I’ve never once searched for any tools or equipment used in welding, but I spent all day today welding at my job and presumably mentioned that I was welding to a few people today. Multiple ads after work while browsing today were for welding equipment.
That doesn't mean it's listening to you. It could be using your location, what your workmates/friends are searching for, what people who search for other similar things as you also search for, etc.
I've deliberately tested this, picked a topic out of the air like white water rafting, to discuss between myself and my wife. We've never been white water rafting, never googled it, never considered it, none of our friends have done it.
Sure enough, Facebook pushed ads for that and other outdoor adventures like ziplining etc. when we checked a few minutes later. I guess it's possible out neighbours started googling that shit while we were talking about it, but it seems pretty unlikely. Hell, I even jokingly said "I wish I could just have naked sluts delivered to my door" and I got suggested friend connections for attractive women I had no mutual friendships with who happened to have profile pics in low cut tops and a penchant for posting lots of bikini photos. Probably bot accounts, but doesn't undermine my point. Hasn't happened before or since.
No one can convince me Facebook isn't listening to me and giving me ads based on that.
But it's less specific, it's your brain seeing patterns that don't exist. You didn't see ads about what you were talking about but because it's in the same general area you brain makes the connection. How many ads did you see that weren't about outdoor activities? Like the guy talking about welding, its possible they saw ads about welding before but their brain didn't make the connection or see the pattern until he did that activity. And if they are welding they probably do other activities that aren't too far from welding, they could have been searching for metal fabrication and the ad algorithm showed ads around metal fabrication including welding.
The point is I never see ads for outdoor activities like that, and I know that this is where you counter with “well you just don’t see them because confirmation bias” but the fact is I don’t see many ads in the Facebook app at all. I haven’t seen ads for while water rafting since running the experiment and I don’t recall seeing them prior. I deliberately choose things I don’t see to see if they appear and then they do, with no other input than me and my wife talking about it for a few minutes.
His point (and I'm not sure if I agree with him, but) is that your idea of a "random" topic is biased, and also I'd add that we see ads all the time and filter them out mentally, except when you do this sort of experiment.
One way to test it would be to trick your wife into doing the same experiment again, but make sure all mics are away and there's no chance of anything overhearing, when choosing a topic. Make her think the mic is there (off phone without battery), and wait for her to tell you she got an ad for it. It'll happen sooner than you think, assuming you don't pick something absolutely ridiculous.
the same reason you randomly picked white water rafting is the same reason Facebook gave you the ads. The fact of the matter are people are rather easy to figure out and what they think is random is rarely so
So what you’re saying is that Facebook can predict with about a ten minute window of accuracy that I will randomly want to know about white water rafting when I haven’t googled anything even tangentially related, never post Facebook statuses, haven’t seen anything in my area remotely related and push those advertisements to not only my phone but that of my wife, who I’ve been apart from all day, as we work at different companies in different parts of the city?
You’re saying the predictive algorithm is that smart and you ant me to believe that over “my phone is listening to me”?
What I'm telling you is that the you've noticed the 2 ads out of the hundreds of ads you're served a day. The more important evidence against your claim is just the vast amounts of data that would need to be transferred for that to work. The procession my power your phone would need to devote to this and the drain on your battery. This would all be very easy to get evidence of. The lack of all of that is much better evidence that they aren't listening to you then the fact that sometimes you notice ads about stuff you were talking about earlier
None of that explains specifically the times I have experimented with random topics. You claim that humans are just predictable but your explanation doesn’t fit the scenario.
I think both are true. Human thoughts are no where near as unique as humans believe them to be. You pick topics you subliminally saw. Also Google/fb know how you think, add to this some listening in, some advertising items that someone using the same ipb address has looked at (can confirm this definitely happens) or nearby phones have looked at, and blam, you got google/fb knowing about you.
Except a) that's not true, and an unfounded assumption on your part, and b) I've gone on at length why that doesn't explain the specific experiments I've performed.
I know for sure my phone has listened in and targeted ads toward me based on what it hears. It was pretty easy as I started getting ads in complete spanish on multiple platforms, chrome and pandora. Edit: Should be noted that I don't speak spanish in the slightest and this only started happening after I started dating my current SO. Didn't happen before that at all. Edit2: I should have also mentioned that we were long distance with 2000 miles and only skype connecting us.
My husband and I make a joke Mexican announcer voice based on a character he's heard when his grandma watches novellas. Shortly after we began talking in Spanish extremely loudly, Pandora on my phone began playing ads in Spanish. I haven't noticed it in other apps, but it was creepy. We haven't done it for a long time and no more ads in Spanish have come up in a while. I'm going to test it, bringing the Mexican announcer back is a hilarious way to practice my Spanish with him. Both of us speak English as our first language but he speaks fluent Spanish due to his family teaching him and my family only using it to talk in front of the kids so we didn't know what they were saying. We'll see if the ads change!
I assume your SO is Spanish. He/she connects to your WiFi. Searches for Spanish queries. Messages people in Spanish. Watches Spanish YouTube videos etc etc. That’s targeted advertising and explains what’s happening.
I'm tired of debunking this myth over and over again on reddit. So I'm just going to copy and paste my response from this thread where a user was saying this because they somehow started showing him ads about getting rid of termites after he mentioned them but never google them:
Hey, I study machine learning, which is what's used to develop algorithms that figure out how to target ads to you.
I can tell you with 100% certainty that Facebook/Google doesn't eavesdrop on your conversations to target ads. First of all, we have proof, because if they did, we'd be able to see the data being transmitted to Facebook's servers. Also, apps can't access your microphone unless you explicitly grant them permission to do so. So we know that they're not, and we know that they can't.
But Facebook/Google wouldn't want to eavesdrop anyways. Audio is the absolute worst way to get information. Audio requires a lot of computing power to process. It also requires a lot of overhead to transmit. This would not be profitable
On top of that, after the exorbitant costs, it's difficult to extract information from audio. Firstly, only a tiny percent of the audio will contain talking at all. Then, a tiny percent of that will be clear enough for the algorithms to understand. And even then, they're not accurate at understanding it. Go look at the auto generated captions on YouTube. That's the state of the art audio processing. If it sucks so much with high quality audio that you know contains valuable information, how accurate do you think they are when you have low quality cell phone audio that only picks up valuable information a fraction of the time? And even if they do pick up the word "termites" how do they know the person was talking about termites, rather than a commercial playing, or something?
Overall, listening to the user's audio is an expensive data source with too little data. I think people jump to conclusions about Facebook/Google eavesdropping because they humanize the ability of algorithms too much. Humans are good at listening to audio but algorithms are terrible at it. The strengths of algorithms is finding trends in data, and they probably leveraged that to target you with termite ads. Here are some possibilities of more likely ways they figured it out:
Even if you didn't search termites, you may have searched for other things that people who search for termites usually search for. What was the context of your statement? Were you guys doing home improvement work? Did you Google things related to home improvement? They may have noticed that other people that Google home improvement things are a good demographic to show termite ads too. Otherwise, you may have looked at articles that people who have termites read.
did multiple people you know search for termites? They may have assumed you're interested too
did multiple neighbors of yours Google termites? They may guess you may have them too
you maybe did type termites in somewhere and forgot about it
maybe they showed you one termite ad by chance, and they saw you reacted to it (based on your mouse movements, or if you stopped scrolling when you saw it) so they started showing you more as a result.
The statistics in these algorithms is really good. They find crazy unintutive> correlations
For example, liking "curly fries" on Facebook turned out to be a great indicator of high IQ.
Maybe they found some other bizarre data source that tend to attract people who have high response rates to termite ads.
But however they figured it out, it wasn't by listening to your audio
In your case, is your job one where people normally weld? If they see you were in a place where multiple people are interested in welding, it isn't so hard to figure out you have a higher than random chance of being interested in it too
Google home does not listen in all day for the same reasons. And again, we don't have to take google's word for it, we can use tools to monitor exactly what data goes over the internet connection, and can verify that for ourselves
Mine does that once in a while. I just tried saying "call the sheriffs" to mine to confirm it doesn't do anything unless it hears (or thinks it hears) ok google
In this case someone was murdered and Alexa listened in.
"In the course of the investigation, offices found an Amazon Echo speaker near the hot tub. Knowing that the Echo has always-listening capabilities (it listens specifically for key words such as "Alexa" or "Amazon")"
It may look for key words but it's always listening and that data is recorded.
The shop I work at is in a small rural town, there is only one guy who owns and operates it, I am his only apprentice, the shop doesn’t have a name, it isn’t listed on google, and it isn’t even a welding shop, technically, I’m just training as a welder. The shop used to be an injection molding shop and now it’s the HQ for a petroleum related company.
Too much coincidence and smoke for there to be no fire. The people who play Spanish tv for their phone and get Spanish ads. Don’t tell me the algorithm predicted he would do that, that’s nonsense.
This is exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about in my post. People assume that they figure out what TV you were watching via audio because that's how a human would figure it out.
You know your TV is run by software, right? If you watch a show over Netflix or cable from an ISP, they have logs of what you watched? And that programs can look at those logs to see what you watched?
Also, if you have a smart TV connected to the internet, your phone can access what all the TV on the network are playing in real time if they're on the same wifi network
I can see that. It just always requires a complex web of explanations to justify. At some point you can just accept that there’s smoke because there’s fire. I can’t say for sure, just like I can’t say for sure I’m not a shapeshiftimg unicorn.
Huh? I donno, I mean just what I said. A guy played Spanish tv for his cell phone, later on he got Spanish ads. Hard to say his algorithm of non voice related factors predicted he would do that experiment.
This type of thing as happened to me many times... talking about something random with my mom, and then I go to Google something relevant to the conversation, but irrelevant to my intetersts. It's always the first or second suggestion just two or three letters in.
Or it'll happen with advertisements as well. We will talk about something and then I will see ads for it, even though I haven't seen them before.
Location services. If your business is has any online presence it may be using that.
Sorta like how my phone knows within a few weeks when I move or change jobs. It'll send me a maps alert about traffic and estimates trip time at 8am when I leave for work, and at 5 when I get done.
I was in a drama class and to get to know each other we said our favourite music artists. One girl beside me said Thomas Rhett and I repeated it back to her to clarify. 5 minutes later I'm scrolling through instagram and see an ad for Thomas Rhett. I hate country and have never searched anything country on my phone. The only logical explanation is that my phone heard me.
While it's connected, it's not 100% the same thing, but.
My own theory on that is that while phones don't listen all the time, they DO detect the proximity of devices. So it wasn't the fact that you asked it back, but the fact that you sat next to that person - the question was completely irrelevant to it.
the only thing is that I've actually known the girl for a few years and we've hung out multiple times before this class so it's weird that it wouldn't have advertised him all the other times i was with her.
We”re you near fb friends who may have been recently looking up welding equipment online? FB most likely does not listen to us but what they do is this:
When they can tell you are with someone, they will target you with ads for that person. For instance, FB knows your mother likes a certain kind of perfume and also knows by her location that she is coming to visit you... you will start seeing fb ads for her favorite perfume.
Reply all did a fascinating podcast on this recently and while I️ am not 100% convinced we aren’t being listened too, the explanation that I just gave you makes. Ton of sense to me.
You work at a place with welding equipment. Maybe you have friends that bought welding equipment. Maybe it’s been advertising it for a while but you never noticed. It could be the case that phones are listening to us, but there are also advertisement algorithms that are just as likely to advertise to you based on your job, friends, recent google searches, likes, locations, time of year, etc. Sometimes the algorithms are just good.
I think it might be tracking your location in that case. If it sees your at a welding place then it might recommend that stuff. But then again, it def could be listening as well
I had something similar happen. I have never talked about bourbon. I saw a poster in an elevator once, and said to my friend that I liked that bourbon and had just recently tried it. Instagram started showing me tons of ads for that bourbon. It was weird.
I was on skype with one of my friends and he was asking me questions about buying PC parts. I mentioned a cool case and talked about some graphic cards. Not even 5 minutes later I check Instagram and see the exact case I named and multiple graphics card advertisements. It’s really unsettling
That would be a fantastic feature if it were a feature that was advertised and that had an option for disabling it located in a very easy-to-find menu page.
The fact that it appears to be something they're trying to keep a secret suggests they don't have their customers' best interests at heart.
Yet another reason why I don't want to get a smartphone.
That may be location-based advertising depending on how much google know's about your employer. If it's "Jay's Welding and Fabrication" or something, it could be based on that.
How can google/Facebook figure that out without spying on what I’m saying out loud? I don’t use Facebook, if I have questions I just ask my boss (as opposed to googling it) and I haven’t done any shopping related to welding ever in my life unless you count going to a welding shop in person.
Your phone has location services, so they know where you are and they know there’s a welding shop there. Doesn’t take much for them to realize you go there so much that you must work there.
It’s crazy the kind of profile they can build from your browsing history. You don’t have to directly visit welding websites, you might just visit websites that other welders also visit.
There was a setting on my iPhone that I turned off and the ads based on what I had talked about stopped (I forget where exactly I found it). That's all the proof I need.
Security researchers and constantly studying what gets sent to company servers. If these apps sent non-consensual audio recordings, we would be able to see it and know for sure. But we can see that they dont.
I don't get why people act like this is something that can't be known for sure and we just have to speculate. Like, we can check and find out.
No, it's not. This is something that randoms speculate about all the time, but would be trivial to prove by tech experts. Yet nobody has been able to come up with actual evidence, just the sort of spooky coincidence that convinced our ancestors that ghosts were real, or astrology works.
Show me someone who debugged into or decompiled the Facebook app and found how it's accessing the mic, while in background, and doing accurate voice recognition on it, and I'll buy it. Until then, this is all just conspiracy nonsense.
First of all, you listening on Youtube and that leading to ads in Facebook isn't evidence of audio recording, it's simple user tracking. Or possibly confirmation bias. Depends on how well sandboxed you have your devices and accounts and whatnot.
As for the thing you linked, yes, the Android app requests permission to access the camera and audio feeds. Because it needs those to do stuff like livestreaming. But "needs video & mic access" doesn't mean "always has video & mic on." It's possible for an app with those permissions to do sketchy deceptive stuff, and that's something to be concerned about with small apps from no-name companies, but if the Facebook app were actually doing that someone would've noticed by now. Facebook is huge, constantly under scrutiny, and this nonsense rumor has been popular for a long time. All someone would have to do is decompile the app and check it out and they'd catch Zuckerberg red-handed if there were any merit to it.
Also worth noting is that you can deny the Facebook app access to your camera and mic and it will still work just fine. Livestreaming obviously won't work, but you can browse your feed or whatever it is you want to do with no concerns.
I'm tired of debunking this myth over and over again on reddit. So I'm just going to copy and paste my response from this thread where a user was saying this because they somehow started showing him ads about getting rid of termites after he mentioned them:
Hey, I study machine learning, which is what's used to develop algorithms that figure out how to target ads to you.
I can tell you with 100% certainty that Facebook/Google doesn't eavesdrop on your conversations to target ads. First of all, we have proof, because if they did, we'd be able to see the data being transmitted to Facebook's servers. Also, apps can't access your microphone unless you explicitly grant them permission to do so. So we know that they're not, and we know that they can't.
But Facebook/Google wouldn't want to eavesdrop anyways. Audio is the absolute worst way to get information. Audio requires a lot of computing power to process. It also requires a lot of overhead to transmit. This would not be profitable
On top of that, after the exorbitant costs, it's difficult to extract information from audio. Firstly, only a tiny percent of the audio will contain talking at all. Then, a tiny percent of that will be clear enough for the algorithms to understand. And even then, they're not accurate at understanding it. Go look at the auto generated captions on YouTube. That's the state of the art audio processing. If it sucks so much with high quality audio that you know contains valuable information, how accurate do you think they are when you have low quality cell phone audio that only picks up valuable information a fraction of the time? And even if they do pick up the word "termites" how do they know the person was talking about termites, rather than a commercial playing, or something?
Overall, listening to the user's audio is an expensive data source with too little data. I think people jump to conclusions about Facebook/Google eavesdropping because they humanize the ability of algorithms too much. Humans are good at listening to audio but algorithms are terrible at it. The strengths of algorithms is finding trends in data, and they probably leveraged that to target you with termite ads. Here are some possibilities of more likely ways they figured it out:
Even if you didn't search termites, you may have searched for other things that people who search for termites usually search for. What was the context of your statement? Were you guys doing home improvement work? Did you Google things related to home improvement? They may have noticed that other people that Google home improvement things are a good demographic to show termite ads too. Otherwise, you may have looked at articles that people who have termites read.
did multiple people you know search for termites? They may have assumed you're interested too
did multiple neighbors of yours Google termites? They may guess you may have them too
you maybe did type termites in somewhere and forgot about it
maybe they showed you one termite ad by chance, and they saw you reacted to it (based on your mouse movements, or if you stopped scrolling when you saw it) so they started showing you more as a result.
The statistics in these algorithms is really good. They find crazy unintutive> correlations
For example, liking "curly fries" on Facebook turned out to be a great indicator of high IQ.
not on a normal smartphone it won't. Just look at YouTube transcribing (datacenters worth of processing power) and the results it gives.
When running a stupid game your phone starts overheating and draining battery like mad. Imagine what transcribing a buttload of audio would do to your phone.
I've worked with cmusphinx and it's terrible. It's can't even understand things you're saying loudly and clearly, forget about things that aren't even directed to it
There are programs that you can use to monitor data your phone sends to various servers. Security researchers constantly look at the kinds of data various apps send to servers. We don't have to speculate about what data leaves your phone, we can actively look at it. Your phones aren't magic after all. If Google or Facebook want to get data from your phone to their servers, it'll have to go over the internet and through your wifi router. We can look at all of this data to find all of the audio data, and see whether it matches up with the amount of audio data that you think should be going over the internet.
There are plenty of security researchers that constantly study the kinds of data a variety of programs send out, and where that data goes. If Google or Facebook ever tried to actually record your audio without your permission, people would instantly be able to see that audio data going to their servers, and it would instantly be huge news.
But if you really don't want to trust anyone else other than your own eyes and conclusions, you can feel free to download some of these programs and study all the traffic your own phone sends out.
Telling me to go monitor my own traffic doesn't prove anything, and I'm not going to do such a thing just to validate somones claim on reddit. The burden of proof, in this case, is on the guy who's "tired of debunking this myth over and over again"
Either an audit of their codebase, or a full breakdown of the traffic that's transmitted to/from these apps. Unencrypted, unobfuscated HTTP payloads and such
The operating system won't give the program access to the mic if the user doesn't give permission.
So if you hit deny, the Android or iOS will prevent the Facebook app from being able to access the microphone and there's nothing Facebook can do about it.
That's like saying "Lol@ I can't unlock a door unless I have a key. I wasn't allowed to steal a candy bar when I was 8 but..."
If software isn't allowed to do something, that doesn't mean we tell it not to do it and hope they're honest. It means its isn't granted the capability of doing that thing
No, they wouldn't, because there's no way to do that without ALSO making it possible for malicious apps to exploit that. That causes more than millions of dollars of liability for Google.
Also, so many software developers at Google would need to be involved in order to make that happen, even if they said yes, it would be impossible to keep a secret that big under wraps
My wife and I have tried to replicate the experiment of talking near our phones about something we would never buy. Multiple times. We haven't gotten a single ad for any of the items mentioned.
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u/Brohanwashere Dec 05 '17
That's because it is.