Ask HN: Do you have examples of Facebook using your microphone for ads?
Last night, while we were at home, my wife mentioned to me that she would like to get a storage box to hold her external hard drives. She described her ideal one as a metal box with some sort of foam to hold the drives in place. She had never searched for something like this before and wasn't even aware that something like this existed. A couple hours later, an ad for such a product landed up on her Facebook page. I was a little freaked out.
So, do you have any examples of where something like this has happened to you? Am I being paranoid and this is just a coincidence? Or could Facebook actually be listening in on us?
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13597225 [1] http://newsroom.fb.com/news/h/facebook-does-not-use-your-phones-microphone-for-ads-or-news-feed-stories/
66 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 230 ms ] threadI'm guessing Facebook is doing some pretty complicated work to find that interest and serve the ad, but as evil as Facebook is I doubt they're straight up lying about using the microphone to listen and serve ads.
Facebook might obtain the ad profile match from a third party which obtained microphone access and would let them bot claim 'at this one company we do not use microphone recordings to target ads'
We mentioned Target, including a request for upcoming sales and target credit cards, Advil, Colgate, Liquid Plumber, Scott toilet paper, Wells Fargo (though we need to rule that out bc my daughter's been googling them re DAPL), Citibank, Marriott, Red Lobster, and an imaginary pending trip to Maine.
I will report back what we see.
edit: none of these do we use or see ads for.
More likely you and your wife are demographically similar to others those advertisers are researching and targeting
I'd say it's much more likely that your wife had seen that ad before your conversation but wasn't particularly conscious of seeing it.
You're basically describing how advertising works - making people feel they want to buy something without them even realising.
But even if was, then your logic would be absurd. You would be saying that every urban myth is true because a single example was true. That is nonsensical.
And no, I wasn't implying anything - I'd like some arguments regarding your point. And saying 'thats nonsense', 'you're wrong' does not make any of your points valid.
It's not up to me to disprove such an absurd extreme claim, it's up to the OP to prove it.
That's how the world works, or else everyone would spend their entire lives having to disprove the claims of cranks and conspiracy theorists.
You haven't answered any of my questions so there's that.
Things like Amazon Echo exist and are used for all sorts of purposes, including making purchases and being available for law enforcement.
Gmail is an advertising company who actively listens in on the conversations you have on on their services (i.e. gmail) and uses it to display ads.
Facebook is an advertising company and data mines the hell out of all the data about you they can get their hands on to be able to sell targeted ads.
The specific use-case of "listening to you talk with your mouth, analyzing it and then showing you ads based on it" might not be explicitly be mentioned in the Facebook TOS, but it's the very natural extension of their business model keeping in pace with technology.
So far the evidence has been "I talked about x and a few days later I saw an advert for x".
It's absurd cringy nonsense.
"The Leading Automated Content Recognition Solution"
"Content ID Software & Information Services for Networks, Cloud Platforms, Devices & Apps"
"Make your smart device, application, or platform content aware in the presence of media streams or ambient audio."
Ambient audio. In other words, they turn your phone into a listening device then analyze what it hears for commercial purposes, albeit supposedly only for picking up the sound of copyrighted material.
- There is a little "chevron" menu popdown in the advert, generally top-right.
- Tap it, and then pull down "Why am I seeing this?"
Then you will find out why you are seeing the advert.
Source: I used to work at Facebook
So, it's Acxiom doing the listening?
Source - Used to work with Axciom data myself
It's called "coincidence".
There are many books available on the topic if you wish to increase your knowledge of the concept. Meanwhile there is a Wikipedia article to get your started:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coincidence
Derren Brown did a great demonstration of a similar phenomenon by asking 100s of people to bet on a series of horse races. Of course one person backed the winning horse on all races and thought it was magic. What they didn't realise is that there were a lot of others doing this too and having one person back all the winners was (in that experiment) an inevitability.
Please do share your results :)
Ps : record the topic and take screenshot if you like to make a proof.
I ALWAYS get emails asking why I have showed an image that relates to what they person was just talking about.
But the images are random! It's the well understood concept of confirmation bias.
It's just depressing to see here, because I thought the readers of hackernews were more sophisticated than random sampling of the general population.
https://www.audiblemagic.com
I had a deep and random conversation about Oreos and the tv show Colony recently.
Within a day ads started showing up on my timeline.
None of the possible justifications mentioned in the replies really apply for the case I observed... We have had this happening two or three times, and it is always when my wife's mobile is around (I don't have FB app installed).
So for all I care, it is something that does happen.
It's a really basic and obvious explanation.
Nobody is secretly listening to your phone.