In Leak, Facebook Partner Brags About Listening to Your Phone’s Microphone to Serve Ads for Stuff You Mention
In Leak, Facebook Partner Brags About Listening to Your Phone’s Microphone to Serve Ads for Stuff You Mention
One of Facebook's alleged marketing partners explained how it listens to users' smartphone microphones and advertises to them accordingly.
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand literally nobody is surprised
The biggest part of this, is that they have denied this for years. But I think everyone knew it was happening.
But the people on reddit told me this totally wasn't happening
smug redditors who not only 100% "know" it can't be happening, but actively get annoyed if someone dares to even wonder if it might happen
Corpos abusing phone permissions to sell you stuff?
This is maybe my biggest pet peeve. These companies are not listening to you in any meaningful way.
You can trivially confirm this by hooking up your home network to Wireshark and filtering packets.
Other reasons:
- They can get all of this information elsewhere: searches, ad pixels, location capturing etc.
- Processing audio data is basically impossible on-device in a useful way, and the network infrastructure to support mass transcriptions on the cloud would be on the order of billions.
- It would be a massive endeavor to cover up the millions of hours of audio data that would need to be analyzed by the lowest paid and most unhappy workers in the industry (content labelers and moderators)
Now I'm sure this is some marketers wet dream, but the logistical and PR nightmare this would create dissuades all but the dumbest ad agencies. This is mostly just terrible tech journalism.
Not that I disagree with your conclusion because there's an even simpler way to check if an app is listening: iOS and Android will tell you the mic is being used... Anyway, we do have always-on NNs listening for keywords ("Siri,", "Hey google", "Alexa") so I agree that full ass voice transcription like whisper will run like dogshit on your phone they can certainly run a much much lighter model to pick up a handful of keywords.
I most definitely trust Apple, Google, and Amazon to not use the backdoor listening devices the NSA likely had them put in all phones.
You are probably right though. I doubt this anything like they are marketing it. It's likely location tracking, flip on mic near businesses with services but don't record till input reaches -12db, transcribe, parse keywords against list and report back. This whole process is incredibly low power on a phone and the only packet you would probably see leave the device is small and probably pretty inocuous looking.
Not to mention cross site trackers owned by Google and Facebook.
I think people greatly underestimate (or misunderstand) the pervasiveness of ad tracking pixels.
Basically any website that has ads or tries to sell you something has a tracking pixel. These pixels create profiles of devices and track almost everything you do while interacting with those sites.
These pixels don't require any actual "information" about you, they're only interested in what you (via the device you're browsing on) will buy. They also don't use cookies anymore, it's usually a combination of user agent, IP address, and coarse location. As you said, companies will generally share these profiles.
Eh, I dunno. I remember making exactly those points 20 years ago, but I think it's pretty feasible now. There are open source NNs that look like they can do this locally on mediocre phones. And if the output is garbage quality, that's ok, it just has to be good enough to sell some ads. I think it's largely feasible, although I'm sure it's inflated by startups looking to impress clients and investors.
Feel free to Wireshark your smart devices and confirm what I've said yourself. The most efficient way to do this is the pixels that already exist on almost every site.
On-device NNs use insane amounts of processing, even on "high-end" phones. You would notice if there was a always-on NN running on your device, this is also something you can try for yourself.
It's actually really successful. I've had some conversations with people and right after, something on their Instagram feed would show something we just talked about. Most recently I made a joke to my friend about my name, next thing on his feed was a meme using my name.
Bad headline then? Huh
Archived cox media page selling this service:
https://web.archive.org/web/20231116115055/https://www.cmglocalsolutions.com/cmg-active-listeningWell there it is.
I have nothing but anecdotal examples, but the amount of weirdly specific ads I've gotten related to shit I (or my partner) was just talking about the other day just keeps piling up.
The most noteworthy though was something I heard from an acquaintance. She has no interest in sports, doesn't watch them, doesn't search about them, doesn't care. One day she went to a gathering with her husband where most of the people there were watching the hockey game. In the days that followed she started getting ads (and, IIRC, even push notifications) about hockey
Fuck it. I'm building my own cellphone.
Wall
Huh?
We know what you are thinking...
Is this legal? YES- it is totally legal for phones and devices to listen to you. That's because consumers usually give consent when accepting terms and conditions of software updates or app downloads.
How do we stop it? Maybe an app that alerts us anytime the video or mic gets turned on?
Practically? I think the Disney thing that just happened shows that these unilateral T&C impositions and changes need to be challenged in court. Nobody reads them and they can just bury whatever the hell they want in there. It's completely unreasonable.
They have to geofence out so many trigger locations that I doubt they check if each location is accurate, current, and legal for them record at. There is no way this can work legally.
TOS says it's all fine though
I'm confused, this has been a thing for years. Is this normies catching up? Limited hang out? Your privacy was given away at the altar of profit long ago.
That's why F-Droid on custom ROM.
you're definitely asking the right questions. had the same thoughts.
Lol I pity anyone who listens to me rambling about my special interests.
I pity anyone hearing the amount of swearing I do on a daily basis lol.
I just checked and the only app on my phone that accessed the microphone permission in the last 24 hours is WhatsApp, and I've set it to "ask every time". So hopefully no poor meta employee has heard me use foul language.