[timthelion]

This is pretty much impossible to debunk because:

A) Given Facebooks policy of A/B testing, it almost certainly isn't listening all the time.

and more importantly,

B) Now that everyone is talking about it, Facebook would have been stupid NOT to turn it off at least for now.

[superbrama]

Would they even take a chance on this with anyone knowing it’ll eventually be discovered or reverse engineered? Why not take their account at face value? (We’ve built AI that is so smart that it can predict your conversations).

[Sir_Substance]

>(We’ve built AI that is so smart that it can predict your conversations)

We've built AI that can do a great job of slicing and restitching your old conversation into responses that are plausible responses to input sentences.

Whether that's good at predicting a conversations depends a lot on the conversationalist you're attempting to emulate using that technique.

[timthelion]

Volkswagen

[superbrama]

Thought experiment for both scenarios:

I’d guess that my emissions cheat code blob is “safe” since no one is looking. (That guess was wrong of course).

I’d guess that my fb app code, installed on billions of phones and scrutinized by researchers the world over isn’t going to be able to hide anything related to processing or transmitting speech recording surreptitiously.

[timthelion]

Thought experiment for both scenarios:

Every significant national government has a major agency in charge of protecting the environment from harmful emissions with many paid engineers devoted to emissions testing.

None of the major national governments except Germany have an agency devoted to ensuring that devices do not en fringe on user privacy.

If you think that Volkswagen is a bad example take AstraZeneca [1]. No one had to prove that they had committed fraud by missmarketing their drugs. Much of the marketing material was publicly available. Everyone who knew the law, knew that they were breaking it.

Or perhaps you could look at Seimens, which outright bribed, using bags of cash, government officials, in order to close deals [2].

Moral of the story, corporations break laws.

If Facebook is listening to you using your phones microphone, that's not even illegal outside of Germany.

[1] http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/Health/astrazeneca-pay-520-mi...

[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/16/business/worldbusiness/16s...

[superbrama]

Valid points but doesn’t address the basic idea that fb knows their code is widely scrutinized. If they process or transmit audio surreptitiously, or have done so, they’d be found out. Their app is so pervasive that it’s exceedingly unlikely that they’d be able to hide any such mechanism for long.

[Ninn]

In regards to B) there would still be a paper trail, in terms of old app versions etc. for ever available.