this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2024
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[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 week ago (34 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (17 children)

They have it's very easy there are free programs that monitor all data traffic.

This claim that Facebook listens to you on your phone has been around for years. It has been investigated numerous times and has never turned out to be true. Until recently the processing capacity required would have been insane and you would have an incredibly high noise to signal ratio. It's just not an economical way of gathering data for advertising.

Why bother anyway when people put their entire lives on Facebook, for free, in easily processable text?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago (13 children)

Your phone/plan carrier using voice data to make a marketing profile is well documented actually. This data is purchased and verified and resold by meta, or in some cases bought and used by alphabet for GAS. Cacti can show you outgoing data for every device on a network, and you can see data being sent from a phone in signed packets going to your carrier when you're not "actively using" it. It seems like you know about network monitoring tools but you haven't actually used them, just talked about them in reference to data collection.

"Why buy the cow" here is also easily answered: not everyone uses Facebook, a fair number of users will deactivate their facebook page but continue to use messenger.

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