A friend posted about Facebook listening in to her conversations today. Iironically, she posted this on Facebook, to inform her Facebook friends that the FB app probably listens in to your conversations to inform your ads. This is exactly the sort of thing that’ll get anecdotal-evidence-hyped peeps concerned about the ears on their phone and get people freaking out about the wrong culprit – I probably foolishly wrote back :
“I’m not entirely convinced that that’s the way this is working (the icon Kim Komando’s referring to is the “Go Live” icon, which is a user-activated broadcast, not at all a listen-in feature) – simply because there are SO many other ways this could be happening – remember Siri, Google and Cortana have “always listening” features, all of them are able to share data on your phone – not to mention any post you make, or google email (all of which cue ads), and your phone has access to your location, your purchases, knows what network you’ve connected to, what ads you’ve clicked on – I think I’d look at other culprits before jumping to the conclusion that FB is doing something that it says it’s not, especially when you’ve got other apps that ADMIT to doing these things in their EULAs.
We Live in a world where it’s important to know what our fancy devices do, but it’s just as important to not get freaked out by things that they’re NOT doing – it’s one of the things I really like about Android, being able to control what accesses the mic at a very basic level… anecdotal evidence is hard, but I bet your issue had more to do with an always-on digital assistant (like Siri, Cortana or OK Google) than it did Facebook’s apps.”
The poster had also talked about how she’d gone to the phone store because her battery kept getting drained. The phone tech “turned something off” that fixed the problem for her, but the problem came back… and when she back that tech was no longer there* and no-one else knew what the setting could possibly have been… my personal suspicion is they shut down Siri or something similar (my worst drains come from OK Google or Cortana when they get stuck “always listening” … and Pokemon Go of course…)
We have reached this point where we feel that music should be free, all our online services should be free, our art should be free… and we willfully or ignorantly ignore that there ARE costs even when we can’t see them. Things are only free when either someone’s getting screwed or there’s some other barter going on**. “Playing for exposure” is one WE all know and hate in the music community, but you get your Gmail for free by allowing your (theoretically anonymised) information to be harvested and letting ads go under your eyes. Facebook’s no different. Acting surprised about it kind of pisses me off. Now, of course with the microphone conspiracy theory we suddenly feel violated? (and I DO believe it’s a conspiracy theory, without merit… but let’s not go giving them ideas… among other things wouldn’t this kind of post get buried in your news feeds?
Let’s JUST take Facebook, which admits to (I say “admits to” but really, in all the digital paperwork you click “okay” to when you sign up says “you agree to”) reading your messages and posts, thumbing through the photographs and links you post – and harvesting information from that. It also (depending on app permissions) tracks where you are, tracks who you’re near, your regular patterns, all so it can try to sell the IDEA that it knows you best to a third party that hopes it can sell you something.
I’d frankly argue that all-of-the-above (text and image searches, geographical tracking and pattern recognition) is probably WAY better at painting an accurate picture of a person than having an app constantly listening to your conversations and TRYING to pick out logical contexts from background noise – add (haha) in the fact that Google and Apple are both doing this too, and a cookie, or snippet of information for ONE of these companies is likely a cookie or snippet for ALL of these companies and it’s no wonder that someone’s ready to sell you something before you probably even know you want it. Take for example the anecdote that seems to have kicked all of this particular theory off – a professor named Kelli Burns says she figured that FB was listening to her conversations because she was chatting with a friend about going on an African safari while driving a jeep and then found that a safari-related pic was trending in her feed and a car advertisement was in her sidebar. She later mentions that “the photo of the safari posted by her friend probably surfaced to the top of her News Feed due to an increase in user engagement. And she acknowledged that the car advertisement for a Volkswagen vehicle may have appeared because that is the type of car she drives.” (full article at Forbes.com) – and I’d go one step further and wonder if she hadn’t been talking about an African safari in a jeep because her friend had recently posted a pic of such a thing. So before we start looking at culprits out of paranoia, maybe we should start acknowledging just how much of our info’s out there for the highest bigger already.
Now, actually I’d call this relatively harmless. Someone thrusts a billboard in my face and all I have to do is ignore it. At least on the FB platform these are relatively well-moderated and don’t generally include malware and the scams are no worse than what you’ll see on late-night television – at least there are no pop-ups. People coming to my door to sell me something piss me off precisely because I don’t want to deal with a human at random and they’re rarely selling something I’m interested in. Isn’t this form of ad-serving better than solicitors?
What makes ME paranoid isn’t the idea that Siri and OK Google (who STILL can’t order me a pizza until I shut my air conditioner off because there’s too much background noise) are keeping their best and brightest voice recognition technology hidden for the sake of harvesting information it can get any number of ways that we’ve all okayed – no, what makes ME paranoid is what happens when the buyer of our information isn’t trying to sell us something, but has other aims in mind. I’m not talking about the Gov’ment. Frankly, I think that the U.S. of A. having my social security number (which THEY gave ME) or my home address (which I gave the post office) my birthday, what I buy online, where I am… I think that’s the LEAST of my concerns. I worry about my health insurance company noting that I post from bars late at night and deciding I’m a higher risk because of it. I’m worried about my car insurance company tracking my speed via the GPS on my phone and upgrading my risk there. I’m worried that my credit card company note that I don’t have a lot of engagement on my band’s website and figures I should be at a higher premium because I’m probably a bad risk financially. When all of THAT is interconnected – that’s terrifying – and I think that those are the much bigger-picture freedoms that we’ll happily be giving away next.
Every couple of months some idiot reposts the whole “Facebook’s about to start charging a monthly fee – repost this and demand that they don’t!” or some such bullshit. And everyone freaks out, or posts “FAKE” and smugly hits ‘enter’ confident that they’ve done their bit to help out truth and justice on the internet. Well, you can be paranoid about them costing you a couple of bucks a month OR you can get paranoid about them collecting the currency that you’ve AGREED to hand over (your private information) – but you’ve signed up for a service, and that service gets paid for somehow – cause nothing’s free. And unlike deals with the devil, you can’t practice your fiddle chops and challenge Mark Zuckerberg to a showdown hoedown for using Facebook.
Let’s do some napkin math : Facebook made $18,000,000,000 in 2015. That’s billion with a capital B. That’s a lot of money. But it also has 1.71 BILLION users (http://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly-active-facebook-users-worldwide/) as of the second quarter of 2016…. Now divide 18 by 1.71 and then divide that further by 12 and you get about 70 cents. Yeah – so in order to keep
Facebook as fat and happy as they were this year we’d all have had to fork over 70 cents every month, and I’d CHEERFULLY switch to that model. Shit. Hit me up for 200% and I’d still signup for the paid version of Facebook faster than you can say “but wait, there’s MORE!!!”
Now, of course in the last year they’ve only had a 10% increase in users but their revenue has increased by over 75% in that same time. They’re betting that corporate interest in our information will increase faster than usership, so there’s no way they’ll switch to a paid model now, because as our privacies become more and more worthless, our information will become more and more prized. And eventually they may well be selling how much time we spent playing Candy Crush to our physician so she knows to upgrade our heart medication and our screen’s font-size to our eye doctor so he knows it’s time for a new prescription. The only limit on THAT is how much they’re ALLOWED to do and that, my friends, is up to Congress… http://www.house.gov/representatives/find/ (related note, while I’m doing waaaay too much research on all of this, it’s interesting to note I can’t find any place which shows me how much FB has petitioned / paid to members of Congress… but I haven’t spent enough time on this to draw any conclusions about that)
*obviously the phone tech who wasn’t there the next week was killed by FB’s assassins…)
**I also find it fascinating that a lot of my more extreme anti-capitalist friends believe a barter system would truly be the way to roll, and isn’t that exactly what’s happening with a lot of online services? Non-monetary “currencies” being traded back and forth?
