[_jal]

If someone wants to convince me FB, et al are doing this, they can show me packet traces of audio being uploaded for analysis, or in the alternative (if the theory is on-phone analysis) resource consumption data from the phone doing it.

There's been so much discussion of this theory that we'd have seen one of those by now. I have zero love for the surveillance shops, but there's just no real evidence this happens.

[fouric]

Resource consumption for low-accuracy voice transcription is trivial - think in the single-digit milliwatt range[1] for custom hardware. It would also be really easy to hide the resulting small amount of textual data in routine communications with the service's server.

You can't rule out audio transcription on the technical basis that "it's too hard" alone, because it's not too hard.

(for Google, that is - Facebook is constrained by the Android sandbox, but Google has their opaque Google Play services blob on almost every Android phone)

That's obviously not a reason to believe that it does exist - we'd only know that if a Google whistleblower stepped forward, or if someone reverse-engineered Play Services - but we can't rule it out on a technical basis alone.

[1] https://groups.csail.mit.edu/sls/publications/2018/Price_IEE...

[not2b]

Better to focus on the things that we have evidence that they are doing (and there is plenty of abusive behavior we know about) than to speculate about unlikely attack angles and say "we can't rule it out" (proving a negative is nearly impossible). Working that way just leads to focus on the wrong threats.

[Y_Y]

I'd be satisfied with a "beyond a reasonable doubt"-type argument. Somebody pre-registers some hypotheses, like "I've never thought about beanie babies in my life, but I'm going to talk about them in front of my phone. I expect I'll start seeing ads for them at a noticably higher rate then before.". Such an experiment wouldn't be difficult to conduct, but I've never heard of it being done methodically, only noticed after the fact.

I'd be very pleased to see it done though. Complications will certainly arise, so N should be large, and there should be several independent replications.

Maybe it's overly cynical, but this also makes me think of the Volkswagen emissions kerfuffle. Would it be so surprising if the ad software was sophisticated enough to know when it was being tested, and try to play dumb?

[brightball]

My wife and I did this. We don’t watch pro baseball at all and we live in the southeast. Had a 10 minute conversation about the Cincinnati Reds and within a few minutes we were seeing MLB ads on Facebook.

I don’t know how they are doing it…but it happens.