13 ms·

March 2020, heydays of coronavirus paranoia. I came back home from somewhere, put my keys onto the dining table and went to the bathroom to clean up. My girlfri

by zubi 5y ago

March 2020, heydays of coronavirus paranoia. I came back home from somewhere, put my keys onto the dining table and went to the bathroom to clean up. My girlfriend, upon seeing the key-chain on the table started reproaching me for being careless about hygiene. When I returned from the bathroom I saw her washing the key-chain in the kitchen sink. This time I got angry and asked how come she hadn't thought that the usb memory-stick attached to the key-chain would be destroyed when being washed. I dried the keys along with the usb-stick, sat down at my table, opened up Facebook only to be greeted by an ad on top about water-proof usb memory sticks. I felt a chill ran down on my spine.

KaseKun 5y ago
Unfortunately, though this is an excellent story, this is just an example of a bias known as "frequency illusion". It happens with a lot of things, like seeing the clock at 11:11 more than you do at 11:09. Or seeing lots of your make/model car but being blind to the hundred of other variants on the road. How many times have you opened up your laptop and not seen a Facebook add for something you just did, or something you discussed? You'll never notice those occasions.
- newswasboring 5y ago
  I understand you have used Occam's razor to come to this conclusion. And its a perfectly valid point. But, this particular story has been repeated so many times around me that I am genuinely suspicious. But alas, the only way to know would be to look at the code. And even then we might not understand because its a blackbox type system which is ill understood by even its designers.
  - quenix 5y ago
    The "11:11 on the clock" story has also been repeated by millions of people for decades. That many people fall prey to a cognitive bias does not make it any less of a bias.
  - syndacks 5y ago
    How is it that no such scandal has been uncovered? Surely by now some hacker would have been able to prove that a phone is recording, sending to server, processing, and returning relevant ad. Or surely someone would have come forward or whistle blown by now. So I'll quote Hitchen's razor for you: "What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence."
    - newswasboring 5y ago
      I have acknowledged that my reasoning is less sound than the occam's razor, and I didn't really assert data impropriety. So calm down. But about your first point. I don't think even the designers and maintainers of this blackbox understand the system. Looking at it from that point of view, the chances of a hacker finding proof for this is pretty low.
      - IX-103 5y ago
        The thing is you can disapprove one piece without understanding the whole system. It would be pretty easy to show that a) sound is not being continually recorded and streamed over the internet and b) the device is not using enough processing power to decode speech. Both have been done, so this is veering into conspiracy theory territory.
        newswasboring 5y ago
        My dude! we are talking past each other. I am not asserting data handling impropriety. That is not what concerns me. What concerns me is they are letting these black box systems emotionally manipulate me.
        TeMPOraL 5y ago
        FWIW, streaming voice over the Internet isn't required for this attack - all the software needs is to send a few bytes long tag indicating the topic of an overheard conversation. The processing power required for this isn't big either - remember that 12+ years ago Microsoft Windows shipped with a speech recognition system that was in many ways better than what the phones currently offer, and worked off-line and with almost unnoticeable performance penalty. And if you're interested in probabilistic reporting ("there's 86% I've heard a word matching this tag in the last hour..."), you can relax performance requirements even further. So, out of the things you mention, the only somewhat convincing piece of evidence would be that the apps in question are not accessing microphone in the background.
  - GekkePrutser 5y ago
    It's actually possible to evoke some interesting responses from the algorithms by reducing the amount of data input. For example: When I set up a new facebook account for my mother (at her explicit wish), she had no friends or interests marked yet. Facebook showed her some random ads and posts. During the setup I was scrolling through her timeline and my phone beeped so I stopped scrolling for about 2 seconds. The post shown was a random post about some fish. When I picked it up, I saw it quickly replacing the next random post with something about the same kind of fish. So evidently it even looks at how long you look at certain content to determine your interests. I suppose it is possible to derive other algorithmic determinations using similar methods.
    - nexuist 5y ago
      > So evidently it even looks at how long you look at certain content It does. Instagram constantly sends back telemetry including your scroll position, which can then be used to determine what you were looking at and for how long. Scroll right past an ad? you probably won't see it again; the algorithm knows it didn't have an impact on you. Meanwhile, spend a few seconds reading what it says, and this teaches the algorithm that you are interested in similar content.
  - michaelcampbell 5y ago
    > But, this particular story has been repeated so many times around me that I am genuinely suspicious So, one meta-step up in abstraction? People "notice" these these things which they talk about and now you're especially sensitive to hearing them?
  - skybrian 5y ago
    You need to default to uncertainty. It’s not proven that it was coincidence, but it’s also not proven that it isn’t. Sometimes you never do find out what happened.
  - whimsicalism 5y ago
    Yes, it is a common cognitive bias.
  - qyi 5y ago
    Why would Google be recording your mic and using it for ads where they would just be caught for doing it? I mean it's completely possible. But more likely just confirmation bias. Speaking of Occam's razor, we should just dump modern "technology" (smart phones, smart TVs, the web, IoT, even feature phones were no good). There's actually nothing hard about the concept of a mobile phone, it's just a computer (or could even be a simple PCB) with a mic and speaker. No need for "secret sauce" standards such that nobody can tell if it's secure (I mean it isn't, the bugs just get patched every week, day, nanosecond, whatever). Hell, you can even make a completely open and simple (even more important than open) phone communication standard and charge 1 billion people tens of dollars per month to use your network and become the richest person on earth. edit: I mean facebook, or whatever (also facebook would have to gain access to the mic [maybe facebook has mic permission i guess, i am unfamiliar with smart phones])
    - worik 5y ago
      Because they have "voice assistants" that have to be always on, always transmitting, because the software that recognises your words on your mobile phone needs help. Facebook has access to your mic if you ever use it for its voice com functions (do not do that) and do not explicitly remove the permissions to access teh mic (do do that). They have been caught several times. Thing is people give them permission to record through the mic so it is legal. Do not confuse legal with good, it is evil.
  - anigbrowl 5y ago
    Well, another approach would be to do some controlled experiments: Pick a selection of somewhat-uncommon products. Get some volunteers to set up Facebook accounts on clean computers and phones with no adblockers. Monitor their incoming advertising messages for 2 weeks. Then randomly assign the products from the first step to the volunteers, give them information about the product on paper and ask them to hold verbal conversations about such such products. If they start getting adverts that happen to match the subject of those verbal conversations, something is going on.
- alex_g 5y ago
  Purchased a hard kombucha at Whole Foods last week, Ever since, about 1/3 of my instagram ads are for it. Never had an instagram ad for it before.
  - lifeformed 5y ago
    Maybe the subtle influences that led you to buying such a drink in the first place are directly related to increased advertising for them. Also Amazon has your Whole Foods purchasing data, so that probably trickled down somewhere.
    - alex_g 5y ago
      Technically my girlfriend purchased it with her Whole Foods/Amazon account, and she has not seen any ads.
    - worik 5y ago
      The first part of your comment is gaslighting. The second "trickled down somewhere" is the point.
  - blueblisters 5y ago
    A few potential reasons: - You fit the demographic of Kombucha drinkers in your locality - You visited a Kombucha blog/website recently that used retargeting to deliver an ad to your Instagram - An initial ad that caught your attention and Instagram used “dwell time” to determine that the ad is relevant to you
    - newswasboring 5y ago
      Honestly speaking, this is more scary than them actually stealing data.
    - alex_g 5y ago
      Good points. I do fit the demographic, I have looked up pages related to Kombucha in the past (thought not in the last 6 months), and I did dwell on the first ad in amazement. Still, I got home from the store and started seeing the ads immediately.
- Spooky23 5y ago
  Most people don’t see completely irrelevant Facebook ads. Frankly, Facebook and their proxies always speak in meaningless nonsense about everything. If you asked Zuck if he ate kittens, you’d get some reply about facebooks mission and why cats are important. For some mysterious reason, all explanations for the “Facebook is listening” phenomenon are uniquely cogent, clear and dismissive. Personally, I have zero doubt that a downstream “partner”, data provider, or affiliate is processing audio data of questionable origin for ad insights. Call center companies with tight margins do it, why wouldn’t an ad company?
  - michaelcampbell 5y ago
    > Most people don’t see completely irrelevant Facebook ads. Most people don't NOTICE the ones that are, either.
- CoolGuySteve 5y ago
  Bullshit, Facebook was found around 2015-2016 to be draining iPhone batteries with background audio sessions. While they may have gotten more efficient with their methods it wouldn't be surprising if they were still recording audio. There's a moral hazard that incentivizes any company that can do so to bug user's homes for advertising purposes. IMO it should be illegal.
  - fraud 5y ago
    My issue with the whole idea of background recording for advertising is that it would be incredibly costly to store this data, transcribe the audio and turn it into anything even remotely meaningful for advertisers. I also don’t know a lot on this subject so if anyone has better info that’d be great.
    - Cpoll 5y ago
      You don't need to store the data, just transcribe it. That's basically the business model for Siri, Alexa et al. If you're worried about cost, just offload the work to the cell phone and accept the less-than-100% transcription. The only reason I don't think the big players are doing this _is_ the potential for scandal. Random apps on the app store that ask for a million permissions, on the other hand, are probably doing this. It only takes one clever hacker looking to make a name for themselves. With that said, there are plenty of cases where companies _were_ caught spying, so maybe it's not so cut and dry.
    - aleister_777 5y ago
      All is needs to be is a list of keywords associated with your advertising profile.
    - whimsicalism 5y ago
      > store this data, transcribe the audio and turn it into anything even remotely meaningful for advertisers I disagree - even shitty, low CPU on-device transcription could give a signal to advertising algos. I doubt this is being done, but it is definitely within the range of possibility and wouldn't even drain your phone battery that much.
- neuronic 5y ago
  No it's not. There has been more than one instance when me or friends talked about topics and a day later we get weird ads for it on Instagram. Adtech is creepy and dystopian.
  - michaelcampbell 5y ago
    As what % of ads that are unrelated to anything they talked about?
- johnboiles 5y ago
  For me it's 9:41
- michaelcampbell 5y ago
  I don't know how many times I internally chuckle when I glance at the clock some time before I go to bed and it's "21:12"; a meaningful number to me as the "2112" album and the band Rush was a big part of my youth. That, and I tend to go to bed between 21:00 and 22:00. But I don't attribute it to anything but me being in a position to look at the clock around that time, and I haven't wondered if I see it any more than 21:09 or 21:30. Would be an interesting histogram, if nothing else.
  - samsquire 5y ago
    I have the same for Rush 21:12. Recommended. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZm1_jtY1SQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZm1_jtY1SQ
- anigbrowl 5y ago
  While this is indeed a possibility, your certitude is unwarranted.
- ericd 5y ago
  This probably could explain most people's accounts of this, but I've been approached by companies who offered large lump sums to include their SDK which required microphone access in our mobile app, in order to fingerprint what our users were watching on TV while it was open, nominally to see what ads they were seeing. I wouldn't be at all surprised if they or others were going a good bit further than that and trying to run speech recognition on overheard conversations, unless it's illegal somehow. AdTech is frankly a revolting industry.
  - dillondoyle 5y ago
    I don't buy the speech recognition, nor have I seen it offered. But the tv 'recognition' is a big part of selling ads on connected tvs, vizio, roku etc.
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  Sure. Except in the last three years that "frequency illusion" has been happening to me with a... growing frequency. About every 2-3 months, Facebook shows my wife an ad for some completely random shit we're sure neither of us searched for before or mentioned to anyone else. I would agree with you last decade. This decade, I have my doubts.
  - root_axis 5y ago
    There is great statistical power in these ML models, in many cases the "random shit" will become the topic of conversation due to shared social factors that can be predicted, you simply neglect to recognize all the times the modeling failed.
sergiotapia 5y ago
This happened yesterday, bought some margherita pizza at 3pm, was talking about how much a little pizza oven would cost to make it crispy and if it would come out the same. At 6pm a youtube ad on the tv showed us a pizza oven. we need better legislation. advertising is a cancer on the entire earth.
- cglace 5y ago
  Sounds terrible.
utopcell 5y ago
FB ad tech is rudimentary if it only showed you ads to replace your USB stick and no dating sites.
- geoduck14 5y ago
  Hahaha
KingOfCoders 5y ago
What is the hypothesis? FB listening through a phone? The (closed?) Laptop? Alexa?
azornathogron 5y ago
I don't know the timing of the events you describe, obviously. Is it possible that after you got angry at your girlfriend, she searched on the web for "waterproof USB keys", thereby associating your IP/system with that search?
Aransentin 5y ago
Couldn't your girlfriend (or any other third party who overheard your conversation) have searched for memory stick water damage before you sat down and opened Facebook? It doesn't seem too strange to me that advertisers send targeted ads for a certain product to an entire household if they think somebody there might need it.
chaitanya 5y ago
Only plausible explanation I can think of is that perhaps you or your girlfriend looked something up about drying a wet memory stick.
zubi 5y ago
As a response to those who asked questions here in the comments: When I finally overcame the shock, the very first thing I did was to ask her if she, or a guest, indeed searched for, or otherwise "input" anything related to usb-sticks or water-proofness into a computer system. The answer was no. I don't know what to make of it. I don't want to succumb to conspiracy theories of the sort that ambient sound is recorded by our devices at all times. Most plausible explanation is perhaps the one about cognitive bias.
- bellyfullofbac 5y ago
  An explanation would be that, in the beginning of Covid, your scenario (needing washable USB sticks) happened to many many people.
  - zubi 5y ago
    Excellent reasoning. I never thought of this but very plausible indeed.
mythrwy 5y ago
I've put normal USB sticks through the washing machine, retrieved them from the dryer lint screen, and had them still work! (don't recommend it of course)
_Microft 5y ago
Did you order the water-proof usb memory stick? It might have contained a backup of your keychain memory stick. ;)
bordercases 5y ago
To everyone suggesting that it's the result of statistical bias: Why can we rule out what should be obvious hypotheses, like you are being listened to? Biases are not successful explanations by default, they are merely alternate hypotheses which require almost no evidence to assert; which is why people take randomness as null or prior. But it shouldn't be rational to stop investigating alternative hypotheses just because of the possibility of bias - this amounts to not desiring further evidence, being incurious.
CyberRabbi 5y ago
This is an amazing story but I believe it is a coincidence that you just happened to notice more than non-coincidences. I say this not because I am especially skeptic or rational, I say this because a similar thing happened to me yet I know for a fact that it was a coincidence. It feels unbelievable yet 1/1000 events happen every now and then. All in all, if Facebook knew you were a technical person it’s not unlikely that an ad for a water proof usb stick would be relevant to you.
glangdale 5y ago
We've (my wife and I) had a few odd ones like this too. That being said, no-one has substantiated this - which, to me, doesn't mean as much as people thinks it does. Suppose you were building this capability. Would you necessarily leave it on 100% of the time, and if someone started acting 'weird' around their phone ("hey, I'm sitting in a lab, and someone is just talking to me a lot") it might be a good time to turn off the capability. Plenty of malware knows to turn itself off when someone has Wireshark installed (or a number of other "tells" that the malware can get that you might be running on a security researcher's machine). Even simply running microphone-based data gathering infrequently might be enough to confound a journalist or researcher with limited time budget.
- xtracto 5y ago
  Reminds me of Volkswagen cheating function: if it detected the car was on the lab, it changed its behaviour to pollute less. So... it's very feasible for any other company to do a similar thing. Now otoh as far as I know, microphone usage is not cheap on mobile devices. So either these apps are doing sporadic on/off recording or we would see a strong impact on the phone charge life.
foobiter 5y ago
did you delete facebook?
xtracto 5y ago
I wrote it elsewhere in this thread, but something similar happened to my wife an I about "babies" . The interesting thing was that she (whose phone had the FB app installed) got the ads while I (who have never used FB apps) did not get the tailored ads. And we both live in the same place and share the same internet
bsimpson 5y ago
The straw they moved me to Signal was a Facebook video chat I had with an acquaintance, who mentioned that her sister was working at a ketamine research lab. When I closed the call, my FB timeline was full of ads for ketamine.

by zubi 5y ago

KaseKun 5y ago

Unfortunately, though this is an excellent story, this is just an example of a bias known as "frequency illusion". It happens with a lot of things, like seeing the clock at 11:11 more than you do at 11:09. Or seeing lots of your make/model car but being blind to the hundred of other variants on the road. How many times have you opened up your laptop and not seen a Facebook add for something you just did, or something you discussed? You'll never notice those occasions.

newswasboring 5y ago
I understand you have used Occam's razor to come to this conclusion. And its a perfectly valid point. But, this particular story has been repeated so many times around me that I am genuinely suspicious. But alas, the only way to know would be to look at the code. And even then we might not understand because its a blackbox type system which is ill understood by even its designers.
- quenix 5y ago
  The "11:11 on the clock" story has also been repeated by millions of people for decades. That many people fall prey to a cognitive bias does not make it any less of a bias.
- syndacks 5y ago
  How is it that no such scandal has been uncovered? Surely by now some hacker would have been able to prove that a phone is recording, sending to server, processing, and returning relevant ad. Or surely someone would have come forward or whistle blown by now. So I'll quote Hitchen's razor for you: "What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence."
  - newswasboring 5y ago
    I have acknowledged that my reasoning is less sound than the occam's razor, and I didn't really assert data impropriety. So calm down. But about your first point. I don't think even the designers and maintainers of this blackbox understand the system. Looking at it from that point of view, the chances of a hacker finding proof for this is pretty low.
    - IX-103 5y ago
      The thing is you can disapprove one piece without understanding the whole system. It would be pretty easy to show that a) sound is not being continually recorded and streamed over the internet and b) the device is not using enough processing power to decode speech. Both have been done, so this is veering into conspiracy theory territory.
      - newswasboring 5y ago
        My dude! we are talking past each other. I am not asserting data handling impropriety. That is not what concerns me. What concerns me is they are letting these black box systems emotionally manipulate me.
      - TeMPOraL 5y ago
        FWIW, streaming voice over the Internet isn't required for this attack - all the software needs is to send a few bytes long tag indicating the topic of an overheard conversation. The processing power required for this isn't big either - remember that 12+ years ago Microsoft Windows shipped with a speech recognition system that was in many ways better than what the phones currently offer, and worked off-line and with almost unnoticeable performance penalty. And if you're interested in probabilistic reporting ("there's 86% I've heard a word matching this tag in the last hour..."), you can relax performance requirements even further. So, out of the things you mention, the only somewhat convincing piece of evidence would be that the apps in question are not accessing microphone in the background.
- GekkePrutser 5y ago
  It's actually possible to evoke some interesting responses from the algorithms by reducing the amount of data input. For example: When I set up a new facebook account for my mother (at her explicit wish), she had no friends or interests marked yet. Facebook showed her some random ads and posts. During the setup I was scrolling through her timeline and my phone beeped so I stopped scrolling for about 2 seconds. The post shown was a random post about some fish. When I picked it up, I saw it quickly replacing the next random post with something about the same kind of fish. So evidently it even looks at how long you look at certain content to determine your interests. I suppose it is possible to derive other algorithmic determinations using similar methods.
  - nexuist 5y ago
    > So evidently it even looks at how long you look at certain content It does. Instagram constantly sends back telemetry including your scroll position, which can then be used to determine what you were looking at and for how long. Scroll right past an ad? you probably won't see it again; the algorithm knows it didn't have an impact on you. Meanwhile, spend a few seconds reading what it says, and this teaches the algorithm that you are interested in similar content.
- michaelcampbell 5y ago
  > But, this particular story has been repeated so many times around me that I am genuinely suspicious So, one meta-step up in abstraction? People "notice" these these things which they talk about and now you're especially sensitive to hearing them?
- skybrian 5y ago
  You need to default to uncertainty. It’s not proven that it was coincidence, but it’s also not proven that it isn’t. Sometimes you never do find out what happened.
- whimsicalism 5y ago
  Yes, it is a common cognitive bias.
- qyi 5y ago
  Why would Google be recording your mic and using it for ads where they would just be caught for doing it? I mean it's completely possible. But more likely just confirmation bias. Speaking of Occam's razor, we should just dump modern "technology" (smart phones, smart TVs, the web, IoT, even feature phones were no good). There's actually nothing hard about the concept of a mobile phone, it's just a computer (or could even be a simple PCB) with a mic and speaker. No need for "secret sauce" standards such that nobody can tell if it's secure (I mean it isn't, the bugs just get patched every week, day, nanosecond, whatever). Hell, you can even make a completely open and simple (even more important than open) phone communication standard and charge 1 billion people tens of dollars per month to use your network and become the richest person on earth. edit: I mean facebook, or whatever (also facebook would have to gain access to the mic [maybe facebook has mic permission i guess, i am unfamiliar with smart phones])
  - worik 5y ago
    Because they have "voice assistants" that have to be always on, always transmitting, because the software that recognises your words on your mobile phone needs help. Facebook has access to your mic if you ever use it for its voice com functions (do not do that) and do not explicitly remove the permissions to access teh mic (do do that). They have been caught several times. Thing is people give them permission to record through the mic so it is legal. Do not confuse legal with good, it is evil.
- anigbrowl 5y ago
  Well, another approach would be to do some controlled experiments: Pick a selection of somewhat-uncommon products. Get some volunteers to set up Facebook accounts on clean computers and phones with no adblockers. Monitor their incoming advertising messages for 2 weeks. Then randomly assign the products from the first step to the volunteers, give them information about the product on paper and ask them to hold verbal conversations about such such products. If they start getting adverts that happen to match the subject of those verbal conversations, something is going on.
alex_g 5y ago
Purchased a hard kombucha at Whole Foods last week, Ever since, about 1/3 of my instagram ads are for it. Never had an instagram ad for it before.
- lifeformed 5y ago
  Maybe the subtle influences that led you to buying such a drink in the first place are directly related to increased advertising for them. Also Amazon has your Whole Foods purchasing data, so that probably trickled down somewhere.
  - alex_g 5y ago
    Technically my girlfriend purchased it with her Whole Foods/Amazon account, and she has not seen any ads.
  - worik 5y ago
    The first part of your comment is gaslighting. The second "trickled down somewhere" is the point.
- blueblisters 5y ago
  A few potential reasons: - You fit the demographic of Kombucha drinkers in your locality - You visited a Kombucha blog/website recently that used retargeting to deliver an ad to your Instagram - An initial ad that caught your attention and Instagram used “dwell time” to determine that the ad is relevant to you
  - newswasboring 5y ago
    Honestly speaking, this is more scary than them actually stealing data.
  - alex_g 5y ago
    Good points. I do fit the demographic, I have looked up pages related to Kombucha in the past (thought not in the last 6 months), and I did dwell on the first ad in amazement. Still, I got home from the store and started seeing the ads immediately.
Spooky23 5y ago
Most people don’t see completely irrelevant Facebook ads. Frankly, Facebook and their proxies always speak in meaningless nonsense about everything. If you asked Zuck if he ate kittens, you’d get some reply about facebooks mission and why cats are important. For some mysterious reason, all explanations for the “Facebook is listening” phenomenon are uniquely cogent, clear and dismissive. Personally, I have zero doubt that a downstream “partner”, data provider, or affiliate is processing audio data of questionable origin for ad insights. Call center companies with tight margins do it, why wouldn’t an ad company?
- michaelcampbell 5y ago
  > Most people don’t see completely irrelevant Facebook ads. Most people don't NOTICE the ones that are, either.
CoolGuySteve 5y ago
Bullshit, Facebook was found around 2015-2016 to be draining iPhone batteries with background audio sessions. While they may have gotten more efficient with their methods it wouldn't be surprising if they were still recording audio. There's a moral hazard that incentivizes any company that can do so to bug user's homes for advertising purposes. IMO it should be illegal.
- fraud 5y ago
  My issue with the whole idea of background recording for advertising is that it would be incredibly costly to store this data, transcribe the audio and turn it into anything even remotely meaningful for advertisers. I also don’t know a lot on this subject so if anyone has better info that’d be great.
  - Cpoll 5y ago
    You don't need to store the data, just transcribe it. That's basically the business model for Siri, Alexa et al. If you're worried about cost, just offload the work to the cell phone and accept the less-than-100% transcription. The only reason I don't think the big players are doing this _is_ the potential for scandal. Random apps on the app store that ask for a million permissions, on the other hand, are probably doing this. It only takes one clever hacker looking to make a name for themselves. With that said, there are plenty of cases where companies _were_ caught spying, so maybe it's not so cut and dry.
  - aleister_777 5y ago
    All is needs to be is a list of keywords associated with your advertising profile.
  - whimsicalism 5y ago
    > store this data, transcribe the audio and turn it into anything even remotely meaningful for advertisers I disagree - even shitty, low CPU on-device transcription could give a signal to advertising algos. I doubt this is being done, but it is definitely within the range of possibility and wouldn't even drain your phone battery that much.
neuronic 5y ago
No it's not. There has been more than one instance when me or friends talked about topics and a day later we get weird ads for it on Instagram. Adtech is creepy and dystopian.
- michaelcampbell 5y ago
  As what % of ads that are unrelated to anything they talked about?
johnboiles 5y ago
For me it's 9:41
michaelcampbell 5y ago
I don't know how many times I internally chuckle when I glance at the clock some time before I go to bed and it's "21:12"; a meaningful number to me as the "2112" album and the band Rush was a big part of my youth. That, and I tend to go to bed between 21:00 and 22:00. But I don't attribute it to anything but me being in a position to look at the clock around that time, and I haven't wondered if I see it any more than 21:09 or 21:30. Would be an interesting histogram, if nothing else.
- samsquire 5y ago
  I have the same for Rush 21:12. Recommended. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZm1_jtY1SQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZm1_jtY1SQ
anigbrowl 5y ago
While this is indeed a possibility, your certitude is unwarranted.
ericd 5y ago
This probably could explain most people's accounts of this, but I've been approached by companies who offered large lump sums to include their SDK which required microphone access in our mobile app, in order to fingerprint what our users were watching on TV while it was open, nominally to see what ads they were seeing. I wouldn't be at all surprised if they or others were going a good bit further than that and trying to run speech recognition on overheard conversations, unless it's illegal somehow. AdTech is frankly a revolting industry.
- dillondoyle 5y ago
  I don't buy the speech recognition, nor have I seen it offered. But the tv 'recognition' is a big part of selling ads on connected tvs, vizio, roku etc.
TeMPOraL 5y ago
Sure. Except in the last three years that "frequency illusion" has been happening to me with a... growing frequency. About every 2-3 months, Facebook shows my wife an ad for some completely random shit we're sure neither of us searched for before or mentioned to anyone else. I would agree with you last decade. This decade, I have my doubts.
- root_axis 5y ago
  There is great statistical power in these ML models, in many cases the "random shit" will become the topic of conversation due to shared social factors that can be predicted, you simply neglect to recognize all the times the modeling failed.

sergiotapia 5y ago

This happened yesterday, bought some margherita pizza at 3pm, was talking about how much a little pizza oven would cost to make it crispy and if it would come out the same. At 6pm a youtube ad on the tv showed us a pizza oven. we need better legislation. advertising is a cancer on the entire earth.

cglace 5y ago
Sounds terrible.

utopcell 5y ago

FB ad tech is rudimentary if it only showed you ads to replace your USB stick and no dating sites.

geoduck14 5y ago
Hahaha

KingOfCoders 5y ago

What is the hypothesis? FB listening through a phone? The (closed?) Laptop? Alexa?

azornathogron 5y ago

I don't know the timing of the events you describe, obviously. Is it possible that after you got angry at your girlfriend, she searched on the web for "waterproof USB keys", thereby associating your IP/system with that search?

Aransentin 5y ago

Couldn't your girlfriend (or any other third party who overheard your conversation) have searched for memory stick water damage before you sat down and opened Facebook? It doesn't seem too strange to me that advertisers send targeted ads for a certain product to an entire household if they think somebody there might need it.

chaitanya 5y ago

Only plausible explanation I can think of is that perhaps you or your girlfriend looked something up about drying a wet memory stick.

zubi 5y ago

As a response to those who asked questions here in the comments: When I finally overcame the shock, the very first thing I did was to ask her if she, or a guest, indeed searched for, or otherwise "input" anything related to usb-sticks or water-proofness into a computer system. The answer was no. I don't know what to make of it. I don't want to succumb to conspiracy theories of the sort that ambient sound is recorded by our devices at all times. Most plausible explanation is perhaps the one about cognitive bias.

bellyfullofbac 5y ago
An explanation would be that, in the beginning of Covid, your scenario (needing washable USB sticks) happened to many many people.
- zubi 5y ago
  Excellent reasoning. I never thought of this but very plausible indeed.

mythrwy 5y ago

I've put normal USB sticks through the washing machine, retrieved them from the dryer lint screen, and had them still work! (don't recommend it of course)

_Microft 5y ago

Did you order the water-proof usb memory stick? It might have contained a backup of your keychain memory stick. ;)

bordercases 5y ago

To everyone suggesting that it's the result of statistical bias: Why can we rule out what should be obvious hypotheses, like you are being listened to? Biases are not successful explanations by default, they are merely alternate hypotheses which require almost no evidence to assert; which is why people take randomness as null or prior. But it shouldn't be rational to stop investigating alternative hypotheses just because of the possibility of bias - this amounts to not desiring further evidence, being incurious.

CyberRabbi 5y ago

This is an amazing story but I believe it is a coincidence that you just happened to notice more than non-coincidences. I say this not because I am especially skeptic or rational, I say this because a similar thing happened to me yet I know for a fact that it was a coincidence. It feels unbelievable yet 1/1000 events happen every now and then. All in all, if Facebook knew you were a technical person it’s not unlikely that an ad for a water proof usb stick would be relevant to you.

glangdale 5y ago

We've (my wife and I) had a few odd ones like this too. That being said, no-one has substantiated this - which, to me, doesn't mean as much as people thinks it does. Suppose you were building this capability. Would you necessarily leave it on 100% of the time, and if someone started acting 'weird' around their phone ("hey, I'm sitting in a lab, and someone is just talking to me a lot") it might be a good time to turn off the capability. Plenty of malware knows to turn itself off when someone has Wireshark installed (or a number of other "tells" that the malware can get that you might be running on a security researcher's machine). Even simply running microphone-based data gathering infrequently might be enough to confound a journalist or researcher with limited time budget.

xtracto 5y ago
Reminds me of Volkswagen cheating function: if it detected the car was on the lab, it changed its behaviour to pollute less. So... it's very feasible for any other company to do a similar thing. Now otoh as far as I know, microphone usage is not cheap on mobile devices. So either these apps are doing sporadic on/off recording or we would see a strong impact on the phone charge life.

foobiter 5y ago

did you delete facebook?

xtracto 5y ago

I wrote it elsewhere in this thread, but something similar happened to my wife an I about "babies" . The interesting thing was that she (whose phone had the FB app installed) got the ads while I (who have never used FB apps) did not get the tailored ads. And we both live in the same place and share the same internet

bsimpson 5y ago

The straw they moved me to Signal was a Facebook video chat I had with an acquaintance, who mentioned that her sister was working at a ketamine research lab. When I closed the call, my FB timeline was full of ads for ketamine.