this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2024
1117 points (96.6% liked)
Technology
59123 readers
4956 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
A 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.
They have it's very easy there are free programs that monitor all data traffic.
This claim that Facebook listens to you on your phone has been around for years. It has been investigated numerous times and has never turned out to be true. Until recently the processing capacity required would have been insane and you would have an incredibly high noise to signal ratio. It's just not an economical way of gathering data for advertising.
Why bother anyway when people put their entire lives on Facebook, for free, in easily processable text?
Your phone/plan carrier using voice data to make a marketing profile is well documented actually. This data is purchased and verified and resold by meta, or in some cases bought and used by alphabet for GAS. Cacti can show you outgoing data for every device on a network, and you can see data being sent from a phone in signed packets going to your carrier when you're not "actively using" it. It seems like you know about network monitoring tools but you haven't actually used them, just talked about them in reference to data collection.
"Why buy the cow" here is also easily answered: not everyone uses Facebook, a fair number of users will deactivate their facebook page but continue to use messenger.
Can you share this well documented documents?
The july 2017 verizon data leak was made public.
Yeah, with lots of leaked customer data. Nothing about using voice data to make a marketing profile. Unless there is a second leak I don't know about.
But judging by your inability to link it you just made it up.
Please think about what you've just confirmed about yourself
I confirmed you made it up and can't link a source.
So what you're saying is the biggest companies like Amazon, Google, ChatGPT, etc... can't perfect voice dictation when I'm talking directly and clearly to my device, but this company has been able to figure it out. And doing it while hiding from the smartphone OS that it's doing it. While the device is at a distance/hidden in my pocket. And is using it just to sell ads.
👍
Is this copypasta
Your comment? I'm pretty sure yeah it was, and a really old one
I asked because it was nonsensical and could have been funny if you were imitating the typical internet child comment but here we are with you making no sense and me disappointed
Really?... Wow, not only did you copy pasta one of the oldest trolls online but you can't understand how illogical the troll is. And you want to accuse me of being a child?
Your comment was disproved here.... In 2018. And it wasn't a new idea then either.
Hey! You can't read after all! Rember when I explicitly posted that you can sniff packets going to your phone provider and not these companies? You have zero reading comprehension and a bad attitude, and it's obvious you're more interested in being right than being correct. If googling unrelated drivel articles to a discussion gets you off, you do you I guess
I'm sorry I proved you wrong to the point you had to resolve yourself to personal attacks. Do you feel better now?
Because people's (presumed private) conversations on Messenger are not the same thing as things people post publicly.
Personally, I would never install that malware on my phone. But if you even have FB Messenger installed on your device, chances are that it's constantly sending your data to Facebook. Go take a look at what permissions it "needs."
We can see what it's sending to facebook though, and it's not constant. There's a bunch that it does send and receive, but this isn't hypothetical speculation, like, we can just see that it's not using your microphone for that, or sending anything like audio data. You can check this yourself, wireshark is free and packet specifications are available.
I get that, but it just happens far too often to be coincidence.
I'm not going to claim to know how, but it's naive to take the word of corporations when we have so much circumstantial evidence that shows these firms are targeting people with ads for things that they had never shown interest in, but happened to mention once in the presence of a device with a microphone and internet connection. There have been people who have tested this, and have gotten results that indicate that this just cannot be a coincidence. It has happened to me personally on several occasions (before I started keeping my mic off at the OS level, hasn't happened since).
I've been around long enough to know that, just because the general public doesn't know how some proprietary tech that corporations spend billions on R&D for might work, doesn't mean it's impossible. People have come up with insane shit, and that's just the stuff that people have voluntarily (usually) disclosed. God knows what kind of proprietary shit is out there that we have no awareness of.
I mean, for fuck sake, you can now steal a person's password by listening to their keystrokes:
https://www.tomsguide.com/news/the-sound-your-keystrokes-make-is-enough-for-ai-to-steal-them-how-to-stay-safe
Not to mention the fact that the NSA likely has back doors in every major piece of software and hardware in the US...
I know that stuff isn't directly related, but the point is that these things always seem impossible, until it gets leaked that it's been possible for years now.
Facebook snooped on users’ Snapchat traffic in secret project, documents reveal
By paying people $20 / month in exchange for installing a VPN that will snoop on your data so they can market research their competitors.
It is unacceptable, but it wasn't in secret from the users. They agreed to get paid in exchange for the usage data of competitor apps.
So it's a completely different situation to any "secretly spying" claim. The users had to go out of their way to get it setup.
Did I misread something? It even says in the title of the linked article, that it was a "secret project".
Yes, it was secret in the sense they didn't want their competitors knowing about it.
It wasn't secret to people who were invited and signed up for the program.
It was already ruled that they failed to sufficiently disclose which information was used and how.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/australia-court-fines-facebook-owner-meta-14-mln-undisclosed-data-collection-2023-07-26/
Yep
Nothing to do with your microphone.
Yes. Just another malicious thing facebook does. Surely, they are totally trustworthy in all other regards. /s
This has nothing to do with trust and everything to do with facts and evidence.
The evidence is: among other things, facebook has repeatedly violated user's privacy. It would be no surprise if they would also monitor conversations via the microphone. Sure, currently there seems to be no evidence for that. But I wouldn't be so naive to just trust them on that.
This is not evidence that they're using your microphone, and you know it's not.
Honestly, I would be very surprised. Not that they would, but that they were able to. And that they were able to without ever being caught, somehow bypassing Google and Apple's mic usage notifications.
I don't know why you keep coming back to trust. I've already addressed this. No one is suggesting that you should trust them. You shouldn't trust them. And you shouldn't use their services. That's not the point.
I didn't claim it to be evidence for that.
Unless some form of hardware notification is hardwired into the device, which indicates cam or mic usage, I'm on the rather paranoid side regarding software notifications. Software is usually much easier to break. I'm leaning a lot out of the window now, as I don't know how secure those notifications are implemented. However, even then there is reason for concern, given that facebook had / has questionable deals with device manufacturers. If they were willing to share personal data with device manufacturers, there is reason to suspect this went or can go the other way around as well.
It is mine. Even though there is no evidence for a surveillance using device microphones itself yet and it could be surprising if they were able to, given the history of facebook, they participated in a lot of rather surprising shit.
...what exactly were you providing evidence for when you said "the evidence is"?
Yes, I see that.
Okay well you could have been more clear, and I won't disagree with you on that. That's not the topic of discussion in this thread.
People have been saying this for decades with no evidence.
Interesting. And shady. Though not about recording conversations.
Aye. Facebook has been proven to be shady af over and over again.
Anybody that's ever spoken to a salesperson knows that they're talking out of their arse most of the time, and I doubt this is an exception.
He's said this because he thinks that the people he's talking to will give him more money if he does.
If it was happening at all you'd have seen proof by now. Like people pulling apps apart and finding proof, not just "I spoke to Bob last week about cameras and now I'm seeing ads for cameras".
The truly terrifying part is they don't need to listen to your conversations to know what you want.