HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

⬐ leecarraher

"ok step 1, let's start up Wireshark(or equivalent sniffer)..." JK. Just another I said something "I think" I never said before and now here's an ad for it-test.

⬐ RikNieu

I have had this happen with my Xiaomi android phone. I've had a couple of times where I get ads served pertaining to conversations I've had with random people when my phone is laying nearby, silently listenting. No googling the topics from my side, simply random conversation.

It even seems to be able to translate conversations in my native language into displaying English ads. Creepy as hell.

I'm thinking of going back to Apple, it's just that their phones as so bloody expensive now. Sigh.

⬐ touristtam

So you have not disabled all application's access to the microphone unless the one that actually need it? I thought that was the appeal of MIUI in the first place.

⬐ RikNieu

I have not allowed access to apps that don't need it, do I have to go through each app and check its permissions manually? Also, the mic works on bg mode?

⬐ msadowski

Same here with a OnePlus android phone. I've been also eying Apple for a while but stuff like disabling Bluetooth for a short period of time puts me off slightly.

⬐ Paraesthetic

Make sure its not just cognitive reticulation, and the priming of your brain where previously you wouldn't have noticed these things.

⬐ RikNieu

It's not. It shows ads based on other peoples interests or what they have talked about with me. It was about things that wouldn't be in my personal sphere of interests in general. Specific ride-sharing companies, specific speakers a friend bought. A random conversation about a specific and obscure topic I had with my wife...

Lets just say that I'm pretty sure its not may brain going bonkers with pattern recognition here.

⬐ captain_mars

I've had the same experience.

Recently, we were visited by my sister-in-law. We ended up talking about a topic, say Topic X. Topic X _never_ comes up when I and my wife are alone; it is simply not a part of our life. We have been married for 15 years, without talking about it even once.

However, it did come up while talking with my s-i-l, and my Android phone was lying nearby. Minutes later, after my sister in law had left, I was presented a Topic X - related ad on YouTube.

It was displayed only once, I ignored it, and no Topic X - related ad was shown after that.

⬐ msadowski

It hapenned to me on two different occasions that I've been discussing a topic with a friend (one that I never searched for) that was later shown to me as an ad. In one particular case he told me of metal casted spinners (like the one in Ibception). About two days later I saw an ad for this. I don't believe this could be a coincidence.

⬐ icebraining

What prompted the conversation?

⬐ sigi45

You probably should believe it.

⬐ msadowski

I'll be the first one to buy a mobile phone with a hardware switch for microphone, cameras and the speaker now.

⬐ Zhenya

Did he search for them and we're you chatting on Facebook messenger that day?

⬐ msadowski

He doesn't even have facebook and he said he didn't search for them. We talked in person while hiking, only our phones were in our pockets. I also never had any facebook applications installed on my phone (except WhatsApp). Also I saw the ad about 2-3 days after we had this chat. I should also note that we were talking in Polish.

⬐ Paraesthetic

Time for a company to leverage on hardware button to switch off mics, camera and gps. I know a lot of people who would buy it

⬐ elliekelly

I believe Apple just did this with their new MacBook & MacBook Pro. Closing the lid physically disengages the microphone.

Edit: Source[1] and also to say that I suppose Apple's solution only gets us halfway to your suggestion. There's still no way to physically disengage the microphone (or Camera, for that matter) when the laptop is open. It's a step in the right direction, at least.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-macbook-air-and-2018-m...

⬐ gmueckl

There are lots of anecdotes around about things like this, but correlation does not constitute causation. Where are e.g. the wireshark dumps showing that data was transmitted to some server while/after he was talking? Capturing the traffic should be a simple exercises.

⬐ icebraining

I'm agnostic on the issue, but assuming they're just transmitting keywords, it would be pretty easy (and sensible, considering the implications!) to hide them inside otherwise innocuous packets.

⬐ parliament32

I think the first step for solving this problem on mobile is having an indicator that an app is "listening". Just like the "location" icon pops up in the top bar on Android (and going into settings for location shows you which apps recently requested location), having an identical icon/history setup for microphone access would be perfect. Same goes for front/back camera.

⬐ Throwawayzoink

One could shoot everything on a desktop and search for dog toys on another device on the same network/IP. I'd bet the guy is trolling.

⬐ badrabbit

I'm afraid not. Usually,some app like facebook is involved. You can search for news articles on the subject and see other people's report as well.

Not only do they collect voice without consent,personal experience tells me they're also sharing it with usgov(not elaborating on that).

⬐ Throwawayzoink

So facebook does speech recognition in realtime for every android device out there and share it in realtime with the many ad networks. Someone is really screwed up at facebook to share such an incriminating secret or business leverage (depending on how you want to see it) with competitors.

The conspiracy theory doesn't seem to hold ground.

⬐ badrabbit

Experience is the best evidence. Give me a better reasonable explanation then? Why do you think it's a conspiracy theory? There are lawsuits[1] and news articles on this.

Someone really screwed up at facebook? Have you read the news recently? They lie through their teeth to their owm shareholders and customers!

If I had to guess they merely transcribe audio on the device and send keywords for ad targeting and other nefarious uses. They can claim there is no "recording" since audio isn't stored anywhere. Honestly,I think this is fairly harmless if you compare it to some of the other more serious conspiracy theories.

Remember how NSA's surveillance was also a conspiracy theory?

IMO,it's a double edged sword for them,they do this sort of crooked business for law enforcent and intelligence community but they also profit by exploiting this for revenue generation.

[1] http://digg.com/2017/facebook-phone-microphone-ads

⬐ Throwawayzoink

"Leaking" data they are supposed to have is not anywhere close to secretly recording user audio. They have plausible deniability with what you hear on news. There is no deniability when they are caught recording users. "Carelessness" does not lead an app to go rogue and start listening and transcribing audio.

Like I said, the problem I see with theory is that it doesn't hold ground even with all the assumptions one should be expected to make.

As for NSA, none of their surveillance was happening on the device. So that again is not the same as this theory.

⬐ anonunt

to be fair could this not be any app on his phone that is listening?

I assume that the big ad aggregators like google etc. would be up for integrating with anyone who provided testably good data, and also it may be that the system is being gamed from the other end.. where hints are passed to the ad bidding bot (of the dog toy company) to pay more for your attention.

its a pretty crappy state of affairs we have.. its a shame that our media (and so much of everything) is owned by so few - it makes it very hard to fight against any of this :( no one has any interest in actually fixing this or making big changes as they are all using it to power their growth and so their delusional valuations.

There was nothing more depressing than working as a BA for a big company and realising that every metric was openly being gamed, objectives were stupid and impossible to meet - but it didn't matter as so long as they kept a constant suite of major structural change projects on the go (buying companies, moving profits and ownership over boarders etc.) they could meet all of their targets and just keep the lies going.

The lower level staff had to play along as their managers would fire them if they didn't play the game. the managers had to keep to the line to maintain their promoted state and keep moving up.. the most senior management could just believe the numbers and fire a middle manager if they didn't like what they got. and the shareholders didn't care as if the targets are hit the share-price just keeps rising and rising.

There was no case i could make to do anything about this, I think i proved the issue to several people but there was no way of people doing anything about it without damaging their own lot :(

Since then I have had much more understanding with the broken nature of the world, how long it will take to fix and how sometimes (often) you really do just need to let the wheels come off before there will be any action - as by that point people are less worried about being blamed and are more likely to act.

⬐ newnewpdro

The test in this video was obviously staged.

⬐ gundmc

Betteridge's law of headlines strikes again.

⬐ rcheu

The fact that this dumb “Google/FB listens to you in the background and uses it to serve ads” myth is still around even on HackerNews is insane to me.

Do you all really think that if this contributed a measureable portion of ads that it wouldn’t leak? There’d also have to be a large amount of hardware dedicated to speech transcription—running constant speech to text on every google chrome browser would need so much compute.

Not to mention that it’d be possible to actually show that the company was lying by modifying microphone drivers and showing that they activate in the background. I’m pretty sure you could also just do it the same way they make game hacks—get access to chrome memory and show that there’s sections that match the recorded speech.

Indisputable proof that this happens would be a PR disaster for either company and cause legal action too.

I’m really in dismay at how long this myth has persisted.

⬐ gmueckl

There is a way how this Youtube video might have been faked. It's maybe a bit subtle. Chrome allows multiple user profiles that have the same name. The video starts with a browser window already open. This might not be the default account; this account isn't associated with dog toys.

The window he opens after his monologue uses the default account. This account actually has been prepared to show dog ads. Maybe he looked at the ads before recording the video to get the details of the advertised products right. The rest is good acting to sell this stunt.

If this is how the video was made, then it would be pretty manipulative. I don't like that conclusion at all.

⬐ OnlyRepliesToBS

lol

⬐ dexen

Myth or not, the technology's been around for some years[1] [2], and there's a profit to be made from matching consumers and advertisers. One doesn't really need to run voice analysis, just pick a keyword[3] every now and then. You add two and two.

>would be a PR disaster for either company and cause legal action too.

Didn't stop Sony [4], and didn't cost them all that much in money - on the order of $1MM - or reputation either.

--

[1a] https://hackaday.com/2017/05/04/ultrasonic-tracking-beacons/

[1b] https://www.wired.com/2016/11/block-ultrasonic-signals-didnt...

[2] https://www.shazam.com/

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QTzVoaua4s

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...

Here's a live test that may help you to believe https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBnDWSvaQ1I and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmM9ch_oXA4

In first video, a guy talks about dog toys and then he'll see ads related to what he talked about.

Worth noting, he doesn't have dogs or searched about it. The ads are even specific to the toy colors he talked about.

⬐ paulcole

Have you ever watched those basketball trick shot videos?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_d-ON4ktkc

Do you think they made all of those on the first try?

⬐ mooman219

A more substantial test would be to monitor network traffic for audio streams, or if basic parsing is happening on device, then those keywords being set.

⬐ earenndil

If it exists, then the parsing is almost certainly happening on-device, and the messages are encrypted and stenographically hidden.

⬐ joshuamorton

This would have impact on battery life that no one has yet noticed.

See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBnDWSvaQ1I

I tested this with my mother, telling her about this in person and talking about dog toys. My mother does not have a dog - but by the end of our 2 hour talk about how much she wanted to get her dog a dog toy she was getting advertisements for dog toys and dog food on Facebook.

She has an iPhone.

⬐ romanovcode

iPhone or Android does not matter. You need to disable microphone access to Instagram, Facebook and Facebook Messenger if you wish them to not listen to you.

Actually if you are on Android I'm pretty sure there is no way to disable google listening to you 24/7.

⬐ saiprashanth93

What is your source for google listening to your microphone all the time on Android?

⬐ savethefuture

"Ok Google"

Exactly. Proof: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBnDWSvaQ1I

⬐ _jomo

He mentions the Facebook court hearing where Facebook was suspected of doing this. Zuckerberg denied they're doing this and I wonder if this happened to Google users but they falsely accused Facebook.

The guy in the video is probably using an Android phone with that "OK Google" feature turned on. He's using Google Chrome and is signed in to a Google account. As scary as it is, there are simple ways to prevent this.

⬐ dgaaaaaaaaaa

This was refuted in reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/8bx9m7/google_is_al...

⬐ djhworld

That was my initial thought too, but it seems too coincidental that when he loaded up fark.com again (at the start of the experiment) there was an ad for pet insurance, or something canine related and then on the first page there was the link to dog toys

So 2 ads for dog things before he clicked on one, seems a pretty extraordinary coincidence

One thing that wasn't clear was he closed Chrome before he started discussing the dog toys, so how was google supposed to be listening? Unless it was via a different device e.g. an android phone

EDIT: Someone in that reddit thread said something interesting though, the guy was streaming directly to YouTube so it could be plausible that Google was listening to the stream audio and using that to feed into his targeting profile

⬐ 1_player

It's not refuted, it's just that the experiment has been contaminated and there might be multiple listening actors that are not Google: Windows' 10 Cortana, Alexa, Android/iOS phones nearby etc.

So it's either a weird coincidence or _someone_ is listening. How and who is still unclear, until the experiment is repeated in a more rigorous manner.

My hypothesis is Google running some text-to-speech from the stream, as any other form of local spying would be visible in network traces, whereas you're sending your stream to Google servers and what happens there is opaque.

Many people, me included, have seen ads after talking about a topic for the first time. My mates got Bitcoin ads just after I've spent most of an evening explaining what it was to them for the first time.

It might be the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon in play, or someone's actually listening. It's definitely something we need to explore.

EDIT: how has this dropped from the front page so quickly?

⬐ plessthanpt05

Just a guess, but I've noticed that HN scrubs the front page of all kinds of stuff pretty quickly -- not just hot button issues (e.g. political stuff or the like).

⬐ underyx

>My mates got Bitcoin ads just after I've spent most of an evening explaining what it was to them for the first time.

1. You most likely have had thousands of cases when you talked to people about something and they didn't get an ad for the topic afterwards. One care hardly proves anything.

2. In Bitcoin's case, it's even more likely that this would happen coincidentally, since it was a temporary fad that got popular over a short period of time, during which time you had an increased likelihood of explaining Bitcoin to your friends, and your friends had an increased likelihood of being served Bitcoin ads, even independent from each other.

⬐ kss238

I don't see this as conclusive at all. I tried it out on my macbook air in chrome and did not get any ads for the item I talked about.

⬐ coolspot

That first click on the dog toy ad likely caused all other tabs to show related and/or exactly this ad.

It doesn’t explain first ad though, but we know nothing about his setup - what phones and other devices he has and what software is currently activated on them.

⬐ StefanFrost

How did this not get more points and comments? o.O

⬐ pizzapill

Would Microsoft sell this data to Google? They have their own ad network. Could be a Chrome background process or even a Android device laying around.