17
lubwn
7y

I am curious whether facebook IS listening to conversations or not.
Living with my girlfriend in a small appartment, yesterday we were talking about some shitty game we both played around 10 years ago, I was wondering whether the game still exists and googled on my phone (via LTE, not wifi) - yeah the game is still online and still the same shit.
Today she saw facebook sponsored ads to this game on HER facebook.

Today we watched a movie (Valerian and the thousands planets) - and there was this ship which looked similar to Millenium Falcon. I noted that in the midtime. After the movie - guess what - opened the facebook abd there was a sponsored ad to buy Millenium Falcon miniature or lego figure.

How? Randomized events? I do not think so. This was not the first time it happened.

Note: we are not native english speakers, maybe "millenium falcon" could be the only catch fb could achieve?

Comments
  • 1
    Has happened to me before too... Sketchy
  • 1
    How would they do that without any access on any device to do so? except if you have some active listening feature, like google assistant, alexa, google home products etc. where I am pretty sure the data gets smashed across the internet to anybody.
  • 4
    If you search for something and visit page with FB widget - they got you.
  • 2
    @JoshBent yeah I was also thinking about that this way. Having win10 home edition which was shipped with my notebook and there were numerous cases about "sending data" to microsoft. I know those are two different companies but who knows who sells data to whom.
  • 1
    *Don's tin-foil hat*

    I don't use social media, and never have. I saw this kind of shit coming when Facebook first came out. Careful what shit you run on your phones people 😎
  • 2
    @ontogeny here's the permission which FB got on my phone. And I browse internet using duck duck go search engine and plugin, hopefully it will increase some privacy
  • 7
    A friend of mine uses Facebook messenger constantly. She called her mother and one of the things that came up in conversation was her mother recommending she buy this one particular ring. She had never heard of it before, and didn't look it up after.

    However, later that day, her Facebook feed showed her ads for that exact ring.

    How did Facebook know? I'm guessing Facebook messenger listened to the call since it was running and has access to the microphone, and matched that to a product ad.

    Alternative: it correlated her mother's recent searches (if she did this) and found their relation through facebook, and showed the daughter (or both of them?) ads for it because they're related.

    However, with similar odd coincidences between conversations and search suggestions/ads happening to me and other people I know, I'm very much inclined to believe the voice-analysis theory.
  • 3
    Not just Facebook. Google too. The first auto complete suggestions in search still to change depending on what you say. These hot mics on Android are worrying
  • 0
    They read you browser history. Not sure about voice
  • 1
    @lubwn @root one thing tho, i read somewhere that in the terms and agreements, it says that the app can open its microphone any time, to listen to you
  • 1
    @firecall welcome to DevRant
  • 1
    What are ads on facebook? The suggested pages? I seriously have no idea.

    Edit: I do use facebook and I see some suggested pages that aren't related to anything.
  • 0
  • 1
    @rik61072 thanks 😀
  • 1
    I say, have no doubt it does listen. And revoke ALL THE PERMISSIONS. I hope you're not into sharing stuff through Facebook. I lost my shit when my Facebook app suggested to me in-app to upload some photos I had recently taken with my phone, which were also displayed in-app along with the suggestion. The app decided to peek on my files on its own, it could read any file and nothing prevented it from uploading everything in secret. Since then the only permission it gets is to run in the background.
  • 0
    Not being a devil's advocate. Just being a logical shithead. No their tech is not that advanced yet.

    Considering how many craps we are spouting from our mouth on daily basis, I do not believe that Facebook can detect few particular voice as the keywords. I have seen you mentioning about non-english speaking, but I don't think you only said that one particular English word during those days.

    However I believe that facebook can track majority of your browsing patterns (especially every content website on earth has facebook widgets on them). I also believe that facebook's algorithm to detect trending keyword or guessing our interest is way more accurate and higher than what we expected.

    // oh I totally expect facebook can listen to our conversation.
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