Image credit: Alexandre Godreau
It may seem like an urban myth, but plenty of people are convinced that Facebook is listening to them through their smartphone’s microphone.
How else can you explain the endless stories like that of Tom Crewe, a UK-based specialist in online marketing? Crewe was joking with a fellow straggly-whiskered chap about getting beard transplants. “I had my Facebook App open at the time and after a few minutes I started scrolling through the News Feed, only to find a Facebook Ad for hair and beard transplants!” he blogged. A few weeks later, after he was talking about his love of Peperami (apparently it’s a pork sausage snack), up popped an ad for his greasy pleasure.
Or Vice reporter Sam Nichols, who wrote last month about the time, a couple of years ago, when “a friend and I were sitting at a bar, iPhones in pockets, discussing our recent trips in Japan and how we’d like to go back. The very next day, we both received pop-up ads on Facebook about cheap return flights to Tokyo. It seemed like just a spooky coincidence, but then everyone seems to have a story about their smartphone listening to them.”
Or this string of stories, put together by the BBC, of people whose conversations were “overheard” by their smartphone:
- “My fiancee and I both had wedding ads the day after we got engaged, before we had told anyone”;
- “We started talking about beds and mattresses and guessing keywords, like slipping ‘California king’ and ‘buy a mattress online’ into the conversation, while intermittently scrolling facebook … two mattress ads in five minutes … none before that conversation”;
- “I visited a friend who was setting up security cameras at her house … I have never used the internet to look at anything remotely linked to home security, yet less than an hour after discussing how to set up the cameras, I had a Facebook ad for home security cameras … my phone had been in my pocket the whole time”; and
- “Once, my friend was over and he discussed that he needed Lasik eye surgery … immediately after, I went on Facebook and a Lasik advertisement appeared … I have perfect eyesight, have never searched Lasik ever before.”
Facebook categorically denies that it’s eavesdropping. Earlier this year, a test conducted by CBS News with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) found no evidence of audio being transmitted. Nor was there any hard evidence — as distinct from anecdotal — in informal tests by New Statesman.
Crikey engaged security consulting firm HackLabs to run some experiments of our own.
Using freshly wiped smart devices, HackLabs created a bunch of new social media accounts, and spent some time liking various things online, and having keyword-laden conversations in front of them. “Unfortunately we just couldn’t seem to get any sort of correlation. Most of the ads that were targeted to us were very much generic, highly popular items — Kim Kardashian and such topics,” said practice manager Michael McKinnon.
HackLabs also tried to intercept the data traffic to see what information was going back and forth, but failed. “Virtually all of the modern social media apps are basically as secure as your banking app,” McKinnon said.
But as he explains, “there’s a lot going on here in these apps. It’s not just a couple of signals that presumably are being used in the targeting of these types of ads. It’s hundreds if not thousands of signals that are being interpreted in many different ways.”
Targeting techniques used by advertisers are much more sophisticated than showing a Peperami ad to someone who said “Peperami”. As Crikey reported three years ago, it’s possible to target a “fit mom” who buys Froot Loops for her child aged 10 years or younger.
While HackLabs’ experiments were running, McKinnon’s brother-in-law visited him for most of a Saturday evening, along with his two daughters. A week later, that brother-in-law complained that he’d been bombarded with online adverts for the video game Fortnite. “The only connection or place he’s ever been exposed to Fortnite, the latest craze game for teens, is at my house with my two boys that play this game incessantly,” McKinnon said.
EFF has concluded that while Facebook may not listen to you through your phone, they don’t have to. “Facebook actually uses even more invasive, invisible surveillance and analysis methods, which give it enough information about you to produce uncanny advertisements all the same,” they wrote.
“Zuckerberg condescendingly called the idea that Facebook is listening in via phone mics a ‘conspiracy theory’. But users are confused because Facebook has so far refused to be more up-front about how the company collects and analyzes their information. This lack of transparency about what is really going on behind the Facebook curtain is what can lead users to jump to technically inaccurate — but emotionally on-point — explanations for creepy ad phenomena.”
After all, notes CBS News, “Google has access to 70 per cent of the credit and debit card transactions in the US.” Who needs to eavesdrop when you have that kind of data available.
Users are also sceptical of the denials — understandably so, given the hints Facebook gives about its future plans.
Only last month, Facebook took out patents on the process of triggering your smartphone by broadcasting a hidden signal over TV. As Metro reported, a “machine recognisable” set of Morse-code-style sounds could order your phone to begin recording an “ambient audio fingerprint”. According to the patent, that’s the “distinct and subtle sounds of a particular location created by the environment of the location, such as machinery noise, the sound of distant human movement and speech, creaks from thermal contraction, and air conditioning and plumbing noises in a household.”
A patent is just an idea, of course, not finished technology, and patents are sometimes intended to block a competitor from using the idea. But it’s clear that analysing audio is very much on Facebook’s mind.
Turn off Siri, turn off Cortana, turn off Alexa. Look at the privacy settings on your phone and your browser. These corporations are STEALING your information and selling it for BIG $$$.
+++ You betcha!
My wife and I visited our son unannounced recently and the house was a little untidy. Upon leaving she said to me “the house was a bit messy” and her iphone responded ‘what did you expect?”
The porn addicted must be worried about their browsing history.
“Too late”, said Quoth the Raven.
1) you have use FB
2) you have to be logged on
3) you have to have your devices synced
4) you have to stupid enough not to have anti-tracking software installed on every device
5) you have to be stupid enough to care about not seeing relevant ads but not care about random shit
Cambridge Analytica
“Advanced Algorithm Beats Conscious Thinking”
The new dirty weapon used to change election results, and ultimately decide who is running the world and has for several years.
Now we have the social media platforms that work without any true regulation, and set out their own rules based on the community values that they create, at the end of the day Mark Zuckerberg! knows exactly what it is that he has built, and that it is a platform for the collection of mass amounts of data that is then used to make sophisticated algorithms, allowing advertising and messaging to override the ability for any person to make a conscious, well balanced informed decision at any level when they are heavily engaged with social media and their advertising, creating poor business and community conditions throughout the world, continues to make the gap between working / middle and Upper Class so large, it, and the planet are not able to exist sustainably.
Any person / group / business / organisation / government can get you to vote in a certain way, buy a product, and or, start grooming whole groups of certain personality types in society to act the way they want them to. I am sure Mark-Zuckerberg! and his product Facebook would say, at best all they have done is enable, but actually, it actively engages in facilitating this data to help the likes of Cambridge-Analytica! grow their dangerous weapon, that I believe should be called analytic algorithm warfare! on a very advanced and worrying scale, for all of the human race who want to have independent thought and decision making as a basic right.
The algorithm wars have only just begun, and in my opinion they are a far more dangerous threat in the short, medium and long term than any A I., and that is why social media platforms in their current state must be shut down and prosecuted, if you took any other product that leads to suicide through bullying, just as one example it would be removed from use. Social media is no different, and the owner’s developers and senior management! of these and related businesses should be prosecuted under the new laws! that will surely be introduced Globally! because of the latest revelations about data mining and the use of data to corrupt election outcomes.
You can be assured the same businesses, governments and groups that are abusing data in the way they have been, will be at the forefront of A.I. technology, as the key to modern sophisticated A.I. is all about learning through very advanced algorithm, that then leads to self-awareness and individual thought, very worrying for humanity.
Governments of all persuasions, and every human on the planet should be outraged about the abuse of data, and how it is being manipulated to change the way you actually think and feel, there has never been a more destructive force in the world to date, these acts of manipulating people decision making are a “Direct assault on our most basic and important Civil Liberty. Free thought.
Just saying!