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by dotdi 3057 days ago
<rant> Shocking!

Abuse of power and shady tracking techniques by Facebook? Unheard of! </rant>

Seriously, this cannot be surprising after learning that the Messenger app listens to everything you do, all the time. That's just off the top of my head. They are doing this and much more.

4 comments

On iOS this is simply not possible without the user being explicitly notified.

Can you provide some evidence of this happening on Android ?

Also Facebook categorically denies this: http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-41776215

I've heard a lot of anecdotal reports of the messenger app listening to what you do. So much so that I've uninstalled the app.

However, I've never seen a non-anecdotal source or even a source that gathers all anecdotes and gives a decent meta-analysis. Would you happen to have one?

The reply all podcast did a decent discussion of the topic.

The messenger app probably doesn’t listen to you, but it’s abusive in other ways and shouldn’t be uninstalled. The main creepy feature of Facebook apps is that they continuously track your location. That’s a source of much of the creepy targeting that people notice.

Also, Facebook’s weasel-worded response to the issue implies that they do not use pervasive audio targeting, but buy data from people who do. The Wired article that claimed that using audio was impractical is nonsense.

Please get your facts straight before posting here.

https://www.wired.com/story/facebooks-listening-smartphone-m...

What facts? This article is full of inaccurate speculation but there are no facts in it. For example:

>To make it happen, Facebook would need to record everything your phone hears while it's on.

This assumption treated as an axiom here is false, and it makes the rest of the article inaccurate as well.

I've read the article before, and it's not convincing.

I'm not one for conspiracy theories, but the article lists some forms of how it might work and reasons how it would be unfeasible. There are other ways this could work, IMHO.

How is this instance an abuse of power or shady?

I would be surprised if service wouldn't index my site after I put one of their pixels on my site.