[pcl]

I don’t think FB is listening because all the stories I’ve heard can be explained by their graph.

I think it’s hard to debunk because people don’t recognize how powerful their knowledge graph is at this point, and simultaneously underestimate how hard general-purpose speech recognition is, even with studio-level audio setups. And especially to a non-programmer, I think it seems so much easier to just figure out speech recognition than to maintain a huge knowledge graph about billions of people, their connections (explicit and implicit), their current whereabouts, the sites they are visiting, and the text they literally give to Facebook in the form of messages etc. But of course, each one of those things is a tractable problem, and can progress independently of the others, until all of a sudden it’s so good it seems like they must be inside our heads, or at least listening.

But here’s the thing: I think all that big data is actually waaaaay creepier. If they were just listening in and showing relevant ads, that’d be one thing. But instead they have all this data going back years, and can make all these inferences from the data. Just imagine what inferences could be made about non-advertising topics!