In Leak, Facebook Partner Brags About Listening to Your Phone’s Microphone to Serve Ads for Stuff You Mention
In Leak, Facebook Partner Brags About Listening to Your Phone’s Microphone to Serve Ads for Stuff You Mention
One of Facebook's alleged marketing partners explained how it listens to users' smartphone microphones and advertises to them accordingly.
"Meta does not use your phone's microphone for ads and we've been public about this for years," the statement read. "We are reaching out to CMG to get them to clarify that their program is not based on Meta data."
Ah, yes. The tried and true defense of "we've denied it for years and continue to deny it" must be credible coming from a source as trustworthy as Facebook. I hear they're planning on holding a press conference to pinky swear they're not listening to the microphone they demand access to in order to show you ads that make them money.
59It remains funny to me that futurism.com became mostly about covering the dystopia we live in.
46This is why I don't like the push of everything needing an app. I sure do wish people in congress cared about this type of privacy issues the way they did Tiktok.
33I highly doubt that they actually managed to do this, at least any time recently.
As another commenter noted, Android alerts you when an app is accessing the microphone in the background, and it would also absolutely destroy the phones battery life more than the FB app currently does. The only way that we have the "Hey Google/Siri" command prompts active all the time is with custom hardware not available to the apps, and certainly not without Android knowing about it.
Maybe they actively listen while the app is open, but even then I think recent Android/iOS would let you know about that.
33These companies absolutely do use your microphone to listen.
My wife and I have tested this and you can too.
Have a conversation near your phones about purchasing something offbeat. We used a kitchen garbage disposal in our test. Talk about them for a few minutes, about needing to buy one, different brands, etc.
Almost immediately you'll be served garbage disposal adds.
29A market agency claiming they do something of the sort isn’t proof that conversations are being monitored en masse. Security researchers can and probably have tested for this and found no clear, verifiable evidence, otherwise we would have known. Also, this stuff can be blocked at the OS level and I find it hard to imagine (esp. without solid proof) that Google or Apple would jeopardize their reputations to this extent by enabling such unauthorized listening in on users’ conversations.
Of course it’s good to keep watching this space but we shouldn’t jump to conclusions.
20At this point it doesn't even matter if it's real or not, after Snowden no sane person believes big tech since they were all in on PRISM.
14unless this is provably and demonstrably true, this is definitely not true, because up until now, this has been entirely speculation.
12I KNEW IT!!!
12Isn’t this an old article?
10Thank god those moral people would never sell stuff to law enforcement nor sell it to companies that would then sell it to law enforcement.
Nope. Those people are all moral, good, and rich thus we are safe.
8For everyone saying apps need permission to use your mic I want to point you to "play services". The permissions protections only apply to user space apps not system apps. Thats how u can say "OK google" and get the chat ai to pop up even tho its "not listening" according to the OS.
Also if you read the website they are not piping audio to their servers. They push triggers (keywords, etc) to the local ai on your phone that listens for things like "OK google" and then sends those reports back.
Meta apps would need permission to to mic but I think if y'all check your big tech apps u will be surprised how many have that permission.
I can't speak to iOS because its closed source but it probably has similar backdoors for apple.
7easy to test. men can say "tampons glitter lotion" several times a day. women say "garage exhaust cable".
7Title is basically clickbait given it's Cox Media Group doing this, not Facebook. They're partnered with a bunch of companies.
6What ? A corporation that earn money in selling personal data, that don't want to share its code that run on a device with a microphone, actually use it ? I'm shocked
6Shocked, I tell you!
3Permanently Deleted
3Ngl man I'm not buying it. With all the protections in mobile OSes against this exact kind of thing it straight up doesn't seem possible
2Until now it was really annoying to collect audio and then use it. The app needs to constantly record, send out the datas and then lastly process it to be useful. Today the cost versus benefits are really not to their advantage.
But tomorrow this might change, if they find a way of using the mic to serve ads be sure that they will. The only question today is how? The only option at this time is for me to process the stuff offline. As they do today with "ok google". Within the next months-years we are going to see more and more phones and it stuff using dedicated or specialized AI chip, they will be great with really low consumption to run 24/24. They could analyse offline the speech, make a resume and lastly when the connectivity is sufficient and enough datas are collwcted, the phone sends out all the infos to the companies servers.
I've seen some comments about the fact that others companies that Google cannot really use the mic in this way, this is right...today. But in the future make sure that when they will have developed correctly this concept, Google (and Apple) would surely be okay with this approach (maybe in exchange with some bucks).
Today phones are surely not listening to us, but they know so much things that we are actually thinking that they are. But this way is maybe not enough profitable for them, so they want to invade even more our privacy to gain more of this fucking thing called "money".
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