I think they’re lying. Apps can’t access the microphone, on an OS level, without explicit permission from the user. Unpess Facebook found and used insane exploits in both Android and iOS, I’m calling bullshit. They’re just bragging about something they can’t possibly do.
Wouldn’t want to be mean to Facebook users, but the vast majority of them probably has micophone access enabled for Messenger at least, if not Facebook.
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This comment inspired me to go turn off microphone, camera, Bluetooth, and local network access for every app. I’ll reenable as necessary.
Just leave it on for whatever runs your phone calls. I emabarrasingly discovered that the phone app NEEDS microphone access lol.
Can’t take calls? Don’t threaten ME with a good time!
I keep my microphone and camera off at the OS level always now. Android has quick options for it that you can add to your pull-down menu thing at the top. When I get an incoming call, a popup comes up asking if I want to allow voice permissions. Then after the call I disable it again. Same goes if I need to take photos.
I’ve never not believed that they listen to this shit. I’ve had far too many coincidental ad placements after saying something completely unrelated to anything I’ve ever searched for.
At least on iOS, it takes it a step farther and tells you specifically when an app is accessing your location, microphone, camera, etc… It even delineates when it’s in the foreground or background. For instance, if I check my weather app, I get this symbol in the upper corner:
The circled arrow means it is actively accessing my location. And if I close the app, it gives me this instead:
The uncircled arrow means my location was accessed in the foreground recently. And if it happens entirely in the background, (like maybe Google has accessed my location to check travel time for an upcoming calendar event,) then the arrow will be an outline instead of being filled in.
The same basic rules apply for camera and mic access. If it accesses my mic, I get an orange dot. If it accesses my camera, I get a green dot.
For anyone who doesn’t have a device that natively supports this feature, there’s an app on F-Droid called “Privacy Indicators” that provides this for camera and mic access. It uses the built-in Accessibility services to provide this, and needs a couple of other special permissions
You can change the color of the indicator, mine’s red for more visibility.
I installed it from GitHub however, since the F-Droid build was really outdated: https://github.com/NitishGadangi/Privacy-Indicator-App
Android has the same feature.
Yeah it’s great, same thing on the Google Pixel. The mic/camera thing brings peace of mind
I know you mean well, but you are making assumptions that the software is not lying to you. You can’t trust a UI element.
because Google/Apple lie to you on behalf of meta, sure
My Pixel does the colored dot thing as well. It also has the ability to add “Mic access” and “camera access” quick options to the pull down menu to quickly turn the permissions on/off at the OS level. I keep mine off at all times. If I receive an incoming call, I get a popup asking if I want to enable the microphone to answer it.
Ever use voice in messenger? If so FB has the permissions it needs to open your mic.
Even if they have that permission, they can’t just turn on the microphone when you’re not in the app. Also the battery drain and data usage will be impossible to miss.
Facebook listening in on your microphone is one of those things that I actually believe to be true. Ever had conversations with people to then realize that you’re being served targeted ads based on these conversations? Seems very coincidental.
Nope
There are other ways they do that, like thrird party cookies, and combining data from many, many sources.
Apps simply CAN’T access those kinds of things unless you allow it. You can check this in the apps permissions on your phone if you’re not sure. If microphone access is allowed, then yeah, they’ll be listening, probably. But remove that permission and you’ll be fine
They really need to name-and-shame beyond “Facebook Partner” considering we’re talking about fucking Cox Media Group.
Fuckers got my entire complex’s Internet shut down (I am a renter not the owner)
I remember reading some time ago that “the idea (of phones listening to everything you say to serve ads) makes no economic sense, because it’d be too expensive to run”
Looks like it actually isn’t “too expensive” to run in the end.
Yep, and it’s not just Facebook, not just microphone. My lappie recently started serving ads for something I searched on a device not linked to it. I’m guessing it’s my ISP engaging in these sneak tactics.
Depemds if you are logged i to google services on your phone and on you pc browser. If you log into anything google on your browser it retains that log in across all the apps
Oh you know what? Gmail!
That’ll do it 😀
You don’t even have to be logged in, or even go to the same website. There are a number of companies that offer free analytics tools to websites. A completely innocent website that just wants to know how many people have visited their page might use a free people counting widget from Google, Facebook, or wherever. Now every time that webpage gets loaded by a browser so does that widget. The widget itself doesn’t even have to report back to the original creators. If it includes something hosted by the original creators, then they can track the destination IP and browser tags.
Even then, you have local voice recognition. You don’t need to stream all microphone recordings to some central server for processing, you just do voice recognition and keep a log of say the last 100 nouns and a high priority log for the last twenty nouns used near verbs like purchase, buy or get. Then send those lists to the ad provider as context. All the hard work is done on the client device and the same backend used for ad context on web pages can be used for this as well.
Then hide it encrypted in an image upload or some other packet. Listen for ‘buy a <something>’ encrypt its text version, wait for something to cargo it with in a data transmission so people looking at data transmissions aren’t any the wiser, hide it in some obscure way that would look normal otherwise, it’s intercepted, sends off to advertisers. Adtech is cyber terrorism.
You don’t think security experts know about stereonography techniques? It’s like the first thing you learn about in uni for it. Like the first week.
It’s not when it’s your device doing the computing. All electronic devices should have visible hardware indicators for when their camara or microphone is on, but that’s a consumer rights issue most people are dismissive of, so it’s not happening. Some people even always want it on for the assistant functionality.
my Samsung has a green light in the task bar when my camera is on
The mic is always on for android phones anway, thats how it hears “Hey Google”
Not how it works.
They have an ultra low power processor that listens for the “hey Google” keyword, then that wakes up the main audio processor. But the main microphone is not actually on, and that small processor isn’t capable of recording audio it’s just looking for a certain matching sound wave and then triggering.
That’s why it sometimes triggers if you just go “hurr ner dorrll” because those random sounds are close enough to what it’s looking for.
That is why some older devices can’t actually install the assistant software. They lack the necessary hardware to do it in a power efficient manner.
Except Facebook never used it this was a 3rd party trying to hype up investors. Many audits have been run on these apps and there is no way they use your microphone. It’s way cheaper to just look at your search history.
Yeah, a marketing agency selling snake oil to people that actually think they can do it is not expensive. Of course they never actually built the tech.
Shocked, I tell you!
It is pretty easy to verify whether you’ve granted Microphone access to Facebook. If you have, revoke it.
It’s not Facebook though, it’s just used in the clickbait headline as an advertising partner of the actual company the story is about.
But if you need to revoke the microphone permission from the Facebook app then something is wrong anyway, because it means you have the Facebook app installed for some reason.
The problem with closed source apps is you don’t know what else is going on in the background and what else it might have installed or connected to, unless you have debug logs for everything it did and know how to interpret all of that. I wouldn’t install any app from the facebook company on any device I use
I’m pretty sure that iPhone have the same security but on Android, apps cannot install other apps. When you think about it that would be a pretty basic security vulnerability so it’s not that surprising that it’s blocked.
At 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.
This is why I don’t have the Facebook app installed. However, what about messenger? Did the collect the data from messenger?
Think about it.
Any closed-source software is a potential privacy threat. You are always at the mercy of big tech in that case. If the product is free, you are the product
These 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.
This has been common knowledge for several years now.
And there have been push back against the idea by naive, trusting people who think the toggles for that do anything. The fact that there’s leak conversations now of advertisers admitting they do it will sink any counter argument against it.
Also, if advertisers are doing it, you can bet that the government can too.
They’re not “naive” or “trusting”. There’s this thing called “evidence”, which doesn’t exist to support this idea. Android is open-source so you don’t have to trust anything, you can verify it, as can security researchers.
Advertisers are lying. That’s what advertisers do.
This is not the court of law and no one is going to jail because of my distrust of corporations. “Innocent until proven guilty” does not apply here. Any batshit idea I could come with on how a corporation could siphon my data, they have already thought of and tried. They do not deserve the benefit of the doubt.
Who said anything about law? I already said you don’t have to trust them. And you shouldn’t. But we’re discussing facts and reality.
No that’s being pushed back on the idea from people with tech skills who work in the cyber security industries. You don’t think they would realize if something like this was happening and shout it from the rooftops?
It’s everyone’s favorite past time to dunk on Facebook but that doesn’t mean we should make stuff up without evidence. Calling people naive because they don’t believe you is the same as saying it’s true because you want it to be.
Evidence must be presented. I’ve never seen any not in the 10 years these claims have been made. No one has ever bothered to provide a shred of evidence and all of it is who I talked about X and then I saw an ad for X.
Pardon me for wanting something a little bit more concrete
You don’t think they would realize if something like this was happening and shout it from the rooftops?
Nope. Too many people are just trying to collect a paycheck. This is testable without access to the backend or source code and too many sociopaths work in the industry. My default is to distrust anything when the other party has a profit motive to lie. It’s anti-skeptical, but you have to prove that they aren’t spying on me if you want me to trust something.
Okay so address my fundamental point which is show me the evidence because otherwise you’re living in exciting reality of your own creation. I am positive it is very fun in there, but it doesn’t have much to do with here on Earth
Come leave here on the other side of the reality curtain we have donuts.
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Sure thing… Just install Facebook Messenger on your phone and don’t pay attention to all of the permissions it needs that are completely unrelated to communicating with people in a messaging app. It is literal malware.
It’s wild how much trust people are willing to put into capitalist corporations again and again as if they give a single shit about them.
People are lazy and life is easier when you just blindly trust things you don’t understand. People think I’m weird that I don’t want a Ring camera INSIDE my house. I wouldn’t even put on outside my home.
The reverse is just as true:
“People are lazy and life is easier when you just blindly hate things you don’t understand.”
As a network engineer, it’s frustrating to see laymen make outlandish claims about technology with their source being “corpo bad”. I hate corporations too, but it would be an absolute bombshell if it were true. There’s just no possible way that every single hacker and security engineer are in league with the corporations.
Honestly, with how people reacted to covid numbers being fudged downward or accepting whatever lie that claims that climate change is fake, I do not believe that any more evidence that corporations are listening in on your conversations would get any reaction out of the population. Hell, did anything come from the Panama Papers or Paradise Papers? The average person does not care.
Sure, people might not care, but that doesn’t change the facts. Experts aren’t denying the legitimacy of the Panama or Paradise Papers, but they are saying that the idea of megacorporations secretly listening to your microphone and selling you products based on that is false. If they were doing that, it would be pretty easy to find out. Smartphones aren’t some mysterious black box; security engineers and hackers are constantly checking for these kinds of exploits. If corporations were actually spying on us through our phones, it would be the biggest topic at DEFCON. Believing that this could be kept secret would require assuming that all these experts are either paid off or in cahoots with the corporations, which veers into full-blown conspiracy theory territory.
I used to work in adtech and the most we could do was track locations. Even that didn’t work properly for our purposes because most shops are in malls where several different stores co-exist on the same coordinates. It only worked for outlets in retail parks which were separated from one another.
There are deniers. They’re wrong.
I’ve tested this many times and never saw it happen.
I even got an email out of nowhere right in my inbox from Dell the same day I was talking about Dell laptops with my book club. I would be so shocked if these examples are mere coincidence
Having worked on the tech side of email marketing campaigns I would actually be impressed
Setting aside confirmation bias (idk, because it’s boring?): So people you’re in a book club with, an established group which it is very easy to associate you with, were discussing Dell laptops… and you think it’s strange you got looped in? If three people from your book club all looked up dells later, or earlier, or etc. etc., why wouldn’t they figure you might also be interested in dell laptops? An approach that doesn’t require NLP of god only knows how much hypothetical audio taken from pockets, and works much better?
Turn off microphone access to all social media and tell your friends the same. I’ve disabled mine for years and all ads are generic or from prior sites visited.
Do you one better - My mini-desktop is plugged into a monitor with no microphone or camera.
There were whole threads of people saying this stuff doesn’t happen. They would say it just didn’t make sense that companies would do this, it’s not worth it to them. That all the ads I was seeing at convenient times were just a coincidence.
And they are right. This company is full of shit. Show me any proof the tech from the deleted advert actually existed.
Right and your evidence is “I think it happens”.
Show me the stack trace.
There are simps in this thread trying to say “uuuuhmmmm AKSHUALLY it’s not Facebook directly” like that’s fucking relevant to the problem.
They’re here in this thread lol. No matter what, these people will deny its happening. I don’t understand it.
I have my camera and microphone deactivated on the OS level because Youtube and Spotify would show me things workmates mentioned way too often.
I didn’t notice it since.
Could still be a major coincidence though, the biggest of them.
Same exact thing for me, and same exact results. Also too major of a coincidence in my mind.
The next iteration of gaslighting is already here: That it’s no big deal anyway since you can just use an ad blocker. Riiight, let’s all just turn our eyes away to make the monster go away. Surely, it’ll get bored and stop listening and recording, and surely, it will not sell its collected data off to banks, insurance providers, the government, law enforcement… right?
Seriously… If ad-blockers worked at a high enough level to actually impact this shit, then they wouldn’t be doing it. They know most people don’t bother with ad blockers, and because of that, they’re low-hanging fruit.
Most of the non tech people reaction
But before that, when it was not acknowledged by social media, it was more like ’ you’re paranoid. And you think you’re that important that they listen to you? Common, get back to reality ’
I feel like we’ve been gaslighted so bad about this that we were even denying each other’s reality.
I knew they had to be doing this so I turned off all mic permissions. One day it pissed me off so much I started keeping my phone off completely unless I needed to use it.
The only good thing that came out of it was I learned about ad blockers. Fine, listen to me since I can’t fucking stop you(keeping phone off was inconvenient), but it’s futile now and you wasted money since I won’t see your stupid fucking ads anymore.
I knew they had to be doing this so I turned off all mic permissions. One day it pissed me off so much I started keeping my phone off completely unless I needed to use it
It might be an easy to just stop using Facebook really.
I’ve had enough time to work out which of my relatives are racist, so I don’t really need it anymore.
I don’t have fb or the youtube app and haven’t for years… so I’m not sure what was doing it. I have ublock origin now, so if it’s still happening I wouldn’t know.
Honestly the thought of them pouring that much money into r&d and launching that spyware just to have us plebs block the end result(ads) does feel kinda good at least.
Yeah, being not paranoid is hard in XXI century.
TBH the same scenario has been mentioned in the “ex machina” movie from 2014 when colleb has been asking how the humanoid robots work. The deep blue was AI of search engine taking data from listening to the phone calls
It’s the reverse. Non tech people believe the snake oil, tech people know this is snake oil.
What’s the last “bombshell scandal that would ruin a company” that actually ruined a company?
Enron? Maybe the SBF thing? Seems like financial scandals are the only thing that matters.
As a business you can be a maverick against many laws, just not the laws regarding finance.
Cambridge Analytica, but only because what they were doing was so monumentally illegal. I’m sure the government would have let them get away with it if they could have thought of a way out for them. A lot of them mates were involved in that scandal.
Unroll.me was a service that would scan your email and clean up your inbox. The New York Times reported that the company was gathering sales receipts emails, anonymizing them, and selling them to rival companies; for example Uber paid them to hand over all the sales receipts they could on Lyft rides in people’s mailboxes. The bad press made them eventually sell the company to Slice, mainly for the email archives they amassed.
Slice like… the pizza website?
That’s what I assumed too but it appears to be a package tracking website
Ngl 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
Title is basically clickbait given it’s Cox Media Group doing this, not Facebook. They’re partnered with a bunch of companies.
What ? 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
