<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases#Frequency_illusion" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases#Frequ...</a><p>I work in Ad tech. No one is capturing anyone's voices to serve them ads via their mobile devices. People are often segmented by location and proximity to interests, however. If someone nearby (a neighbor, perhaps) searched for pest control? Guess what, you're now in a likely segment of people looking for pest control. Boss searched for a canon printer at work? You're in that segment, too, until your interest score drops and you're removed from that audience segment. This is pretty universal - you can even see what Google's got you pegged for being interested in by going here: <a href="https://www.google.com/settings/ads" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/settings/ads</a><p>TL;DR: There are like-minded people in very close proximity to you, searching for the same things that you search for/mention/use/lust after, and you're getting lumped in with them.
It's not just listening. Facebook once showed me an ad for sneakers after mine were stolen, thus proving that Facebook sent somebody to steal them.
Facebook's explanation:<p>>Myth: The feature listens to and stores your conversations.<p>>Fact: Nope, no matter how interesting your conversation, this feature does not store sound or recordings. Facebook isn’t listening to or storing your conversations.<p>>Here’s how it works: if you choose to turn the feature on, when you write a status update, the app converts any sound into an audio fingerprint on your phone. This fingerprint is sent to our servers to try and match it against our database of audio and TV fingerprints. By design, we do not store fingerprints from your device for any amount of time. And in any event, the fingerprints can’t be reversed into the original audio because they don’t contain enough information.<p>>Myth: Facebook is always listening using your microphone.<p>>Fact: Nope, if you choose to turn this feature on, it will only use your microphone (for 15 seconds) when you’re actually writing a status update to try and match music and TV.<p><a href="http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2014/05/a-new-optional-way-to-share-and-discover-music-tv-and-movies/" rel="nofollow">http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2014/05/a-new-optional-way-to-sh...</a> (via <a href="http://www.computerworld.com/article/2490090/social-media/backlash-over-facebook-s--listening--feature-is-a-problem-of-trust.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.computerworld.com/article/2490090/social-media/ba...</a>)
The obvious reason is that your friends are searching for things. When you talk to your friends and your friend mentions that he's going through a divorce, the odds are great that he's looked up a divorce lawyer online, because you're friends, FB figures you'd be interested in the same thing and starts serving you ads for divorce attorneys.<p>Or if your friend is renovating his house and does a search for new cabinets, you'll see cabinets show up in your ads. And you won't think anything about it until you talk to your friend about his renovations. Then you get home, and your FB is full of renovation ads.<p>Never attribute to malice or competence (voice fingerprinting for ad targeting )what can adequately be explained by a stupid algorithm ("my friends and I must like the same things" ad targeting).
Do bugs in Houston tend to come inside in October? If so, the ad may just have been targeted at location + time of year. (I'm just tossing out a hypothesis; I have no opinion either way as to whether Facebook was listening.)
This is somewhat anecdotal but with the latest iOS and Facebook app versions, Facebook doesn't even show up on the list of apps that have requested to use my microphone. Unless they found some exploit to bypass Apple's restrictions and use my microphone without even asking for permission, I seriously doubt they're listening to users.
Reading all the creepy anecdotes in the thread ...<p>Possibility 1 :
Facebook is snooping on your conversations.<p>Possibility 2:
Their machine learning algorithms are getting creepily good at predicting your wants and needs.<p>Both are scary.
> There was also an article a few years ago that talked about how they have super computers that aggregate all your data thats available about you and make estimates on when you would need something or have a life event.
Its evidently crazy accurate at approximating when you would say get married, buy a car, buy a house, and very good at predicting your shopping habits.<p>Dear Facebook overlords, when will I meet the girl I'll marry?<p>Seriously, has anyone tried this?
I think this is probably just an example of the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon: <a href="http://www.psmag.com/books-and-culture/theres-a-name-for-that-the-baader-meinhof-phenomenon-59670" rel="nofollow">http://www.psmag.com/books-and-culture/theres-a-name-for-tha...</a>
I had a similar experience. My girlfriend watches a lot of Netflix. She was listening to Gotham when she asked me to look up the name of one of the actors on IMDB.<p>I fired up Chrome on my already opened MBP, typed IMDB in the search bar and the first result was IMDB Gotham.<p>I'm not going to speculate, but the coincidence was indeed surprising.
There is always the possibility of Facebook listening to conversation. But it is also possible to figure out your interest using context time travel. Google does it all the time.[1]<p>> Imagine scaling this idea. Imagine you know everything a person goes through. Everything. In the right context, you will be able to predict everything this person does. By studying his past, you can determine his thoughts all the time. Here is something that happened to me a few years ago.<p>> I've watched a Mexican show on YouTube for a few month. Let's call it a soap opera for now. A month later, I was chatting with a friend in Mexico and I've mentioned the show. She mentioned another Brazilian show she liked. This conversation was happening on whatsapp. The moment I jumped on Google, on my desktop machine, all I had to do was type 2 characters on the search bar and Google completed it with the name of the show she was talking about.<p>[1] <a href="http://idiallo.com/blog/context-time-travel" rel="nofollow">http://idiallo.com/blog/context-time-travel</a>