Gadgetory

all right we're going to do it we're going to talk about Facebook and the fact that lots of you think the company is listening to your conversations even when you aren't using the app like the one time my friend mentioned I'm writing a musical to me and I saw an ad for it in my Instagram feed and later that night Facebook owns Instagram by the way if you weren't aware I don't even go to musicals so this was a super weird ad for me to see which leads me to the question is Facebook tapping our microphones listened in on everything we say to then service ads yes or no does Facebook use audio Matea obtained from mobile devices to enrich personal information about its users no well I believe that Facebook isn't listening to our conversations and has previously screwed up use their privacy particularly with its Cambridge analytic a scandal so it's always good to be skeptical of what the company says and what it does every expert I talk to you for this video believes Facebook isn't listening actual evidence proves it isn't - but the scary thing is you produce so much data the Facebook probably doesn't even need your microphone to learn everything about you now let's dive in to answer whether Facebook is tapping your microphone we need to answer two main things one is it even technically feasible for Facebook to tap billions of people's microphones and parse all their voice data to then determine who is speaking and about what and - why would they want to do this anyway and would it really be that lucrative on the technical side yes it is totally possible for Facebook to manage this voice data Nigel Keynes a co-founder and CTO of the company called intelligent voice says all that's really needed to parse voice data is serious processing power which Facebook likely has all of the technologies today it would be a very feasible technical challenge for a large tech company to undertake and figuring out what you're saying is super easy what's been said and what it means our extremely simple determining who's talking varies in difficulty depending on the circumstances like if you're calling from your Facebook account it's pretty easy to figure out who's speaking and tribute that data to that specific person the ability to distinguish me as as a British male of a particular age just for my voice is very simple and to distinguish you as an American woman of a particular age it's pretty simple for example Facebook could easily tell that I'm the one talking about Oreos or whatever else if I'm calling someone from my Facebook account however a stray microphone conversation isn't as easy to attribute and this is what most people are probably worried about let's say you're having lunch with a friend and at least 20 other people are around you Facebook would probably struggle to figure out who's talking Canning says the company would likely need additional metadata to narrow the field it could easily determine the age and sex of the person talking just from their voice so if it could also figure out geolocation data which Facebook and Instagram collect it could then get closer to figuring out which user is talking if Facebook's set up a specific geofence it could even further narrow its options by identifying everyone else in the area and then matching voice data up against its user base with spewing geolocation data all the time so if I could narrow it down to say a thousand people in a particular geofence then if I had your if you were recording something on your phone I got access to that and I also knew the biometric profiles of people the other thousand people that geofence I could do a pretty good job of working out with you but Facebook is a massive platform with billions of users if you're in a dense city like New York with me and millions of other residents this would likely be a difficult task in a small town it'd probably be possible but also require a decent amount of work just to figure out how to target you with that if I was trying to match it against the hundred million or billion other people on my platform then though I couldn't so it's it's still a matter of scale the the ability to do want to many match on biometrics exists but the more people you throw into the pot the less accurate it becomes all right so let's say Facebook could listen to you and recognize individuals does it actually need to if a company isn't listening in like it says then how are we all getting such a scary on point ads is voice data even worth collecting I actually think that voice data probably gives up more information about ourselves than most any other sort of data because not only have you got the content so what said you've also got a very rich seam of emotional content begins with it as well Facebook has access to something even better than voice data everything else that you do I called Andres Arrieta the tech products manager and the Electronic Frontier Foundation to chat about Facebook's tracking technology they have so much data on us that they don't need to turn on the microphone let's run through the things Facebook likely already knows about us it knows your location because of where you say you live but also the location tracking permissions you give the company's app it knows your self-identified demographics what you look like because of the photos you upload your family members and friends and crucially your browsing habits Facebook uses its add tracking technology called the Facebook pixel to follow you around the web and keep tabs on wherever you end up this pixel which website owners can build on to their sites helps advertisers figure out if their Facebook Ads have been successful oh and you know those like buttons you see on every single website those track you to Facebook has even been able to identify users sexual preferences based on the sites they visit that's how the company accidentally outed gay users to advertisers years ago this goes much more further than just feeling a simple profile and showing you what type of fear of what motorcycle you want applies this is about your really really personal relationships and things that you might have not shared with it with others Facebook tracks users IRL purchase history - they do buy your credit history we tend to think of online tracking as something that is contained online but it's no longer contained online there they're putting all these other sources online offline together to build or complete lives it uses this data in aggregate to anonymously verify that its ads actually drive sales up suffice to say the company knows a lot about you you can witness ad trackers in the wild through plugins like the Electronic Frontier Foundation's privacy badger which shows all the third-party trackers keeping tabs on you it says the verge has more than 100 trackers which is kind of not a good look for us but you also don't pay us for this content so and that's why I Ariana thinks Facebook isn't listening to our conversations but if you require more hard evidence the e FF even proved that the company wasn't listening to us in a news segment with CBS we're monitored traffic from a user's phone it didn't see any audio recordings going to Facebook Andres thinks that maybe people notice ads more after they've talked about a specific topic most of the time is because we sometimes actually don't pay attention to the ads and it's totally possible that dad had been playing before but because it's such a small brand you never noticed I know that possible explanation isn't totally satisfying but in some ways it's scarier Facebook knows everything about you without needing your microphone if you're concerned about ad tracking and Facebook in particular you could delete your account which also means deleting whatsapp and Instagram sorry about it you could also try and add tracking to extension like privacy badger which lets you turn off add trackers Arianna suggests using different browsers and diversifying research so that companies can't bill is a complete profile of you you could also enable do-not-track in your browser which asks websites to not track you they don't have to honor your request though generally we all have to come to terms of the fact that ads power the internet it's reality at this point and until we start paying for every service or we drastically rethink ad technology we're stuck with it maybe I'll put a love yet in there to just for love you all right so let's say Facebook could Noren crushed [Laughter]