Phones listening to you

[gh5000]

I was skeptical, but when we had our recording studio redone a few weeks ago I said it could have done with having a specialist acoustically treated door fitted.

 

An hour later I was treated to an advert for specialist acoustic doors in my app timeline.

 

I've turned off mic access to facebook and messenger, and am seriously thinking about dropping them both.

I think proximity to another FB user could also be the factor here. Guy installing the studio owns a company with a FB page etc and is near your phone etc. Maybe. Just an idea

[hardtailstar]

I see this regularly happen and I don't have any Facebook app installed.

 

I'm not too worried about it. They sometimes can be subtle reminders that I need to buy that product!

[Bompalompalomp]

I've been saying this for years! The worst one recently is my partner and her friends were talking about taking a friend to see male strippers. And now I'm getting ads for those same male strippers... I'm a lesbian.

 

I have a massive list of screenshots I've taken when I've noticed it...

[mikeprice]

Could it be something simpler

 

e.g. Facebook knows who you friends are - and knows where they are

 

if you are all sitting around talking about something - often some of your friends will then go off and search for that thing later

 

so Facebook sees a lot of your friends looking at the same subject

 

so passes you the same adverts as it is likely that you could be interested in the same things as your friends

 

no sneaky listening in required

[elsiegee40]

Could it be something simpler

 

e.g. Facebook knows who you friends are - and knows where they are

 

if you are all sitting around talking about something - often some of your friends will then go off and search for that thing later

 

so Facebook sees a lot of your friends looking at the same subject

 

so passes you the same adverts as it is likely that you could be interested in the same things as your friends

 

no sneaky listening in required

 

I think Facebook is up to all sorts that we don’t know about. I have long wondered how Facebook comes up with its friends suggestions.

 

I haven’t given facebook or messenger access to my phone address book ever. Neither has my husband who only has 3 friends on facebook and doesn’t have the facebook app. (Me and our kids... a deliberate ploy so he could use messenger without giving it access to his contacts).

 

Yet facebook routinely suggests people as friends to me who are in my address book or his. Or people who are friends of people in my address book... like the plumber’s teenagers who I have never met and don’t know my kids. And I’m not friends with the plumber on Facebook; I just have his number on my phone.

[Bompalompalomp]

I think Facebook is up to all sorts that we don’t know about. I have long wondered how Facebook comes up with its friends suggestions.

 

I haven’t given facebook or messenger access to my phone address book ever. Neither has my husband who only has 3 friends on facebook and doesn’t have the facebook app. (Me and our kids... a deliberate ploy so he could use messenger without giving it access to his contacts).

 

Yet facebook routinely suggests people as friends to me who are in my address book or his. Or people who are friends of people in my address book... like the plumber’s teenagers who I have never met and don’t know my kids. And I’m not friends with the plumber on Facebook; I just have his number on my phone.

 

It definitely scrapes your emails and texts for possible contacts. It's suggested to me a lecturer I've only ever emailed, a guy I met for a motorcycle ride once and we only emailed/texted that I never even knew the surname of. A few more like that. Also suspect it does it with people who went to the same location/events as you.

[jthompson]

Could it be something simpler

 

e.g. Facebook knows who you friends are - and knows where they are

 

if you are all sitting around talking about something - often some of your friends will then go off and search for that thing later

 

so Facebook sees a lot of your friends looking at the same subject

 

so passes you the same adverts as it is likely that you could be interested in the same things as your friends

 

no sneaky listening in required

 

This. I really don't think the advantages for Facebook of listening to mics are all that great, and can't be anywhere near worth the risk that they'd be taking by doing it. They can already finesse a great deal from more legit sources.

 

As for friend suggestions, that could simply be down to a high proportion of people in your contacts being people who have uploaded their contacts to Facebook. Your connections with people will be spelled out to Facebook dozens of times already, without them needing to see any of your own contacts data. Couple that with a few years' worth of mobile locations, messaging metadata and the existing social graph for each of those other people that you know, and Facebook can take a pretty educated guess at who some "J Bloggs" is and who they know IRL.

[elsiegee40]

One of the suggestions is a former colleague of my husband’s. He is an Indian national living and working in India. The only connection is that my husband was his boss when working out there 4 years ago.

 

Another is the teenage daughter of the former head of my governor school - he wasn’t on facebook. They live the other side of the county. I had his mobile number.

 

Facebook is doing more than simple matching.

[mikeprice]

yeah - I think there are some very clever and devious people working within Facebook working out ways of getting more info

 

and they are very good at it and have huge volumes of our data to play with and see what works

and the resources to do it

 

quite impressive in a way

 

still - as a private company - they can be fully trusted to look after our best interests

 

can't they?????

[Norphy]

Facebook can be trusted to do whatever makes them money. Nothing more, nothing less.

[jthompson]

Facebook can be trusted to do whatever makes them money. Nothing more, nothing less.

 

They'll be balancing up exploitation of users' data with retention of users' trust. Sacrificing all of the users' trust by violating them in that way (eavesdropping without consent) will lose them money. Even in the absence of everyday morality, the logic of making money would suggest that they don't eavesdrop with mics. Especially now that the company appears concerned about leaks.

[Zoom7000]

I downloaded my Facebook data the other day. It was mostly me rambling about my mother in law and her quirks and how boring Preston is! If they can make money out of my data, then power to them! [/slightSarcasm]

[difinity]

One of the suggestions is a former colleague of my husband’s. He is an Indian national living and working in India. The only connection is that my husband was his boss when working out there 4 years ago.

 

Another is the teenage daughter of the former head of my governor school - he wasn’t on facebook. They live the other side of the county. I had his mobile number.

 

Facebook is doing more than simple matching.

 

Do you have Whatsapp installed ? That would be one way Facebook knows contacts that are only in your phone.

[elsiegee40]

Do you have Whatsapp installed ? That would be one way Facebook knows contacts that are only in your phone.

 

I have, husband hasn’t. So it may explain some suggestions, but not all... especially the Indian former colleague of my husband. His number is in my husband’s phone contacts (which facebook has never had permission to access) and they’re connected via LinkedIn (which has a separate login)

[mavhc]

Assume facebook knows you're married to your husband, Indian guy has his number, someone else in the world has your and your husband's number. Both those people have synced their contacts

[Arthur]

I have, husband hasn’t. So it may explain some suggestions, but not all... especially the Indian former colleague of my husband. His number is in my husband’s phone contacts (which Facebook has never had permission to access) and they’re connected via LinkedIn (which has a separate login)

@mavhc's explanation sounds the most plausible especially when you take Facebook's shadow profiles into account.

 

How Facebook Figures Out Everyone You've Ever Met

 

Connections like these seem inexplicable if you assume Facebook only knows what you’ve told it about yourself. They’re less mysterious if you know about the other file Facebook keeps on you—one that you can’t see or control.

 

Behind the Facebook profile you’ve built for yourself is another one, a shadow profile, built from the inboxes and smartphones of other Facebook users. Contact information you’ve never given the network gets associated with your account, making it easier for Facebook to more completely map your social connections.

 

Shadow contact information has been a known feature of Facebook for a few years now. But most users remain unaware of its reach and power. Because shadow-profile connections happen inside Facebook’s algorithmic black box, people can’t see how deep the data-mining of their lives truly is, until an uncanny recommendation pops up.

 

Facebook isn’t scanning the work email of the attorney above. But it likely has her work email address on file, even if she never gave it to Facebook herself. If anyone who has the lawyer’s address in their contacts has chosen to share it with Facebook, the company can link her to anyone else who has it, such as the defense counsel in one of her cases.

 

Facebook will not confirm how it makes specific People You May Know connections, and a Facebook spokesperson suggested that there could be other plausible explanations for most of those examples—“mutual friendships,” or people being “in the same city/network.” The spokesperson did say that of the stories on the list, the lawyer was the likeliest case for a shadow-profile connection.

 

[...]

 

Facebook doesn’t like, and doesn’t use, the term “shadow profiles.” It doesn’t like the term because it sounds like Facebook creates hidden profiles for people who haven’t joined the network, which Facebook says it doesn’t do. The existence of shadow contact information came to light in 2013 after Facebook admitted it had discovered and fixed “a bug.” The bug was that when a user downloaded their Facebook file, it included not just their friends’ visible contact information, but also their friends’ shadow contact information.

 

The problem with the bug, for Facebook, was not that all the information was lumped together—it was that it had mistakenly shown users the lump existed. The extent of the connections Facebook builds around its users is supposed to be visible only to the company itself.

 

Facebook Says Data on Most of Its 2 Billion Users Vulnerable

 

Facebook Inc. said data on most of its 2 billion users could have been accessed improperly, giving fresh evidence of the ways the social-media giant failed to protect people’s privacy while generating billions of dollars in revenue from the information.

 

The company said it removed a feature that let users enter phone numbers or email addresses into Facebook’s search tool to find other people. That was being used by malicious actors to scrape public profile information, it said.

 

“Given the scale and sophistication of the activity we’ve seen, we believe most people on Facebook could have had their public profile scraped in this way,” the company said. “So we have now disabled this feature.”

 

Facebook also said data on as many as 87 million people, most of them in the U.S., may have been improperly shared with research firm Cambridge Analytica. This is Facebook’s first official confirmation of the possible scope of the data leak, which was previously estimated at roughly 50 million. It has resulted in calls from legislators and policymakers for greater regulation of social media, helping to shave billion of dollars from the company’s market value.

 

Facebook Scans the Photos and Links You Send on Messenger

 

The company told Bloomberg that while Messenger conversations are private, Facebook scans them and uses the same tools to prevent abuse there that it does on the social network more generally.

[elsiegee40]

Assume facebook knows you're married to your husband, Indian guy has his number, someone else in the world has your and your husband's number. Both those people have synced their contacts

 

I just cannot think of anyone other than my husband that would have both our numbers. This Indian guy is too remote a connection. I just don’t have any work contacts for my husband. He doesn’t even have a PA. I still think facebook is digging into things it shouldn’t

[DalekSec]

Do they read my brain waves also? Was thinking earlier about external GPUs compared to normal internal GPUs and the speed difference...........Load up youtube when i get home ... 1st recommended video is about external GPUs

[Dos_Box]

I downloaded my Facebook data the other day. It was mostly me rambling about my mother in law and her quirks and how boring Preston is! If they can make money out of my data, then power to them! �� [/slightSarcasm]

 

How very dare you! It's not just Facebook reading what you post y'know

[Zoom7000]

How very dare you! It's not just Facebook reading what you post y'know

 

I'm surprised it took you this long to take any action!

[TwistedHelixis]

Are your phone camera and microphone spying on you? - TheGuardian Edited April 7, 2018 by elsiegee40

[mavhc]

Better stop using Yahoo Video Chat, also did you know Yahoo had a video chat?

 

Why are they trying to make people paranoid, hoping for them to buy paper newspapers again?

[Arthur]

I might be just being paranoid, and people from facebook/google have said your phone definitely doesn't listen to you or target ads based on what you say etc.

 

Zuckerberg shoots down conspiracy theory that Facebook taps your microphone

 

Suspicions that Facebook (and associated apps like Instagram) are secretly recording audio through phone microphones in order to better target ads have refused to die, despite official denials dating all the way back to 2016. In today’s Senate hearing, Mark Zuckerberg addressed the urban legend yet again, issuing an absolute denial.

 

"Yes or no, does Facebook use audio obtained from mobile devices to enrich personal information about users?" asked Sen. Gary Peters (D-MI).

 

"No", Zuckerberg responded adamantly.

 

He went on to elaborate that Facebook does have access to audio when people record videos on their devices for Facebook, but otherwise it doesn’t access your microphone.

 

"Hopefully that will dispel a lot of what I’ve been hearing", said Peters, before moving on with his questioning. The senator said that he had heard the conspiracy theory from many people, including his staffers.

 

Zuckerberg's full answer follows below:

 

Senator, let me get clear on this, you’re talking about this conspiracy theory that gets passed around that we listen to what’s going on on your microphone and use that for ads. To be clear, we do allow people to take videos on their devices and share those, and videos have audio, so we do while you’re taking a video, record that and use that to make the service is better by making sure your videos have audio, but I think that is pretty clear. But I just wanted to make sure I was exhaustive there.

[Jawloms]

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/facebook-isnt-spying-us-ads-12362519.amp

 

Stuart

[jthompson]

Here's the EFF's take on it.

tldr: they don't need to.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/04/facebook-doesnt-need-listen-through-your-microphone-serve-you-creepy-ads