that is true, at least then I only get ads for stuff I actually have an interest in.

This is what's wrong with our country.

"IF it's true", which I doubt it is.

Shouldn't it be incredibly easy to see what data Facebook is actually recording on your device?

I'm sure dozens of researchers have already checked that claim.

He’s full of shit. There is no doubt they use the mic to record us.

That squawk of a no was fucking hilarious. I knew right away. "Liar" ahahaha

Mark : "No,........... not ALL the time"

Meh, 99% of facebook users have been willingly spoon feeding the succ all of their information for the last however many years, don't imagine that they need to listen to you speak to serve you ads. That being said, it's pretty likely they are doing that considering how depraved of any morality advertising and marketing is.

"to serve you adds?" No, no, the mic isnt used for /adds/

To be fair, I'd wager if it does happen(or other things that we know do), he is likely unaware.

Olnly in late stage capitalism they can steal all of your data and justify it with "it is to serve you better ads". People even believe it. Dumbfags, haha.

facebook uses the searches of your friends not your mic this is why you feel like it listened to you, because it gives you ads for the things you talked about with friends and only they googled

if you think every tech company doesn't listen in to find what you talk about for ads and spying via integrated microphone... you're insane.

Fuken Liar

The question was fairly specific. It might not be exactly that, so he might not be lying when he says no. But it's probably close to the truth

On Sunday I drove past an old job I worked at; I mentioned to my wife that I used to work there. The next day I was asked if I knew the owner of said job. I've never talk about this job on Facebook, nor anywhere else for that matter. There is no way that was simply a coincidence. I even have disallowed mic access to Facebook, so double "Hmm" there.

Technically he's right. Now Messenger on the other hand...

Because it’s google who does it, not Facebook. They buy data from each other.

He has a few days to “adjust” any statements. No doubt itll be done when everyone isnt watching

I'm betting one upvote.

I bet FB knows everything about me even though I've never had a FB, Myspace, insta, snapchat, tinder accounts etc. Only social media I've been on are Twitter and Reddit.

In his defense, it might be amazon that is gathering that microphone data and selling ads. Fucking background processes

This isn't a conspiracy. Everyone knows it does.

Did he say no? I thought i heard him say he had to "get his people to come back to them to better answer their question on the matter" as he said on every single tough question

Not again with this shit.

I'd guess that it wont haunt him at all. People are allowed to lie under oath if it's to the benefit of the establishment.

Here's another instance of lying to congress: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGYn7ER5U_0

People are allowed to lie under oath if it's to the benefit of the establishment.

If this is true, I am just about at the edge of whether I want to live or not. If we have gotten to the point that we are legally allowed to escape any accountability, we have lost.

Source?

Plot twist. Facebook doesn’t but Instagram does.

He's probably using semantics. Facebook doesn't listen but the OS does and we just harvest that data or some other BS like that.

He wasn’t under oath.

That means he didn't perjure himself, not that he wasn't lying or that there aren't consequences.

Pulling that data from your mic WILL SHOW UP on your Data/Battery usage.

It’s far, far, far simpler to just access the friends, data, and associates they already have.

Technically he is right because they asked him "If I make a call on WhatsApp and I say 'Black Panther' while I get ads for Black Panther"?

WhatsApp doesn't do that. BUT if they were smart they would have also asked about FB messenger, and OTHER apps that they own. But he didn't, he was insistent on WhatsApp...

This is what happens when out of touch senators ask questions.

Facebook 100% is listening to your conversations, picking up key words.

Why is it then everytime they show an old interview with Zucker in front of his computer he has a peice of tape over the camera lense? If they can do the camera they can do the mic.

It doesn't listen to serve ads.. It listens to sell your data to other companies, who serve you ads. The question should be two part, does Facebook listen and collect data through mic, then how does it use data collected.. Maybe he didn't technically lie?

Wasn’t there a video of a guy proving this??

A friend of mine has a new girlfriend. I met her for the first time last week.

Ive deleted the facebook app from my phone but when I logged in through chrome, who should be the first person to show up in the 'people you may know' section?

When my girlfriend got pregnant, we avoided telling anyone pubically for a few weeks. Maybe she had messaged a few of her friends but I only ever spoke to her about it via messenger ( like when I'm in work) suddenly the adverts for weddings and engagement rings where everywhere. And this isn't just in Facebook so don't tell me they aint listening.

Funny. I called my sister while at the store last week, asking which brand of sparkling water to buy. I mentioned the product name in the phone call. Later that day, I receive a sponsored ad on Instagram for that exact brand. Never in my life have I searched for that brand (or sparkling water for that matter) on google or any other platform, and I haven’t searched, liked, or followed any pages regarding it either.

they got you - welcome to big bro :(

I don't know if the app listens or not. What I do know is that my battery discharges a lot faster when I use the facebook app vs just looking at facebook in chrome on my mobile with the app uninstalled. Also, if the app is open in the background it burns up the battery as well. It could be nothing but it give me the impression that a lot of processes are running other than what is needed to display my facebook wall.

asked if Facebook products listen

Possible response: "Nope, a third party prodcuct does that for us."

I used to think this mf was the coolest dude ever. I wanted to be so much like him. Way long ago.

Can anyone prove this is actually happening?

Nobody can prove anything without having access to Facebook's backend. We do have tons of circumstantial evidence about it.

But what about the data required to send constant audio stream back to Facebook. Even if they were able to record at 32/kbps that would still take up a huge chunk of someone’s data plan.

My guess is the data isn't sent raw but it's rather crunched and analyzed in some way.

Yeah that’s the only way I could imagine. Is if they had a voice-to-text function. But even still, sure seems like a major risk for a company to take just to be able to provide slightly more targeted ads. Then again, that’s also the moneymaker. So idk, you’re right we can’t confirm it unless we had access to the source.

10 Denarius

So glad I haven't had social media since MySpace. Friends to me are people you can call, text, and remember their birthdays without Facebook doing it for you.

Nah, tech's not advanced enough to do that for cheap, there's easier ways to get that info.

Controlling your thoughts. Especially with machine learning and AI - we are all creatures of habit. If you like these things you probably do these things. If you start liking things now you are intending to do X soon. No limit to the application of that data from commerce to politics to more sinister things like pre-crime.

where's the video?

Z E R O

Does Facebook universally use it's own ad system? Or does it use Google AdSense also? Because I'm fairly certain Google uses your mic lol.

I want to know who the people that work for facebook are . what country are they from what are their political leanings . How many of them are foreign nationals with dual citizenship . And how many of them are working as spies for foreign intelligence agencies

I think it's clear someone is doing that, but it could be Google.

Where's the video?

Word!!! It happens all the time.

is this the part where I express my anger and protest, then continue to use Facebook? I have gotten pretty effective in my indignant attitude about oil, gas and then go drive my car with the 'save the planet' bumper sticker. What else can I do to express disgust and not do a damn thing.

True Story: I was at work watching a Ben Shapiro youtube video and a co-worker walks in and asks me what I'm doing. So I turn my monitor towards him so he can watch as well. One minute into him watching the video his phone vibrates with a Facebook notification. He looks at his phone and touches the notification and sure enough Facebook was telling him that I like Ben Shapiro. Sorry, I don't believe in coincidences like that, they ARE listening.

Android does it. Facebook access their data. So Facebook doesn't directly do it, Your phone does it.

Do you guys have any idea how much resources it would take to do something like that? Just for better targeted ads? They would 100% lose money from this.

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I totally beleive this could be happening (secret ad recording). But me and my partner have been having conversations about buying a pressure washer for a month now in different ways and places and ive yet to recieve one advert, sale, or promotion for a pressure washer. Im kinda dissapointed. To be clear we really dont need a Pressure washer whatsoever.

No. who would even go that far if it was legal.

It's not going to haunt him at all, that's why they pay lots of money to political campaigns.