In Leak, Facebook Partner Brags About Listening to Your Phone’s Microphone to Serve Ads for Stuff You Mention
1y 9mon ago by lemmy.world/u/return2ozma in technology from futurism.com
Techbros really went full police state just to deliver ads I wouldn't click on straight into my adblocker
It's terrifying
Even people you'd really expect to use adblockers. A good example is right here on Lemmy, people here are generally pretty tech-savvy yet you get threads with lots of people complaining about ads. This has been a weird lesson as I get older, seeing that most people somehow don't even think about lifting a finger to fix things they see as problems, they really just complain and then do absolutely nothing to help themselves. It's the same with if someone mentions something they don't know what it is, instead of taking 5 seconds to just look it up they comment to ask about it and then never reply to people answering their question. I'm certain that it's very common to have some weird need to make others do work for you, they don't actually care about finding out what something is or how to do something to fix a problem, they just care about making others spend any kind of effort for them.
if someone is like, half of the described vampire i don't mind. Honestly it feels strange to have our ancient way of finding things out (asking your friends if they know) be somehow seen as wrong nowadays. I want to learn from other human being, not disembodied pieces of information oftentimes tied to ads for driver updating software
I encountered a user a week or two ago who was confused by the inaccurate output of an LLM, didn’t/couldn’t understand that it’s more or less just fancy autocomplete, who then tried to interact with the post replies as if the users were also an LLM. I had a great time calling that out. It was kinda hilarious, tbh.
Dude. Paragraphs.
I mean, five sentences is a paragraph.
I work as a software engineer with other software engineers. Even software engineers and UX designers using the internet that way. Talented ones. Many of them - maybe the majority. It takes me a second to get over my astonishment when they share their screens. Not only astonishment at how overboard ads have gotten w/o an adblocker, but also that this particular person doesn't use an adblocker.
So many people aren't well-informed about what ad networks or doing, or how different the web experience could be.
I have a friend that pays Google a YouTube tax every month... He tells me he wants to support the creators.
I'm just kind of sad for him... I tried to explain direct donations were a million times more effective, but he clearly just doesn't want to learn how to use an adblocker.
This guy is like 30 years old.
Why in the world would you think that someone paying to use a service is a problem? Sure direct donations are more helpful, but that doesn’t run servers to actually distribute the content you’re viewing. Your problem is completely different than what we are discussing about ad blockers.
Do you mean YouTube premium? Old YouTube music because they're different things I think premium includes music actually but you can just have the music subscription.
Youtube music is actually better than something like Spotify for creators, so it's not the worst justification in the world.
I see people doing it and its terrifying.
It's about to be a lot more with the chrome manifest update. I got my dad into chrome some 15 years ago and explaining why he should switch to Firefox is completely confusing for him. He thinks his own business listing on Google won't work if he's not using Chrome.
I've had people that refuse to use an adblocker because "the creators deserve to get paid". Well, your funeral if you get malvertising...
Recent versions of Android make it much more difficult for a background app to access the microphone. There will be a notification if any background app is using the mic or camera.
Google's "Now playing" feature constantly listens to what's going on in the background to show you what songs are playing. They claim this is done with a local database of song "fingerprints". The feature does not show the microphone indicator because: "...Now Playing is protected by Android's Private Compute Core..."
I'm not saying that other, non-google, app do this to my knowledge; but the fact that this is a thing is honestly a bit scary.
Edit: screenshot of the "Now Playing" feature
For what it's worth, I did just test it with airplane mode and it still correctly identified the song playing. So at the very least, it's not lying about using a local database to identify songs, at least when it is offline.
It also uses a cloud fingerprint database apparently according to the second paragraph:
If you turn on "Show search button on lock screen", each time you tap to search Google receives a short, digital audio fingerprint to identify what's playing.
Oh, I didn't notice this, my apologies. Turning on identify songs nearby reveals two new options, notifications and show search button. That show search button option must be new; I had identify nearby music on already since my last phone. Guess they added something new. My bad.
I have seen said feature being mentioned or brought to other android versions whether with apps or modules, do they work the same way?
I'm not sure how other apps or android versions work. This is a flaw with the closed source software ecosystem.
The thing is I really can't see Google allowing anyone else access. They don't even allow Android OEMs to have access
if this is used, or there is some whitelist that gives permission for background microphone use in voice interaction services, apps with tracking capabilities probably use some set of predefined keywords (hardcoded inside the app itself) and those can be triggered while being on standby/in background, when there is a match some pinging goes to outside servers...
Why is that scary to you?
What other apps use Google's "Android Private Compute Core" and therefore don't show mic or camera usage notifications? Not trying to sound all tinfoil hat here, but seriously: can apps other than those from Google use the "Android Private Compute Core"? Even if only Google's own apps can use the "Android Private Compute Core", we can't see the source code for Google's apps as (far as I know, anyway) they are not open source. If an app is not open source, we do not really know what the app is doing in the background; we'll just have to take them at their word.
Not to mention companies and their software (especially older versions) are commonly hacked. If there was a vulnerability, how long did my phone provide the hackers with unlimited access to those features to have them possibly try to extort me in real life.
Yup, the green dot top right
Now if there was only an easy way to get to the offending app to identify it
Pull open quick settings and tap the dot.
Really? Thank you!
For Samsung at least, tapping the dot will tell you what's accessing what. I can't confirm if it works on other flavors of Android unfortunately.
Yeah, this sounds like a shareholder soapy titwank speech to me.
They're bullshitting everyone including the people we hate.
Supposedly more difficult.
Android likes selling ads too, why would google want to stop ad blocking microphne access?
"Meta does not use your phone's microphone for ads and we've been public about this for years," the statement read.
Meanwhile:
Not defending Facebook, but if you record a video with sound, then the FB app has to have permission to record your audio.
That said, delete Facebook. Fuck Zuck.
if you record a video with sound, then the FB app has to have permission to record your audio.
I can't tell if you're trying to explain how it currently works (which I know very well, thanks) or asserting that the current behavior is necessary in order to record with sound.
It really doesn't have to be as it is. The OS can provide a record-video API, complete with a user-controlled kill switch and an activity indicator, and the app can call it. The app doesn't need direct access to the microphone to allow the user to create a file with sound.
Edit to clarify: I'm not saying that the "permission" doesn't work as advertised. I'm saying that recording an audio file doesn't have to require a permission system as coarse and disempowering to users as it is today. I guess the people clicking the downvote button misunderstood.
Pretty sure that qualifies for that permission.
But the whole point of doing so is to use it in the app, and you for sure can't do that without the permission.
I think this is more a teleological argument he is making and I agree. We've become numb to these permission warnings. Oh this app needs access to my camera because I need to take a photo of something once at registration. Why can't it link to my default trusted photo app and that app can send a one time transfer to it? I hardly question these permissions anymore since many apps need permissions for rare one off functions. The only thing I deny every single time is my contact list.
teleological
I will thank you
about a million words from now
I don't give anything mic or camera access on iOS. It's really not an inconvenience, and anything that demands it is something I don't want on my phone anyways.
You don't use the camera or phone?
I'm very obviously not talking about system apps.
You don't have to give third party apps permissions they don't need.
Come on man, you know they didn't mean it literally 💀
Some of us are autistic. I didn't understand it either.
Pretty sure that qualifies for that permission.
I don't know what you mean. Existing behavior does not provide the control or visibility that I described.
One important difference is that the "permissions" in the screen shot are effectively all-or-nothing: if you don't agree to all of them, then you don't get to install the app. They're not permissions so much as demands.
(Some OS do have settings that will let you turn them off individually after installation, but this is not universally available, is often buried in an advanced configuration panel, leaves a window of time where they are still allowed, and in some cases have been known to cause apps to crash. Things are improving on this front with new OS versions, but doing so in microscopic steps that move at a glacial pace.)
If your app touches the camera and mic, it will show up on that screen that it does so. "Using the API" (which is just how the OS works) doesn't prevent it from appearing on that screen, especially when you're doing so for the purpose of putting video and audio in posts.
If your app touches the camera and mic, it will show up on that screen that it does so.
Showing up on that screen is no substitute for what is actually needed:
- Individual control (an easy and obvious way to allow or deny each thing separately)
- Minimal access (a way to create a sound file without giving Facebook access to an open mic)
- Visibility (a clear indication by the OS when Facebook is capturing or has captured data)
All of those things are implemented in modern Android. Well, almost.
- Whenever the app wants to use microphone an OS popup asks you if you want to give the app permission to use the feature. The options are "when using app", "only this time" (it will give the app one-time-use access to the mic) and "never". If you click the 1st or 3rd options, you wouldn't see the popup again and you'll have to change the permission from settings. If you choose the 2nd option, you can manually choose to give permission each time it's requested.
- This is impossible? The OS can either let the app use the mic or not, it can't tell what the app is doing with the mic. Unless you mean give a one-time permission this time, but not in the future, then we covered that in previous point.
- Android always shows a green indicator on screen (upper right corner) when any app is using the microphone or camera API. Well, almost always, some system apps might not trigger it. But if you want to see which app is using mic/camera you can tap the indicator.
All of those things are implemented in modern Android.
No, they are not all implemented on any version of Android that I've seen. I don't know about iOS.
Well, almost.
Right. We don't need just a few pieces of what I listed. We need them all.
an OS popup asks you if you want to give the app permission to use the feature.
That's not a bad interface, but it doesn't address what I wrote: Individual control.
Why should email address, sexual orientation, and home address be lumped all together into a single permission? Lumping installed apps and search history together isn't much better. Why should a music player, which obviously needs access to music files, be also granted access to biometric data like voice recordings?
This is impossible? The OS can either let the app use the mic or not,
Of course it's possible. The OS can record the file and then hand it off to the app. No microphone access required.
Android always shows a green indicator on screen (upper right corner) when any app is using the microphone
That alone is better than nothing, but not enough. How is a user to know if something was captured when the screen was off?
These things are indeed improving as new versions come out, but at a glacial pace. Heck, it was ages before Android stopped letting apps spy on each other's log messages. It's now at version 15 and still doesn't have basic controls like restricting network access.
When I said "well almost" I meant the impossible case in the second point. Otherwise, everything is implemented as a I listed. What kind of Android do you use that you haven't seen these features? This granular permission system has been the standard since Android 11.
In iOS it's implemented in a very similar manner, but I don't use it as often to describe it in as much detail as with Android.
The OS can create the file and then hand it off to the app.
That is also implemented, but is a separate API, storage access. You're free to upload any file you like if the app requests it. You can create the file with any voice recorder of your choosing. Although I can't imagine a scenario where Facebook would request a voice clip. When it's requesting the mic it's usually for live audio, like calls.
How is a user to know if something was captured when the screen was off?
It's true, if you gave the app permission to use mic whenever the app is running, it can in theory quietly use mic in the background. If you start a call and lock the screen, the call will continue in the background. Not sure if there are any safety measures implemented for that. But if the case was of a routine sneaky mic spying, it will become obvious fast, due to battery drain and network usage.
still don't have basic controls like restricting network access
There are some network controls, like restricting background data usage (depending on Android version/implementation). But yes, there's still no granular network permission system, you have to manually go into setting to turn on restrictions. Thought to fair, there isn't a consumer OS out there that lets you easily restrict network access to a certain app, even on desktop (correct me if I'm wrong). And I can see why, it would be counterproductive for vast majority of users to manually give network access to each app they install, when the whole point if the device is to have apps that have network access.
I appreciate that you're articulating your thoughts pretty well without resorting to the adversarial nonsense I've received elsewhere in this thread, so thanks for that.
It's still clear that I haven't been understood, but I'm exhausted from trying. (Again, mostly not from you, so please don't take it personally.) Time for me to put lemmy away for the day, I think. Take care.
Hey, I saw that you added more content to the comment that I responded to, that wasn't there when I was composing my response. And seeing that content, I think I understand where the confusion is coming from.
If that screenshot is yours and you think those are the permissions, I don't think that's the case. That looks like a screenshot from an app store where it just lists what data the app might be using and not the permission system. It's just a list of categories of data that may or may not be collected if you use the app, which must be disclosed by the developer. You can't agree or disagree to those things from the OS side, because that's all that happens on the developer's side. In case of FB, you might be able to opt out of those things in their settings, but I wouldn't bet on it, cause that's their bread and butter.
For these things it doesn't matter if you, for example, gave them direct access to the mic or uploaded the audio file, they will process the audio file and gather as much useful information as they can.
In fact, if you don't give it any hardware permissions, they will still be able to gather some information, for instance from the Personal Info category (email address, sexual orientation, and home address, etc.) because you enter that info on registration or they infer it from your usage. The OS can't do anything about that. As long as you use the app and interact with it you give them information, what you clicked, which posts you liked, what you commented and so on.
When it comes to OS, you can individually (separately) give permission for mic, camera, location data, file storage, contacts info, etc. Most of the things listed in the "Data collected" panel doesn't even come from your phone hardware.
Let me know if I have now understood you correctly.
I downvoted because of the snark in first paragraph.
No snark intended. Do you run into that so often that you've come to expect it?
Intention vs. Impact, look it up.
I downvoted because of the snark in first paragraph.
Ooh, I spy more snark!
Yeah watch me not deny it tho; I intended for it to be snarky and anticipated this impact.
That rudely condescending comment lends nothing useful to the discussion, and has just earned my only downvote of the day. Enjoy. Bye.
That is not the same thing as listening in the background.
Nobody said it was the same thing as listening in the background. It's still relevant and important.
I trust that most adults understand the implications of an exploitable permission and a strong incentive to abuse it, as well as the track record of corporate denials.
Using the permission to record audio triggers an on-screen indicator that the mic is recording. Someone would probably notice it on 24/7 recording. Someone would have also by now found the constant stream of network traffic to send the audio to be analyzed, because they also aren't doing that on-device.
Meta said it does not, but what about 3rd parties…
What a horrifying list of data collection. Fuck all that hahaha
Why wouldn’t you want to share your fitness data with the company that will sell it to the company setting your health “insurance” premiums? </s>
"Meta does not use your phone's microphone for ads and we've been public about this for years," the statement read. "We are reaching out to CMG to get them to clarify that their program is not based on Meta data."
Ah, yes. The tried and true defense of "we've denied it for years and continue to deny it" must be credible coming from a source as trustworthy as Facebook. I hear they're planning on holding a press conference to pinky swear they're not listening to the microphone they demand access to in order to show you ads that make them money.
FWIW, this was debunked when CMG originally made the claim. It was a marketing guy overselling their product and they had to correct their statement. They use the same info data brokers collect, and phones actively listening to you is not true.
Even what they said could be true without applying to phones. They said "smart devices" a lot. They never said "smart phone".
There are a lot of IoT devices, some of which have microphones, a lot less secure than either iPhone or Android.
The fundamental question is, “Do you trust Facebook?” They have the resources to manipulate the story and twist the truth. They have the capability to spy on you with mics, but they say they don’t do so. Do you trust them?
No it was quite a lot more than "a marketing guy" - there were pages and pages of details about their Active Listening program on their website, investor presentations etc. They went far into detail about how much they could listen to and what they could do with all that audio data.
Here's the Internet Archive link:
https://web.archive.org/web/20231116115055/https://www.cmglocalsolutions.com/cmg-active-listening
call me a normie but I do like having contact with my family. And though I'd love to move somewhere where my privacy is respected - there's no point in using a messaging app if you're the only one there
and no I can't convince my 76 year old grandma to move to signal, she barely wrapped her head around Facebook
That's a BS reason. I have 2 members of the Baby Boomer generation in my Signal contacts, they use it all the time with no problems. It's no harder than iMessage to use. They would like it better when they see that Signal doesn't gimp the image quality between Android and iOS phones unlike iMessage
Well i'm very happy for you and for them, but my 76 year old Polish grandmother - who got her first mobile phone at the age of 60ish, probably doesn't even know what image quality is, definitely doesn't know the difference between android and iOS, and has recently called me panicked to ask why all her photos were on Facebook, they weren't, she was looking at her gallery preview through the Facebook app - is not going to be very enthusiastic about learning to use an app only her grandson uses.
so I'll just stick to messenger
It isn't. I've personally had it happen where a relative who went to some country that bans video calling and VoIP (except for the unencrypted/honey pots of course) and used Signal to call people back home (only because I told them it would be unblocked due to censorship circumvention). Despite everyone in my household being familiar with WhatsApp, I was the only who did video calls with them and had to share my device so others could also call them. Even when I'd set up Signal on one of their devices, they still complained it was to difficult to use, insisted I'd uninstall it when the trip was over and used it a grand total of once.
I honestly think it's partly to do with the nerd factor. This same relative turned out to also have installed the backdoored unencrypted app to chat with others, but hid it from us due to me being vocal about not using that. These other households, also WhatsApp based, managed to install, sign up and use that just fine. They also couldn't be bothered to set up Signal for some reason, yet gladly accepted the suggestion to use the honey pot.
I think that these people in my circle don't care about security at all and only care about the platform. If it's "secure", "private" and "censorship resistant" and they haven't heard of it until I, the "techie", explain the technological benefits of it, they'll think it's a niche "techie" thing they're not nerdy enough to understand. If I get them to use it, they'll keep thinking this whenever something is slightly different than WhatsApp and be frustrated. Meanwhile they can get behind the honey pot because "WhatsApp doesn't work there, this is just what people in that country use". It appears normal because "normal people" use it all the time, and they'll solve any inconvenience themselves because "normal people (can) use this, and I'm normal too".
What's a normie in this context?
An average person
That's ludicrous. "An average person" cares about more than "nothing" - such statements saying otherwise are just what the 0.1% want.
Stop fighting each other and start fighting the people who have created and persisted this dumpster fire.
"Yeah but my friends use Messenger!"
My mom uses Messenger. Acts like texting is too hard for her but Facebook Messenger isn't. Literally the only reason I have it installed on my phone, because otherwise I don't get the message when she needs something. If I could pry her away from it I could finally be done with the thing forever.
They really need to name-and-shame beyond "Facebook Partner" considering we're talking about fucking Cox Media Group.
Fuckers got my entire complex's Internet shut down (I am a renter not the owner)
Dildos, lots of dildos! I'm just gonna repeat that while I'm driving to see if I start getting Google ads for dildos.
Keep us updated!
Hold on, I just tripped on another goddamn dildo, you don't wanna know where I fell.
If that works, you should try it with a product that you aren't interested in too and compare the results.
I've tried that, it didn't work....unfortunately.
I tried that. Didn’t work. There may be some filters so they don’t serve inappropriate ads to people with families or some such.
Wouldn't want to be mean to Facebook users, but the vast majority of them probably has micophone access enabled for Messenger at least, if not Facebook.
This comment inspired me to go turn off microphone, camera, Bluetooth, and local network access for every app. I’ll reenable as necessary.
Just leave it on for whatever runs your phone calls. I emabarrasingly discovered that the phone app NEEDS microphone access lol.
I keep my microphone and camera off at the OS level always now. Android has quick options for it that you can add to your pull-down menu thing at the top. When I get an incoming call, a popup comes up asking if I want to allow voice permissions. Then after the call I disable it again. Same goes if I need to take photos.
I've never not believed that they listen to this shit. I've had far too many coincidental ad placements after saying something completely unrelated to anything I've ever searched for.
Can’t take calls? Don’t threaten ME with a good time!
At least on iOS, it takes it a step farther and tells you specifically when an app is accessing your location, microphone, camera, etc… It even delineates when it’s in the foreground or background. For instance, if I check my weather app, I get this symbol in the upper corner:
The circled arrow means it is actively accessing my location. And if I close the app, it gives me this instead:
The uncircled arrow means my location was accessed in the foreground recently. And if it happens entirely in the background, (like maybe Google has accessed my location to check travel time for an upcoming calendar event,) then the arrow will be an outline instead of being filled in.
The same basic rules apply for camera and mic access. If it accesses my mic, I get an orange dot. If it accesses my camera, I get a green dot.
Android has the same feature.
My Pixel does the colored dot thing as well. It also has the ability to add "Mic access" and "camera access" quick options to the pull down menu to quickly turn the permissions on/off at the OS level. I keep mine off at all times. If I receive an incoming call, I get a popup asking if I want to enable the microphone to answer it.
Yeah it's great, same thing on the Google Pixel. The mic/camera thing brings peace of mind
I know you mean well, but you are making assumptions that the software is not lying to you. You can't trust a UI element.
because Google/Apple lie to you on behalf of meta, sure
For anyone who doesn't have a device that natively supports this feature, there's an app on F-Droid called "Privacy Indicators" that provides this for camera and mic access. It uses the built-in Accessibility services to provide this, and needs a couple of other special permissions
You can change the color of the indicator, mine's red for more visibility.
I installed it from GitHub however, since the F-Droid build was really outdated: https://github.com/NitishGadangi/Privacy-Indicator-App
Facebook listening in on your microphone is one of those things that I actually believe to be true. Ever had conversations with people to then realize that you're being served targeted ads based on these conversations? Seems very coincidental.
Nope
There are other ways they do that, like thrird party cookies, and combining data from many, many sources.
Apps simply CAN'T access those kinds of things unless you allow it. You can check this in the apps permissions on your phone if you're not sure. If microphone access is allowed, then yeah, they'll be listening, probably. But remove that permission and you'll be fine
Ever use voice in messenger? If so FB has the permissions it needs to open your mic.
It remains funny to me that futurism.com became mostly about covering the dystopia we live in.
The future is going to be amazing! Well, it has the potential to be amazing if we use tech the right way. No I mean, like in an ethical way. Without exploiting people. No not like that, in a way that helps people. Well yes, billionaires are people, but I meant... at least it should be in legal ways. Or at least policed. Not hostile to average people. Not an openly criminal endeavour. Maybe just dont criminalise resistance to it? ... oh, actually the future is going to be a techno-monopolistic dark age, I see. We can pivot to covering that.
Yeah that's a shame, electronics seems to have reached a level where most people just don't need or dream of a better something (PC, phone, etc) and other tech is hard to grasp like biotech.
Not, like, "haha" funny...
I am so numb to outrage that this just seems... Meh. What happened to me.
It's the world we live in. It's very much intentionally designed to make you complacent.
yeah like tell me something I don't know.
"This just in: to the surprise of no one, your phone has, in fact, been spying on you from day 1. Now we go to Jim with sports. Jim?"
They spent decades gaslighting you so you thought you were crazy for even imagining it.
Normative nihilism is going to get us all.
This is such a strange reality to live in. All of the futuristic, dystopian fiction I have consumed has the same premise that people living in the dystopia know it and know it's bad. Somehow reality is worse.
Most of the non tech people reaction
But before that, when it was not acknowledged by social media, it was more like ' you're paranoid. And you think you're that important that they listen to you? Common, get back to reality '
Yeah, being not paranoid is hard in XXI century.
TBH the same scenario has been mentioned in the "ex machina" movie from 2014 when colleb has been asking how the humanoid robots work. The deep blue was AI of search engine taking data from listening to the phone calls
I feel like we've been gaslighted so bad about this that we were even denying each other's reality.
I knew they had to be doing this so I turned off all mic permissions. One day it pissed me off so much I started keeping my phone off completely unless I needed to use it.
The only good thing that came out of it was I learned about ad blockers. Fine, listen to me since I can't fucking stop you(keeping phone off was inconvenient), but it's futile now and you wasted money since I won't see your stupid fucking ads anymore.
I knew they had to be doing this so I turned off all mic permissions. One day it pissed me off so much I started keeping my phone off completely unless I needed to use it
It might be an easy to just stop using Facebook really.
I've had enough time to work out which of my relatives are racist, so I don't really need it anymore.
I don't have fb or the youtube app and haven't for years... so I'm not sure what was doing it. I have ublock origin now, so if it's still happening I wouldn't know.
Honestly the thought of them pouring that much money into r&d and launching that spyware just to have us plebs block the end result(ads) does feel kinda good at least.
It's the reverse. Non tech people believe the snake oil, tech people know this is snake oil.
I remember reading some time ago that "the idea (of phones listening to everything you say to serve ads) makes no economic sense, because it'd be too expensive to run"
Looks like it actually isn't "too expensive" to run in the end.
Except Facebook never used it this was a 3rd party trying to hype up investors. Many audits have been run on these apps and there is no way they use your microphone. It's way cheaper to just look at your search history.
It's not when it's your device doing the computing. All electronic devices should have visible hardware indicators for when their camara or microphone is on, but that's a consumer rights issue most people are dismissive of, so it's not happening. Some people even always want it on for the assistant functionality.
The mic is always on for android phones anway, thats how it hears "Hey Google"
Not how it works.
They have an ultra low power processor that listens for the "hey Google" keyword, then that wakes up the main audio processor. But the main microphone is not actually on, and that small processor isn't capable of recording audio it's just looking for a certain matching sound wave and then triggering.
That's why it sometimes triggers if you just go "hurr ner dorrll" because those random sounds are close enough to what it's looking for.
That is why some older devices can't actually install the assistant software. They lack the necessary hardware to do it in a power efficient manner.
my Samsung has a green light in the task bar when my camera is on
Yep, and it's not just Facebook, not just microphone. My lappie recently started serving ads for something I searched on a device not linked to it. I'm guessing it's my ISP engaging in these sneak tactics.
Depemds if you are logged i to google services on your phone and on you pc browser. If you log into anything google on your browser it retains that log in across all the apps
Oh you know what? Gmail!
That'll do it 😀
Even then, you have local voice recognition. You don't need to stream all microphone recordings to some central server for processing, you just do voice recognition and keep a log of say the last 100 nouns and a high priority log for the last twenty nouns used near verbs like purchase, buy or get. Then send those lists to the ad provider as context. All the hard work is done on the client device and the same backend used for ad context on web pages can be used for this as well.
Then hide it encrypted in an image upload or some other packet. Listen for 'buy a <something>' encrypt its text version, wait for something to cargo it with in a data transmission so people looking at data transmissions aren't any the wiser, hide it in some obscure way that would look normal otherwise, it's intercepted, sends off to advertisers. Adtech is cyber terrorism.
You don't think security experts know about stereonography techniques? It's like the first thing you learn about in uni for it. Like the first week.
Yeah, a marketing agency selling snake oil to people that actually think they can do it is not expensive. Of course they never actually built the tech.
What's the last "bombshell scandal that would ruin a company" that actually ruined a company?
Enron? Maybe the SBF thing? Seems like financial scandals are the only thing that matters.
Cambridge Analytica, but only because what they were doing was so monumentally illegal. I'm sure the government would have let them get away with it if they could have thought of a way out for them. A lot of them mates were involved in that scandal.
As a business you can be a maverick against many laws, just not the laws regarding finance.
Unroll.me was a service that would scan your email and clean up your inbox. The New York Times reported that the company was gathering sales receipts emails, anonymizing them, and selling them to rival companies; for example Uber paid them to hand over all the sales receipts they could on Lyft rides in people’s mailboxes. The bad press made them eventually sell the company to Slice, mainly for the email archives they amassed.
Slice like... the pizza website?
That’s what I assumed too but it appears to be a package tracking website
I highly doubt that they actually managed to do this, at least any time recently.
As another commenter noted, Android alerts you when an app is accessing the microphone in the background, and it would also absolutely destroy the phones battery life more than the FB app currently does. The only way that we have the "Hey Google/Siri" command prompts active all the time is with custom hardware not available to the apps, and certainly not without Android knowing about it.
Maybe they actively listen while the app is open, but even then I think recent Android/iOS would let you know about that.
Google's "Now playing" feature constantly listens to what's going on in the background to show you what songs are playing. They claim this is done with a local database of song "fingerprints". The feature does not show the microphone indicator because: "...Now Playing is protected by Android's Private Compute Core..."
I'm not saying that other, non-google, app do this to my knowledge; but the fact that this is a thing is honestly a bit scary.
As someone relatively ignorant about the mechanics of something like this, would it not make more sense that the app would be getting this data from the Android OS, with Google's knowledge and cooperation?
The place I see the most unsettling ads (that seem to be driven by overheard conversation) tends to be the google feed itself, so it seems reasonable to me that they could be using and selling that information to others as well, and merely disguising how the data were acquired.
The place I see the most unsettling ads (that seem to be driven by overheard conversation)
There's a simpler explanation -- you're in the same geospatial region or you're connected to the same networks as the people you're having conversations with, and those people also looked up the things they have conversations about.
If you have GPS, Wi-Fi, or (possibly) Bluetooth, then that's how they can pretty easily associate you to those people.
It's a reasonable explanation, and what I typically assume to be true. Still, I'm curious about the actual mechanics, and if it potentially could be being done by Google without the larger tech industry being aware of it.
I believe technically-inclined people could monitor the traffic that exits the phone, or at least passes through the router.
Audio recordings would be larger than the kinds of stuff that's just sent passively.
They can and do. Nobody has shown evidence of this happening.
It would take a lot of data. On device voice processing is not very advanced. That's why most voice stuff doesn't work without a signal.
That makes sense, but isn't it assuming they're processing data on the device? I would expect them to send raw audio back to be processed by Google ad services. Obviously it wouldn't work without signal either, but that's hardly a limitation.
As someone else pointed out, how does the google song recognition work? That's active without triggering the light indicating audio recording, and is at least processing enough audio data to identify songs.
If they were sending that much audio back, people would see the traffic. You could record it and send it at a different time, but the traffic would exist somewhere. People have looked and failed to find any evidence of such traffic.
It's something that could happen on device in the nearish future if there's not anything now, but it would probably still be hard to hide.
People have looked and failed to find any evidence of such traffic
Source? I would like to read about that
Sorry, it's been long enough and I haven't saved any of the links, and the keywords are polluted as hell with garbage results. I can't find anything specific.
You probably won't find a source about something not happening.
It's almost like they were asking about sources for people looking or something.
If you're not going to contribute, why are you wasting people's time?
Thanks for the info! I guess that's ultimately what I'm looking for more about: how much do we know about cellular traffic? Obviously with encryption we can't just directly read cell signals to find out what's being sent, so do people just record the volume of data being sent in individual packets and make educated guesses?
It seems plausible to run a simple(non-AI) algorithm to isolate probable conversations and send stripped and compressed audio chunks along with normal data. I assume that's still probably too hard to hide, but if anyone out there knows of someone that's looked for this stuff, I'd love to check it out.
This is why I don't like the push of everything needing an app. I sure do wish people in congress cared about this type of privacy issues the way they did Tiktok.
These companies absolutely do use your microphone to listen.
My wife and I have tested this and you can too.
Have a conversation near your phones about purchasing something offbeat. We used a kitchen garbage disposal in our test. Talk about them for a few minutes, about needing to buy one, different brands, etc.
Almost immediately you'll be served garbage disposal adds.
This has been common knowledge for several years now.
And there have been push back against the idea by naive, trusting people who think the toggles for that do anything. The fact that there's leak conversations now of advertisers admitting they do it will sink any counter argument against it.
Also, if advertisers are doing it, you can bet that the government can too.
No that's being pushed back on the idea from people with tech skills who work in the cyber security industries. You don't think they would realize if something like this was happening and shout it from the rooftops?
It's everyone's favorite past time to dunk on Facebook but that doesn't mean we should make stuff up without evidence. Calling people naive because they don't believe you is the same as saying it's true because you want it to be.
Evidence must be presented. I've never seen any not in the 10 years these claims have been made. No one has ever bothered to provide a shred of evidence and all of it is who I talked about X and then I saw an ad for X.
Pardon me for wanting something a little bit more concrete
Sure thing... Just install Facebook Messenger on your phone and don't pay attention to all of the permissions it needs that are completely unrelated to communicating with people in a messaging app. It is literal malware.
You don’t think they would realize if something like this was happening and shout it from the rooftops?
Nope. Too many people are just trying to collect a paycheck. This is testable without access to the backend or source code and too many sociopaths work in the industry. My default is to distrust anything when the other party has a profit motive to lie. It's anti-skeptical, but you have to prove that they aren't spying on me if you want me to trust something.
Okay so address my fundamental point which is show me the evidence because otherwise you're living in exciting reality of your own creation. I am positive it is very fun in there, but it doesn't have much to do with here on Earth
Come leave here on the other side of the reality curtain we have donuts.
This is not the court of law and no one is going to jail because of my distrust of corporations. "Innocent until proven guilty" does not apply here. Any batshit idea I could come with on how a corporation could siphon my data, they have already thought of and tried. They do not deserve the benefit of the doubt.
I used to work in adtech and the most we could do was track locations. Even that didn't work properly for our purposes because most shops are in malls where several different stores co-exist on the same coordinates. It only worked for outlets in retail parks which were separated from one another.
It's wild how much trust people are willing to put into capitalist corporations again and again as if they give a single shit about them.
People are lazy and life is easier when you just blindly trust things you don't understand. People think I'm weird that I don't want a Ring camera INSIDE my house. I wouldn't even put on outside my home.
The reverse is just as true:
"People are lazy and life is easier when you just blindly hate things you don't understand."
As a network engineer, it's frustrating to see laymen make outlandish claims about technology with their source being "corpo bad". I hate corporations too, but it would be an absolute bombshell if it were true. There's just no possible way that every single hacker and security engineer are in league with the corporations.
Honestly, with how people reacted to covid numbers being fudged downward or accepting whatever lie that claims that climate change is fake, I do not believe that any more evidence that corporations are listening in on your conversations would get any reaction out of the population. Hell, did anything come from the Panama Papers or Paradise Papers? The average person does not care.
Sure, people might not care, but that doesn't change the facts. Experts aren’t denying the legitimacy of the Panama or Paradise Papers, but they are saying that the idea of megacorporations secretly listening to your microphone and selling you products based on that is false. If they were doing that, it would be pretty easy to find out. Smartphones aren’t some mysterious black box; security engineers and hackers are constantly checking for these kinds of exploits. If corporations were actually spying on us through our phones, it would be the biggest topic at DEFCON. Believing that this could be kept secret would require assuming that all these experts are either paid off or in cahoots with the corporations, which veers into full-blown conspiracy theory territory.
There are deniers. They're wrong.
I even got an email out of nowhere right in my inbox from Dell the same day I was talking about Dell laptops with my book club. I would be so shocked if these examples are mere coincidence
Having worked on the tech side of email marketing campaigns I would actually be impressed
Setting aside confirmation bias (idk, because it's boring?): So people you're in a book club with, an established group which it is very easy to associate you with, were discussing Dell laptops... and you think it's strange you got looped in? If three people from your book club all looked up dells later, or earlier, or etc. etc., why wouldn't they figure you might also be interested in dell laptops? An approach that doesn't require NLP of god only knows how much hypothetical audio taken from pockets, and works much better?
I'm just shocked that there are marketing departments that actually know what they're doing. Granted I haven't worked for any huge companies, so that's probably why I have difficulty picturing it.
I've tested this many times and never saw it happen.
A market agency claiming they do something of the sort isn’t proof that conversations are being monitored en masse. Security researchers can and probably have tested for this and found no clear, verifiable evidence, otherwise we would have known. Also, this stuff can be blocked at the OS level and I find it hard to imagine (esp. without solid proof) that Google or Apple would jeopardize their reputations to this extent by enabling such unauthorized listening in on users’ conversations.
Of course it’s good to keep watching this space but we shouldn’t jump to conclusions.
They have it's very easy there are free programs that monitor all data traffic.
This claim that Facebook listens to you on your phone has been around for years. It has been investigated numerous times and has never turned out to be true. Until recently the processing capacity required would have been insane and you would have an incredibly high noise to signal ratio. It's just not an economical way of gathering data for advertising.
Why bother anyway when people put their entire lives on Facebook, for free, in easily processable text?
Your phone/plan carrier using voice data to make a marketing profile is well documented actually. This data is purchased and verified and resold by meta, or in some cases bought and used by alphabet for GAS. Cacti can show you outgoing data for every device on a network, and you can see data being sent from a phone in signed packets going to your carrier when you're not "actively using" it. It seems like you know about network monitoring tools but you haven't actually used them, just talked about them in reference to data collection.
"Why buy the cow" here is also easily answered: not everyone uses Facebook, a fair number of users will deactivate their facebook page but continue to use messenger.
Can you share this well documented documents?
The july 2017 verizon data leak was made public.
Yeah, with lots of leaked customer data. Nothing about using voice data to make a marketing profile. Unless there is a second leak I don't know about.
But judging by your inability to link it you just made it up.
Please think about what you've just confirmed about yourself
I confirmed you made it up and can't link a source.
Is this copypasta
I asked because it was nonsensical and could have been funny if you were imitating the typical internet child comment but here we are with you making no sense and me disappointed
Hey! You can't read after all! Rember when I explicitly posted that you can sniff packets going to your phone provider and not these companies? You have zero reading comprehension and a bad attitude, and it's obvious you're more interested in being right than being correct. If googling unrelated drivel articles to a discussion gets you off, you do you I guess
Because people's (presumed private) conversations on Messenger are not the same thing as things people post publicly.
Personally, I would never install that malware on my phone. But if you even have FB Messenger installed on your device, chances are that it's constantly sending your data to Facebook. Go take a look at what permissions it "needs."
We can see what it's sending to facebook though, and it's not constant. There's a bunch that it does send and receive, but this isn't hypothetical speculation, like, we can just see that it's not using your microphone for that, or sending anything like audio data. You can check this yourself, wireshark is free and packet specifications are available.
I get that, but it just happens far too often to be coincidence.
I'm not going to claim to know how, but it's naive to take the word of corporations when we have so much circumstantial evidence that shows these firms are targeting people with ads for things that they had never shown interest in, but happened to mention once in the presence of a device with a microphone and internet connection. There have been people who have tested this, and have gotten results that indicate that this just cannot be a coincidence. It has happened to me personally on several occasions (before I started keeping my mic off at the OS level, hasn't happened since).
I've been around long enough to know that, just because the general public doesn't know how some proprietary tech that corporations spend billions on R&D for might work, doesn't mean it's impossible. People have come up with insane shit, and that's just the stuff that people have voluntarily (usually) disclosed. God knows what kind of proprietary shit is out there that we have no awareness of.
I mean, for fuck sake, you can now steal a person's password by listening to their keystrokes:
Not to mention the fact that the NSA likely has back doors in every major piece of software and hardware in the US...
I know that stuff isn't directly related, but the point is that these things always seem impossible, until it gets leaked that it's been possible for years now.
Security researchers can and probably have tested for this and found no clear, verifiable evidence, otherwise we would have known.
Facebook snooped on users’ Snapchat traffic in secret project, documents reveal
By paying people $20 / month in exchange for installing a VPN that will snoop on your data so they can market research their competitors.
It is unacceptable, but it wasn't in secret from the users. They agreed to get paid in exchange for the usage data of competitor apps.
So it's a completely different situation to any "secretly spying" claim. The users had to go out of their way to get it setup.
it wasn’t in secret
Did I misread something? It even says in the title of the linked article, that it was a "secret project".
Yes, it was secret in the sense they didn't want their competitors knowing about it.
It wasn't secret to people who were invited and signed up for the program.
It was already ruled that they failed to sufficiently disclose which information was used and how.
Yep
Yes. Just another malicious thing facebook does. Surely, they are totally trustworthy in all other regards. /s
The evidence is: among other things, facebook has repeatedly violated user's privacy. It would be no surprise if they would also monitor conversations via the microphone. Sure, currently there seems to be no evidence for that. But I wouldn't be so naive to just trust them on that.
This is not evidence that they’re using your microphone, and you know it’s not.
I didn't claim it to be evidence for that.
somehow bypassing Google and Apple’s mic usage notifications
Unless some form of hardware notification is hardwired into the device, which indicates cam or mic usage, I'm on the rather paranoid side regarding software notifications. Software is usually much easier to break. I'm leaning a lot out of the window now, as I don't know how secure those notifications are implemented. However, even then there is reason for concern, given that facebook had / has questionable deals with device manufacturers. If they were willing to share personal data with device manufacturers, there is reason to suspect this went or can go the other way around as well.
I don’t know why you keep coming back to trust. [...] That’s not the point.
It is mine. Even though there is no evidence for a surveillance using device microphones itself yet and it could be surprising if they were able to, given the history of facebook, they participated in a lot of rather surprising shit.
Interesting. And shady. Though not about recording conversations.
Aye. Facebook has been proven to be shady af over and over again.
Anybody that's ever spoken to a salesperson knows that they're talking out of their arse most of the time, and I doubt this is an exception.
He's said this because he thinks that the people he's talking to will give him more money if he does.
If it was happening at all you'd have seen proof by now. Like people pulling apps apart and finding proof, not just "I spoke to Bob last week about cameras and now I'm seeing ads for cameras".
The truly terrifying part is they don't need to listen to your conversations to know what you want.
There were whole threads of people saying this stuff doesn't happen. They would say it just didn't make sense that companies would do this, it's not worth it to them. That all the ads I was seeing at convenient times were just a coincidence.
Right and your evidence is "I think it happens".
Show me the stack trace.
And they are right. This company is full of shit. Show me any proof the tech from the deleted advert actually existed.
I have my camera and microphone deactivated on the OS level because Youtube and Spotify would show me things workmates mentioned way too often.
I didn't notice it since.
Could still be a major coincidence though, the biggest of them.
Same exact thing for me, and same exact results. Also too major of a coincidence in my mind.
The next iteration of gaslighting is already here: That it's no big deal anyway since you can just use an ad blocker. Riiight, let's all just turn our eyes away to make the monster go away. Surely, it'll get bored and stop listening and recording, and surely, it will not sell its collected data off to banks, insurance providers, the government, law enforcement... right?
Seriously... If ad-blockers worked at a high enough level to actually impact this shit, then they wouldn't be doing it. They know most people don't bother with ad blockers, and because of that, they're low-hanging fruit.
There are simps in this thread trying to say "uuuuhmmmm AKSHUALLY it's not Facebook directly" like that's fucking relevant to the problem.
They're here in this thread lol. No matter what, these people will deny its happening. I don't understand it.
At this point it doesn't even matter if it's real or not, after Snowden no sane person believes big tech since they were all in on PRISM.
Except it's not Facebook doing this, it's Cox Media Group.
If you look at the slideshow, cox media group doesn't claim to be the ones harvesting the data, only to be processing it using AI to then provide that aggregate information to advertisers. Which makes sense, they literally have no means to directly collect voice data from you
Also no offense but, I thought lemmy users were a little bit better than this whole "read headline, make assumptions, storm to comments" thing that Reddit loves to do
they literally have no means to directly collect voice data from you
The Facebook app doesn't collect voice data either though, or at least I haven't seen any actual data proving it. Some Android phones show a dot on the screen when the microphone is in use. The Facebook app doesn't even ask for microphone permission unless you use a feature that needs it.
Android only solution, I think. Admittedly I don't know I iPhone very well.
Anecdotally, it's not even a solution. I've run into "coincidental" ads without having the FB app installed (visiting FB via browser).
Then they've installed a root kit on your computer because that's the only way they could have access to your microphone, the web browser blocks it otherwise.
unless this is provably and demonstrably true, this is definitely not true, because up until now, this has been entirely speculation.
I KNEW IT!!!
It is pretty easy to verify whether you've granted Microphone access to Facebook. If you have, revoke it.
The problem with closed source apps is you don't know what else is going on in the background and what else it might have installed or connected to, unless you have debug logs for everything it did and know how to interpret all of that. I wouldn't install any app from the facebook company on any device I use
I'm pretty sure that iPhone have the same security but on Android, apps cannot install other apps. When you think about it that would be a pretty basic security vulnerability so it's not that surprising that it's blocked.
It's not Facebook though, it's just used in the clickbait headline as an advertising partner of the actual company the story is about.
But if you need to revoke the microphone permission from the Facebook app then something is wrong anyway, because it means you have the Facebook app installed for some reason.
goes close to a smartphone "BLOODY MARY! BLOODY MARY! BLOODY MARY!" gets advertisements from local pubs and restaurants serving Bloody Mary at a discount
I had a bloody mary last weekend, you're clearly listening in on my conversations.
I am not against this.
Thank god those moral people would never sell stuff to law enforcement nor sell it to companies that would then sell it to law enforcement.
Nope. Those people are all moral, good, and rich thus we are safe.
Turn off microphone access to all social media and tell your friends the same. I’ve disabled mine for years and all ads are generic or from prior sites visited.
Do you one better - My mini-desktop is plugged into a monitor with no microphone or camera.
easy to test. men can say "tampons glitter lotion" several times a day. women say "garage exhaust cable".
For everyone saying apps need permission to use your mic I want to point you to "play services". The permissions protections only apply to user space apps not system apps. Thats how u can say "OK google" and get the chat ai to pop up even tho its "not listening" according to the OS.
Also if you read the website they are not piping audio to their servers. They push triggers (keywords, etc) to the local ai on your phone that listens for things like "OK google" and then sends those reports back.
Meta apps would need permission to to mic but I think if y'all check your big tech apps u will be surprised how many have that permission.
I can't speak to iOS because its closed source but it probably has similar backdoors for apple.
Title is basically clickbait given it's Cox Media Group doing this, not Facebook. They're partnered with a bunch of companies.
What ? A corporation that earn money in selling personal data, that don't want to share its code that run on a device with a microphone, actually use it ? I'm shocked
This is why I don't have the Facebook app installed. However, what about messenger? Did the collect the data from messenger?
Any closed-source software is a potential privacy threat. You are always at the mercy of big tech in that case. If the product is free, you are the product
Think about it.
We know? It's not a coincidence that when you mention something like Cheap Flights to Dublin, it soon ends up on your ad rotation.
Honestly I'd rather that than ads for the things I already bought.
uOrigin user : you have ads?
uBlock and advert blocking DNS user: you have ads?
Just using uBlock is great if you only use a web browser that supports it.
Shocked, I tell you!
Ngl man I'm not buying it. With all the protections in mobile OSes against this exact kind of thing it straight up doesn't seem possible
Until now it was really annoying to collect audio and then use it. The app needs to constantly record, send out the datas and then lastly process it to be useful. Today the cost versus benefits are really not to their advantage.
But tomorrow this might change, if they find a way of using the mic to serve ads be sure that they will. The only question today is how? The only option at this time is for me to process the stuff offline. As they do today with "ok google". Within the next months-years we are going to see more and more phones and it stuff using dedicated or specialized AI chip, they will be great with really low consumption to run 24/24. They could analyse offline the speech, make a resume and lastly when the connectivity is sufficient and enough datas are collwcted, the phone sends out all the infos to the companies servers.
I've seen some comments about the fact that others companies that Google cannot really use the mic in this way, this is right...today. But in the future make sure that when they will have developed correctly this concept, Google (and Apple) would surely be okay with this approach (maybe in exchange with some bucks).
Today phones are surely not listening to us, but they know so much things that we are actually thinking that they are. But this way is maybe not enough profitable for them, so they want to invade even more our privacy to gain more of this fucking thing called "money".
Thought this was common knowledge by now
Can something that’s not true be common knowledge?
god?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Obsolete_medical_theories
And that's just in medicine.
Yeah, there was a viral video years back about a couple that thought this was happening to them, so they started talking about cat litter for 1 day, only inside their house, and then within 2 days they were being served cat litter ads for the first time in their lives.
They didnt own a cat.
Did they mention cat litter in any messaging app? Upload a video announcing their plan?
I'm skeptical, lol
How many other novel ads did they see that they didn't talk about?
I'd be incredibly skeptical of the claim that they've never been served a cat litter ad. Everybody gets served ads that are misses. They're obviously easy to ignore which makes it difficult to recall what they were about. But I have no doubt that they would've been served cat-related ads plenty of times before. Cats are, after all, one of the most common pets.
I'm not saying they didn't get an ad for cat litter. I'm saying they probably also got ads for other random products that they didn't talk about, but they didn't pay attention to those because they weren't talking about them. It's not a valid experiment design.
I know. But we're both talking about the same thing. Everyone gets irrelevant and ostensibly novel ads all the time. Cat litter, beauty products, diapers, whatever. They just so happen to have focused their attention on cat litter when they just as easily could have focused on dozens of other products and noticed the same result. And, in truth, it's unlikely that they are actually novel, just unnoticed before.
Yea they can deny it all they want, but I’ve had similar happen to me countless times.
Even better, last time I tried to buy something from one of their adds it turned out to be a scam. I reported the post (add) and they said they wouldn’t remove it because it didn’t break any policies. lol.
I used to pick up things for a friend at the supermarket and they moved over five years ago. To this day, I still use the savings card, and still get coupons for baby formula and diapers. Even if I had an infant at the time, does the supermarket think my now six year old would still be using formula and diapers?