[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...