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A comment on Facebook Really Is Spying on You, Just Not Through Your Phone's Mic. Parent comment

Re:Facebook Really Is Spying on You, Just Not Through Your P... by Karunamon on Wednesday March 07, 2018 @09:15PM (#16541733)
but do you know what kind of evidence you would have to see to conclude that FB is listening?

Any one of:

* OS-level confirmation (permission entitlements, cpu usage, etc)

* Packets resembling sound data being caught in flight.

* An internal leak of the method they'd be using to do so from one of three of the largest tech employers. Not even Apple can keep their secrets secret, and they're probably the most paranoid tech company in existence.

You know, literally anything concrete, rather than evidence-free accusations based on fallible memory.

So far, not one bit of these instances can't be explained by a combination of Baader-Meinhof and confirmation bias, with a mix of plenty of non-audio data that Facebook no doubt has. People are so willing to paint FB as this boogeyman that they're disregarding basic logic.

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Re:Facebook Really Is Spying on You, Just Not Through Your P... by zzz157 on Thursday March 08, 2018 @03:20AM (#16543098)
>* Packets resembling sound data being caught in flight.

Not even necessary. You could do keyword recognition on the device itself, pushing a list of keyword<->waveform maps, and sending an indicator when they're recognized.

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Re:Facebook Really Is Spying on You, Just Not Through Your P... by SilasX on Wednesday March 07, 2018 @09:27PM (#16541785)
So do I understand you correctly that you’re categorically excluding any kind of experimental evidence, no matter how well controlled or rigorous? That, so long as there is no breach of the source of the technique, you can’t be convinced?

I understand that any one person’s anecdotes are weak evidence, but your comments are going much further and claiming that such tests can never be evidence, even though much scientific knowledge is similarly obtained.

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Re:Facebook Really Is Spying on You, Just Not Through Your P... by Karunamon on Wednesday March 07, 2018 @10:44PM (#16542127)
Experimental evidence is fine, given an actual experimental protocol. So far, all we have are weak anecdotes that don't come close to proving the assertion.
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