[photonios]

Exactly. People underestimate the amount of data Facebook (and companies alike) can and do scoop up. I’ve seen countless stories supposedly proofing that they’re listening through the microphone. However, most of them can easily be explained away if you consider the vasts amount of data they collect.

[Cacti]

The idea that they're listening to your mic is rather ridiculous. I mean, we'd find out eventually, and the consequences of widespread illegal wiretapping would be severe for Facebook, they would really cease to exist.

However, as you said, they don't need to. Localization and usage metrics alone can tell you an incredible amount of extremely detailed information.

[agildehaus]

Just looking at the Facebook iOS app, they don't declare the "audio" background mode in their Info.plist. So instantly we know that they're not recording anything in the background.

For foreground, I suppose it'd be fairly trivial to tell if the app was making calls to AVAudioRecorder.

[photonios]

I wish someone would actually write about how ridiculous these clames are in a way that non-technical people would be able to understand. There's so much bias, conjecture and downright false proof.

[TeMPOraL]

I agree. I'd love something shorter than having send someone to read half of the LessWrong Sequences. I wish CGP Grey or Kurzgesagt could do a video on that.

The basic thing you need to make people comprehend: to learn a fact X, you don't have to actually learn it - it's enough for you to learn about such Y that P(X|Y) >> P(X). And you don't have to learn Y either, you have to learn V and W such that P(Y|W) >> P(Y) and P(Y|Z) >> P(Y). Etc. This method applies recursively.

And once they comprehend the causality graph this forms, you need to make them understand just how much information we radiate all the time, and how humans are still very inefficient in doing the calculations mentioned above with all that data. Facebook is only the tip of an iceberg; it's only going to get worse from here, because modern technology keeps letting us explore the causality graph even further and faster.

[imron]

> the consequences of widespread illegal wiretapping would be severe for Facebook, they would really cease to exist.

Unfortunately, I don't think they would. They'd get a slap on the wrist fine, maybe have one or two senior executives resign, they'd post a mea culpa, saying how they now it was wrong and promise to do better, and then everyone would forget about it a few weeks later when some new thing started to dominate the news cycle.

[photonios]

Indeed. I doubt they would go down due to this. They'd receive some negative attention. They'll make some sweet PR statements and hop, they're back in business.