They really need to name-and-shame beyond “Facebook Partner” considering we’re talking about fucking Cox Media Group.
Fuckers got my entire complex’s Internet shut down (I am a renter not the owner)
Dildos, lots of dildos! I’m just gonna repeat that while I’m driving to see if I start getting Google ads for dildos.
I tried that. Didn’t work. There may be some filters so they don’t serve inappropriate ads to people with families or some such.
It remains funny to me that futurism.com became mostly about covering the dystopia we live in.
The future is going to be amazing! Well, it has the potential to be amazing if we use tech the right way. No I mean, like in an ethical way. Without exploiting people. No not like that, in a way that helps people. Well yes, billionaires are people, but I meant… at least it should be in legal ways. Or at least policed. Not hostile to average people. Not an openly criminal endeavour. Maybe just dont criminalise resistance to it? … oh, actually the future is going to be a techno-monopolistic dark age, I see. We can pivot to covering that.
Not, like, “haha” funny…
Yeah that’s a shame, electronics seems to have reached a level where most people just don’t need or dream of a better something (PC, phone, etc) and other tech is hard to grasp like biotech.
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Wouldn’t want to be mean to Facebook users, but the vast majority of them probably has micophone access enabled for Messenger at least, if not Facebook.
This comment inspired me to go turn off microphone, camera, Bluetooth, and local network access for every app. I’ll reenable as necessary.
At least on iOS, it takes it a step farther and tells you specifically when an app is accessing your location, microphone, camera, etc… It even delineates when it’s in the foreground or background. For instance, if I check my weather app, I get this symbol in the upper corner:
The circled arrow means it is actively accessing my location. And if I close the app, it gives me this instead:
The uncircled arrow means my location was accessed in the foreground recently. And if it happens entirely in the background, (like maybe Google has accessed my location to check travel time for an upcoming calendar event,) then the arrow will be an outline instead of being filled in.
The same basic rules apply for camera and mic access. If it accesses my mic, I get an orange dot. If it accesses my camera, I get a green dot.
My Pixel does the colored dot thing as well. It also has the ability to add “Mic access” and “camera access” quick options to the pull down menu to quickly turn the permissions on/off at the OS level. I keep mine off at all times. If I receive an incoming call, I get a popup asking if I want to enable the microphone to answer it.
I know you mean well, but you are making assumptions that the software is not lying to you. You can’t trust a UI element.
Facebook listening in on your microphone is one of those things that I actually believe to be true. Ever had conversations with people to then realize that you’re being served targeted ads based on these conversations? Seems very coincidental.
Ever use voice in messenger? If so FB has the permissions it needs to open your mic.
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I remember reading some time ago that “the idea (of phones listening to everything you say to serve ads) makes no economic sense, because it’d be too expensive to run”
Looks like it actually isn’t “too expensive” to run in the end.
I am so numb to outrage that this just seems… Meh. What happened to me.
It’s the world we live in. It’s very much intentionally designed to make you complacent.
Normative nihilism is going to get us all.
This is such a strange reality to live in. All of the futuristic, dystopian fiction I have consumed has the same premise that people living in the dystopia know it and know it’s bad. Somehow reality is worse.
This is why I don’t like the push of everything needing an app. I sure do wish people in congress cared about this type of privacy issues the way they did Tiktok.
What’s the last “bombshell scandal that would ruin a company” that actually ruined a company?
Unroll.me was a service that would scan your email and clean up your inbox. The New York Times reported that the company was gathering sales receipts emails, anonymizing them, and selling them to rival companies; for example Uber paid them to hand over all the sales receipts they could on Lyft rides in people’s mailboxes. The bad press made them eventually sell the company to Slice, mainly for the email archives they amassed.
Slice like… the pizza website?
That’s what I assumed too but it appears to be a package tracking website
These companies absolutely do use your microphone to listen.
My wife and I have tested this and you can too.
Have a conversation near your phones about purchasing something offbeat. We used a kitchen garbage disposal in our test. Talk about them for a few minutes, about needing to buy one, different brands, etc.
Almost immediately you’ll be served garbage disposal adds.
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.
There were whole threads of people saying this stuff doesn’t happen. They would say it just didn’t make sense that companies would do this, it’s not worth it to them. That all the ads I was seeing at convenient times were just a coincidence.
I have my camera and microphone deactivated on the OS level because Youtube and Spotify would show me things workmates mentioned way too often.
I didn’t notice it since.
Could still be a major coincidence though, the biggest of them.
Same exact thing for me, and same exact results. Also too major of a coincidence in my mind.
The next iteration of gaslighting is already here: That it’s no big deal anyway since you can just use an ad blocker. Riiight, let’s all just turn our eyes away to make the monster go away. Surely, it’ll get bored and stop listening and recording, and surely, it will not sell its collected data off to banks, insurance providers, the government, law enforcement… right?
Seriously… If ad-blockers worked at a high enough level to actually impact this shit, then they wouldn’t be doing it. They know most people don’t bother with ad blockers, and because of that, they’re low-hanging fruit.
They’re here in this thread lol. No matter what, these people will deny its happening. I don’t understand it.
goes close to a smartphone “BLOODY MARY! BLOODY MARY! BLOODY MARY!” gets advertisements from local pubs and restaurants serving Bloody Mary at a discount
I am not against this.
At this point it doesn’t even matter if it’s real or not, after Snowden no sane person believes big tech since they were all in on PRISM.
Isn’t this an old article?
Android only solution, I think. Admittedly I don’t know I iPhone very well.
Anecdotally, it’s not even a solution. I’ve run into “coincidental” ads without having the FB app installed (visiting FB via browser).
