[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.