Monday, August 01, 2016

Why the rumor that Facebook is listening to your conversations won’t die...

Not long ago I watched a video in my Facebook timeline—I don’t remember what it was, only that it was something very sad. Whatever it was, I felt overwhelmed, and I put my head down on the bed beside my computer and did about sixty seconds of crying.

When I lifted my head I saw something new at the top of my timeline: some garbage ad, like any one of thousands of garbage ads that speckle my social media usage with background noise. But this one was worrying: It was for “online counseling services”, or something like that. I was alarmed.

Did Facebook hear me crying? No, Facebook has said clearly, but it really felt like it did, which is probably why this rumor won’t die.

It’s not even that crazy of a conspiracy theory. Two years ago Facebook began experimenting with using your phone and your computer’s inbuilt microphone to recognize and predict what you were listening to or watching at the time you made a status update. For example, if you’re listening to a certain artist or watching a certain film, rather than typing about it, Facebook would “hear” and identify the source of the sound and supply it for you. When the feature launched in 2014 Facebook promised that the feature was “entirely optional,” that it didn’t record or store any of the audio it captured, including personal conversations, and that it mainly just uses your audio data to harmlessly note popular matches. Full story...

Related posts:
  1. Social media: Weapon of PsyWar and you’re the target...
  2. Zuckerberg is a hypocrite on internet privacy as Facebook is a giant data mining...
  3. Facebook pays $19bn for WhatsApp. Why? Because Zuckerberg wants control ...
  4. Now Facebook is planning creepy new artificial intelligence technology...
  5. Facebook, Zuckerberg and the CIA...
  6. Facebook = Spybook?
  7. Facebook's future plans for data collection beyond all imagination...

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