Facebook may be listening to your conversations and targeting ads to you...

chef-borjan

chef-borjan

chef-borjan

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Really interesting and obviously unnecessarily intrusive if true.

Reddit thread

EDIT: To be clear, the claim is that Facebook is accessing your microphone to listen to your real life conversations you have when near your phone.

Might also explain why people feel Facebook drains their battery so much...

Hopefully the truth can be figured out, or at least if this seems suspicious someone like Apple can take a look at the app and see if they are doing anything they shouldn't be. People think this violates the App store policy (although I haven't checked that myself).
 
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harry5522 said:
So wait Facebook is doing what every other major website is doing? Shocker
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Sorry I'll edit my post to be more clear.

People are having real life conversations just in the vicinity of their phones, and when they pick them up later they are getting ads pushed to them about things they have mentioned in that conversation. They also claim that they have never typed such details into their phones at any point.

I don't think websites verbally have this capability.
 
They openly admitted they were going to listen "to your music and movies" last year. Don't like it, don't use it. It's an NSA archive anyway.
 
It's just a paranoid coincidence, I bet everyone's browsing history will reflect most conversations they have and the adverts are just targeted from browsing history.

I would estimate that my browsing history would reflect in approximately 60 to 70% of every conversation I have.
 
OhEsEcks said:
It's not a coincidence. Facebook stated last year they would be listening in...

http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2014/05/a-new-optional-way-to-share-and-discover-music-tv-and-movies/

That gives them free rein of the mic.
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It clearly states in that link that they can't capture conversation and it does not give them free reign of the mic

Quote: "When writing a status update – if you choose to turn the feature on – you’ll have the option to use your phone’s microphone to identify what song is playing or what show or movie is on TV."

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Hikari Kisugi said:
then any agency would have also, the phones are significantly less secure than I thought.
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And therein lies the bigger problem.

http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2014/01/a-peek-inside-the-nsas-spy-gear-catalog/

PICASSO: Now this is spyware. This software implants can collect call metadata, location data and even turn on the phone’s microphone to pick up conversations in the room. It also features something called a “panic button”, but the catalogue doesn’t explain its function.
Click to expand...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_ANT_catalog
 
I had my suspicions when I started getting ads relating to things I'd talked about recently, it definitely wasn't my search history as a couple of cases were when other people had told me about an album they were listening to and then an ad for that band appeared in my feed.

I did think I was being paranoid but it's happened to a few of us in the office so I'm not discounting it entirely.
 
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