[patientplatypus]

Ummm....https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/79i4cj/youtube_user...

It's a pretty easy test - they just said "cat food" a bunch of times and ads for cat food came up in their feed the next day. I'm sure if you were interested you could probably do the same experiment with some other product you've never posted about or talked about online and come up with similar results. It seems strange that you would just assume that the people who are bringing up this issue are simply misinformed, or do not also know that facebook also looks at other parts of their data. I think most lay people understand how data mining is leveraged these days.

[bearbearbear]

Hi, first comment so please be gentle.

I'd like to point out that this video doesn't actually provide any evidence that Facebook was listening.

They said they talked about cat food all day, then they showed an ad on Facebook for cat food.

There's no way to verify that they didn't make the video of the cat food ad on Facebook and then talk about cat food all day.

Nor is there any evidence that they talked about cat food all day at all. No recording of the conversations etc.

In fact I'm a little confused about how this is even a question.

I'm not a programmer so I don't know, but: Wouldn't it be trivial for someone who knows how to write Android software to monitor if an an application is accessing the audio input device?

I mean, I know that on Linux you can monitor whether or not a device is being opened.

Why doesn't someone check if Facebook is accessing the audio input?

[dnate]

That's been done, and no one has found any evidence that this is happening. Hence it's status as a conspiracy theory.

As soon as you start assuming that the OS is giving the facebook app access to the microphone regardless of whether you allowed it in the settings, things start to get absurd

[bearbearbear]

Link please?

[SmellyGeekBoy]

> I'm not a programmer so I don't know, but: Wouldn't it be trivial for someone who knows how to write Android software to monitor if an an application is accessing the audio input device?

Or even by MITMing the connection and looking at the network packets. But yes, it's not outside the realms of possibility to hook into the microphone driver on a rooted Android phone and check when it's being activated.

I'm not one to leap to Facebook's defence and if this is happening it needs to be shut down ASAP, but I suspect that there would be at least some credible evidence out there if it were indeed the case.

[lifeformed]

I'd like to see some more rigorous testing than this. They said it took 2 days to happen? Other people's anecdotes indicate it happens within minutes. I don't think this is conclusive, it's still within the realm of confirmation bias.

I feel like there'd be hundreds of these videos if it was real. How many people tried to make this video and it didn't work? I hope someone buys 10 new phones, opens 10 new Facebook accounts, and does some statistically rigorous testing.

[batiudrami]

This is easy also to fake, and I trust some random YouTuber much less than a public Facebook statement. It would be intensely stupid for the head of ads at to deny this if they were doing it.

[mirimir]

Well, she wasn't under oath, so there is no firm legal requirement for her to be truthful. Or maybe, being a public representative, she's not been briefed about this. Legal security through compartmentalization is pretty common in the corporate world.

[jhasse]

> Well, she wasn't under oath, so there is no firm legal requirement for her to be truthful.

The same is true for the random YouTuber ;)

[mirimir]

For sure :)

[Buge]

That could easily have been a random ad, combined with something like the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon.

To be a scientific test it needs a list of products, and then randomly assign half into a study group and half in to a control group. Then talk all the time about stuff in the study group but not the control group. And see if there is a statistically significant difference between the ads shown for products in the study group vs the control group.

[kagamine]

IN the video he claims not to have owned a cat or talked about cats for 20 years. they chose a subject that they are certain they have, as a couple, never exchanged words on.

Explaining away doesn't explain. For an average, normal FB user, this was as scientific as they could get. It would be nice to see someone repeat the experiment with a pro-hacker type on hand and a packet sniffer ++.

There are too many people giving a company like fb, who have form on the implementation of morally and ethically dubious practices, the benefit of the doubt, all the while dismissing any and all claims of users. It looks fishy at best, and I'm not name calling, it isn't allowed on this forum, but there are a disproportionate number of FB defenders popping up wherever this story surfaces.

[Buge]

Except he probably sees hundreds of ads for things he's never talked about for 20 years. It's not scientific at all, because he has no way of distinguishing a listening ad from luck. My statistical method would distinguish that.

But I guarantee you there are hundreds of pro-hacker types not giving facebook the benefit of the doubt. They're reverse engineering the apps, monitoring API calls from rooted phones, monitoring network traffic, etc. There are entire forums of people dedicated to hacking on android and finding rooting methods, etc.

There are tons of security researchers in academia desperate for a nice paper, eagerly looking for something juicy like facebook app listening to users. In fact these researchers have found that hundreds of android apps are listening to you[1]. But facebook isn't on that list.

The EFF has tons of smart people eager to dig into any little privacy mistake that a major company makes. They for sure would launch a huge lawsuit against facebook if this came out, and they very likely have some researchers looking into whether there's any listening.

Why haven't you heard about all the pro-hacker research into facebook's spying? Because they have all found no spying, because there isn't any. They don't want to publish that they found nothing, because then it would look like they're defending facebook, and these pro-hacker types don't like facebook and don't want to defend them.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/05/there...