Despite the shady image they have, these companies go to great lengths to avoid doing shady things (because ultimately it’s bad for business). Not to mention the hundreds of tech employees that would have to be involved and keep quiet in this type of “conspiracy”. It’s incredibly unlikely, I truly believe that.
The tech companies you work for do often engage in illegal activities, and some of your collegues are complicit. I'm sure it is an uncomfortable thought for some of you, but this is all part of the public record.
This is certainly true in a lot of finance.
The sad reality is people are very predictable, even with basic data.
I can imagine the same thing done for text. The text might be encrypted, but interest keywords might be generated on-device and sent out-of-band.
I'm not claiming this is real, but I agree with GP.
For an example from non-FAANG companies, see illegal dumping of toxic waste by chemical companies, such as DuPont and PFOAs [1]. Despite knowing what they did was illegal, the math works out -- products with PFOAs were something like $1 billion in annual profit, and even when they got caught the fines and legals were a fraction of that, spread out over many years.
So I personally believe these companies 100% would do shady shit if it increases their profit margins. And why wouldn't they? There is no room for morals in capitalism, and the drawbacks are slim.
[1]https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/10/magazine/the-lawyer-who-b...
As others above me have thoroughly explained, there are numerous ways Facebook could figure out what you’re reading about/listening to/viewing on the internet, which ultimately drives what you are chatting with your friends about. Reading your messages would actually be the most difficult and low fidelity way for them to try to mine this information. They can just see your entire browsing history and extract from there, since the majority of website have a tracking cookie that in some way phones home to Facebook.
If FB could do that, then FB would realize that these topics are not actually products they are interested in, so they wouldn't be showing ads.
Facebook show (many people) a lot of ads and they only need to get lucky a few times for you to think it’s uncanny. All the non-unique times an ad was not relevant will have blurred together and so you won’t easily remember that they were the vast majority of the ads you see. A little bit of feedback (eg if you dwell on the coincidental ad) may cause you to see more related ads.
I disagree with this to the extent that I would say the exact opposite is true.
Facebook (and others) have proven time and time again that they cannot correctly predict user behavior by locking out or banning users who actually did nothing wrong (because their algorithms predicted that the user was breaking terms of service or might be planning to). This happens over and over, even in cases not so complex as the "photos of my child to send to my doctor".
But on the flipside, Zuckerberg has been documented saying one thing to the public and exactly the opposite in private. Heck, Facebook has had memos and emails leaked where they talked about how they would say one thing in public (and to regulators) while doing the opposite secretly.
I believe that Facebook cheats and breaks agreements (and laws) in multiple directions all the time, often willfully. They've even been caught cheating their own ad customers by intentionally overstating the effectiveness and target accuracy of their ads.
I know that, unfortunately, this is what puts bread on your mouth.
But, really? Are you suggesting that Cambridge Analytica didn't happen? Did we all hallucinate that?
You guys jumped the shark already. These attempts at damage control are laughable.
CA happened but that has nothing to do with this. The policies that allowed CA to collect data were very public, Zuck enthusiastically talked about the open knowledge graph all the time prior to CA, much to the dismay of many investors. Facebook didn't lie in that case, they misjudged the potential to misuse open data access, and the potential for negative PR as a result.
By analogy, it's like you're the landlord of an apartment building and you don't lock the front door. You put up a huge sign saying "this door is unlocked, everyone is welcome". You sell ads for your building embracing the unlocked door policy. Then somebody walks in and photographs all the tenants through their windows. Suddenly people who didn't care about the unlocked policy are now very angry, and rightly so. But this is completely different from collecting data, lying about it, and operating a massive conspiracy to conceal the data use from literally tens of thousands of employees who would normally be able to see it.
We limit the information we share with Meta in important ways. For example, we will always protect your personal conversations with end-to-end encryption, so that neither WhatsApp nor Meta can see these private messages.
Facebook has a deep culture of pathological lying. They lied to the FTC [1]. They lied to WhatsApp and to the EU [2]. They created an Oversight Board and then lied to it [3].
Each of those lies are more substantial than lying in a privacy policy.
[1] https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/cases/182_3109_fa...
[2] https://euobserver.com/digital/137953
[3] https://techcrunch.com/2021/09/21/the-oversight-board-wants-...
They can of course also have their app de-crypt and re-encrypt the messages to the key of a requesting third party like police or hired reviewers if certain keywords are used.
Authorities could also have Google or Apple ship a signed tampered Whatsapp binary to any user or group of users, like protestors, that uses a custom seeded random number generator so they can predict all encryption keys generated and no one else, including Meta, will know.
The variant of end to end encryption where third parties control the proprietary software on both ends, is called marketing.
As part of the Meta Companies, WhatsApp receives information from, and shares information (see here) with, the other Meta Companies. We may use the information we receive from them, and they may use the information we share with them, to help operate, provide, improve, understand, customize, support, and market our Services and their offerings, including the Meta Company Products. This includes:
- improving their services and your experiences using them, such as making suggestions for you (for example, of friends or group connections, or of interesting content), personalizing features and content, helping you complete purchases and transactions, and showing relevant offers and ads across the Meta Company Products
====
Popular theory is they can't see or store your messages, but can analyze them on the client and profile you (e.g. interested in brazil nuts)
I can perfectly mean just the audio exchanges when both parties talk.
Also: E2E does not imply necessarily that they do not know the key.
Where's the evidence? I don't know what ethos "Hacker News" is supposed to capture, but surely it's not superstition?
for a lot of people, no
> Meta, a company of unprecedented size that was built over monetizing your private data?
one of many companies, however "meta" does have the advantage that you can opt out of them, mostly.
> A company who's been caught in plenty of scandals (like Cambridge Analytic) about this exact sort of thing (violating their users' privacy)?
CA is interesting as it started out as an academic study, which was consented fully. CA then went on to scrape people's public profiles, which often included likes, friends, etc. This combined with other opensource information allowed them to claim to have good profiles of lots of people, the PR was strong. Should FB have had such an open graph? probably not. Should they have taken the rap for everything evil on the internet since 2016? no. There are other actors who are much more predatory who we should really be questioning.
> Are you Meta employees?
I think you place far to much faith into a company that is clearly floundering. Its not like it has a master plan to invade your entire life. Its reached it's peak and has not managed to find a new product, and is slowly fading.
However, as we all think we are engineers, we should really design a test! but first we need to be mindful of how people are tracked:
1) phone ID. If you are on android, your phone is riddled with markers. Apple, supposedly they are hidden, but I don't believe that they don't leak
2) account, and account is your UUID that tracks what you like.
3) your IP. if you have IPv6, perhaps you are quite easy to track. even on V4 your home IP changes irregularly and can be combined with any of the above to work out that you are the same household.
4) your browser fingerprint. (be that cookies, or some other method)
5) your social graph
method:
1) buy two new phones.
2) do not register them with wifi
3) create all new accounts for tiktock, gmail, instgram etc.
4) never log into anything you've created previously, or the fresh accounts on old devices.
5) message each other about something. However you need to source your ideas from something offline, like a book from a thrift store or the like. maybe an old magazine. open a page, pick the first thing your finger lands on. this will eliminate the "I heard about x" or "i'm in the mood for y"
report back.
Wait... If WhatsApp is really E2EE encrypted, why would any of the other steps be necessary? Dude and his wife can simply pick at page at random from a magazine in a store, never search anything online about it, start talking about it using WhatsApp as if it was something of great interest to them. If they start getting related ads, obviously something shady is going on. There's no need for new phones / new GMail accounts / etc.
because you need to eliminate the chance of profiling by any other means.
Using the same phone as before means that the pre-existing profiles exist, which means that the relationship is already inferred. Because its trivially easy to track people, you need to eliminate all other variables.
Is it so hard to believe that Meta is snooping on WhatsApp conversations? Meta, a company of unprecedented size that was built over monetizing your private data? A company who's been caught in plenty of scandals (like Cambridge Analytic) about this exact sort of thing (violating their users' privacy)?
Someone from this community, which generally means educated, tech-literate and sensitive to these topics shares a perfectly plausible observation, of something that has been experienced as well by plenty of other folks, me included; and then some people come and try to make up the most convoluted explanations (candy boxes from Kazakhstan just happened to be trending that specific day, nothing to see here, move along!) to this phenomena and try to shift the blame away from Meta. Why do you do this? Are you Meta employees? A PR agency they hired?
It's just baffling. Apparently some people DO want to be abused.
Plot twist: we all get ads about candy boxes from KZ now.