“Meta does not use your phone’s microphone for ads and we’ve been public about this for years,” the statement read.
Meanwhile:
Meta said it does not, but what about 3rd parties…
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.
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.
Ooh, I spy more snark!
Yeah watch me not deny it tho; I intended for it to be snarky and anticipated this impact.
I downvoted because of the snark in first paragraph.
That rudely condescending comment lends nothing useful to the discussion, and has just earned my only downvote of the day. Enjoy. Bye.
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.
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.
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 💀
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.
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>
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.
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.
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
Interesting. And shady. Though not about recording conversations.
Aye. Facebook has been proven to be shady af over and over again.
Nothing to do with your microphone.
Yes. Just another malicious thing facebook does. Surely, they are totally trustworthy in all other regards. /s
This has nothing to do with trust and everything to do with facts and evidence.
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.
The evidence is: among other things, facebook has repeatedly violated user’s privacy
This is not evidence that they’re using your microphone, and you know it’s not.
It would be no surprise if they would also monitor conversations via the microphone.
Honestly, I would be very surprised. Not that they would, but that they were able to. And that they were able to without ever being caught, somehow bypassing Google and Apple’s mic usage notifications.
But I wouldn’t be so naive to just trust them on that.
I don’t know why you keep coming back to trust. I’ve already addressed this. No one is suggesting that you should trust them. You shouldn’t trust them. And you shouldn’t use their services. That’s not the point.
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.
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
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.
So what you’re saying is the biggest companies like Amazon, Google, ChatGPT, etc… can’t perfect voice dictation when I’m talking directly and clearly to my device, but this company has been able to figure it out. And doing it while hiding from the smartphone OS that it’s doing it. While the device is at a distance/hidden in my pocket. And is using it just to sell ads.
👍
Is this copypasta
Your comment? I’m pretty sure yeah it was, and a really old one
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
Really?.. Wow, not only did you copy pasta one of the oldest trolls online but you can’t understand how illogical the troll is. And you want to accuse me of being a child?
Your comment was disproved here… In 2018. And it wasn’t a new idea then either.
Removed by mod
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.
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.
Shocked, I tell you!
Wonder what it’ll get out of ‘Kill Zuckerberg’ and other things.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And they are right. This company is full of shit. Show me any proof the tech from the deleted advert actually existed.
Right and your evidence is “I think it happens”.
Show me the stack trace.
They’re here in this thread lol. No matter what, these people will deny its happening. I don’t understand it.
There are simps in this thread trying to say “uuuuhmmmm AKSHUALLY it’s not Facebook directly” like that’s fucking relevant to the problem.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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 am not against this.
I had a bloody mary last weekend, you’re clearly listening in on my conversations.
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.
This is why I don’t have the Facebook app installed. However, what about messenger? Did the collect the data from messenger?
Think about it.
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
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)
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.
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.
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 😀
You don’t even have to be logged in, or even go to the same website. There are a number of companies that offer free analytics tools to websites. A completely innocent website that just wants to know how many people have visited their page might use a free people counting widget from Google, Facebook, or wherever. Now every time that webpage gets loaded by a browser so does that widget. The widget itself doesn’t even have to report back to the original creators. If it includes something hosted by the original creators, then they can track the destination IP and browser tags.
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.
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.
my Samsung has a green light in the task bar when my camera is on
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.
What’s the last “bombshell scandal that would ruin a company” that actually ruined a company?
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
Enron? Maybe the SBF thing? Seems like financial scandals are the only thing that matters.
As a business you can be a maverick against many laws, just not the laws regarding finance.
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.
