[netsharc]

Yeah, some people believe Facebook listens to their conversations and use them for ad targeting, in theory it's possible, but in practice it would mean needing to upload billions of audio files (how many conversations happen in average day near how many phones with active FB/IG accounts on them) and having the computing power to transcribe them.

And even if they had the resources, being caught doing it would be too damaging...

Then again, some dumb ad salesman on some cable network might believe the myth and think "If FB can do it, why can't we?" and try to implement this surveillance-capitalism-for-ads idea..

[tveita]

Even a few years ago it would be perfectly possible to do audio based content ID on known content to uncover viewing preferences on streaming media - a proven business model, ref https://samsungads.events/acrguide-pr

These days you could easily run Whisper locally on each cable box and report back whatever information advertisers will pay for. It will run a bit hot, but what do they care if they waste your electricity.

[kurthr]

Yeah, listening/matching for specific songs or words is trivial locally. It has been done commercially since the early 2000s (for ASCAP) on mobile phones, when they were dumb bricks. The idea that every single company is following some righteous non-profit seeking stance, is sort of laughable. Maybe FAANG have decided it's not worth it (they have other ways), but that doesn't mean they couldn't or other apps don't.

[o11c]

Are we talking the same Facebook that literally MITM'ed their competitor apps', and hasn't been punished yet?

[thisislife2]

Unless laws exist to prevent this, you can bet that ALL BigTech are doing this, to varying levels. If they are not doing it in your country, you can bet they are doing it in other countries. The US government incentivised them to do this with the PRISM program ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM ) and showed them the value of collecting user data even if they do not need it (right now) for their services and products.

That services like Alexa, Siri, Cortana, Assistant etc. exist with 24x7 listening devices shows that cost is no longer a hurdle in deploying this at scale. And note that they do not have to upload the audio files (which by the way, they can - I remember Google showcasing an audio codec - https://github.com/google/lyra - that is suitable for very low bandwidth, so neither bandwidth nor storage is a big issue today). Today's phones also have enough power to transcribe the audio on device itself (e.g. Google Live Transcribe feature now works when offline - https://9to5google.com/2022/03/10/google-live-transcribe-fea... ). Why do you think there is a sudden push now to put AI on SoCs and thus on device? It's partly because BigTech want to offload more and more processing on to your device. We are at a stage where hardware has outpaced system software development and is actually underutilised.

(And we are also at the techno-cultural cusp where the ownership of most of our devices are questionable, and moving towards a dystopian future where we will no longer be able to claim rights on these computing devices).

[marcellus23]

> Unless laws exist to prevent this, you can bet that ALL BigTech are doing this, to varying levels.

I would absolutely take that bet. It's nothing more than unsubstantiated paranoia.

[firecall]

For sure.

But ya know…

I know they arnt, at least I believe they arnt listening.

But sure as hell feels like it sometimes!

Still I’m smart enough and knowledgable enough to know that combined signals used to target and my own confirmation bias can make it seem like we are being listened to.

We can sometimes talk about something and then literally see an Ad for it.

[ReptileMan]

Well there are strange cases when we talked with a friend about something and then suddenly the algorithm decided to push content or ads that are related to the topic. While we didn't search stuff on the topic.

[evantbyrne]

Yeah, saying "some people" believe they experience this is an understatement. People my age seem to generally be aware their phones send them targeted ads based on their conversations. It happened to me frequently with my Nexus in the Google News app. Happens to my girlfriend on her Android in the Facebook app. I switched to iPhone, never installed Facebook, and haven't seen the same effect in Apple's news app.

[guerrilla]

> And even if they had the resources, being caught doing it would be too damaging...

Would it really, or is your comment the response to them already having been caught? How would we really know the difference if nobody wants to beleive it? This is exactly how things were before Snowden. Your argument begs the question, in other words.

[firecall]

Indeed.

I’m not sure it would be damaging.

Off the top of my head, Tesla employees were viewing internal cameras.

And I’m pretty sure Facebook employees used to be able to read private messages and jokes/bragged about it?

Nothing happens to these people, unless they step out of the US that is…