A few days ago we had this thread [0] where someone asked about a Facebook ad that arrived mysteriously on their page. I saw several possible explanations for this in the thread. Later I found a post by Facebook [1] stating explicitly that it does not use the microphone for ads. I was satisfied, until last night.<p>Last night, while we were at home, my wife mentioned to me that she would like to get a storage box to hold her external hard drives. She described her ideal one as a metal box with some sort of foam to hold the drives in place. She had never searched for something like this before and wasn't even aware that something like this existed. A couple hours later, an ad for such a product landed up on her Facebook page. I was a little freaked out.<p>So, do you have any examples of where something like this has happened to you? Am I being paranoid and this is just a coincidence? Or could Facebook actually be listening in on us?<p>[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13597225
[1] http://newsroom.fb.com/news/h/facebook-does-not-use-your-phones-microphone-for-ads-or-news-feed-stories/
Considering that this would be pretty easy to prove, but no one has yet, Occam's razor says this most likely was something else entirely. One possible explanation could be that the ad was shown to her before as well but she didn't notice it, yet it subconsciously registered and created a need or idea for such a product (i.e. you're switching around cause and effect). Another is that your wife is quite predictable in her demand of such a product due to other factors that are trackable by Facebook.
If you are using Facebook on a recent phone client, or through a browser, whenever this happens, try this:<p>- There is a little "chevron" menu popdown in the advert, generally top-right.<p>- Tap it, and then pull down "Why am I seeing this?"<p>Then you will find out why you are seeing the advert.<p>Source: I used to work at Facebook
I find it highly unlikely and am inclined to believe Facebook on this one.<p>I'd say it's much more likely that your wife had seen that ad before your conversation but wasn't particularly conscious of seeing it.<p>You're basically describing how advertising works - making people feel they want to buy something without them even realising.
If Facebook indeed does this, it should be fairly easy to trigger by repeatedly mentioning some kind of product in front of a running Facebook app. If not, it's a "can't reproduce" for me.
I do not. However, I've heard it anecdotally many times. You can definitely find similar stories on reddit.<p>I'm guessing Facebook is doing some pretty complicated work to find that interest and serve the ad, but as evil as Facebook is I doubt they're straight up lying about using the microphone to listen and serve ads.
Does it actually matter much whether there are current, proven examples? If you give their app access to your microphone, they're going to use it for ad targeting and worse as soon as it's politically / technically / economically expedient to do so.
Not verbal communications, but I have seen ads relating to SMS messages I've sent or received. Perfect example was my wife advising the vacuum cleaner was broken, next thing I see when I logged onto Facebook was an advert for vacuum cleaners.
I have been approached by companies that wish to listen for audio on our mobilenetworks for tv stations. They have pretty good id databases of the shows in the background and use the information to reset ads and to sell back to stations. They did mention facebook being a client. As far as realtime interpretation of plain audio for ads that doesn't seem far fetched. Ad units of these companies are the elite i wouldn't put it past them.<p><a href="https://www.audiblemagic.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.audiblemagic.com</a>
This just happened to me: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13589749" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13589749</a><p>None of the possible justifications mentioned in the replies really apply for the case I observed... We have had this happening two or three times, and it is <i>always</i> when my wife's mobile is around (I don't have FB app installed).<p>So for all I care, it is something that <i>does</i> happen.
Coincidence. FB has over a billion daily users and each one communicates dozens of concepts per day - if each person sees numerous ads per day then it's a statistical certainty that someone, somewhere happens to get an ad that matches up with something they mentioned earlier in that day or week. This is the same reason why everyone has a story about a dream that came true.
I've had a number of ads pop up for things my wife and I have discussed verbally without searching. Even if Facebook themselves do not monitor the mic, nothing prevents someone else (Apple, Google, etc) from doing so and feeding that information to FB. It's certainly occurring but it's not clear that FB is directly responsible.
I was talking to my boyfriend in the car about the idea of people having personal plastic recycling machines in their home, where you would break down the plastic waste you create and then make "ink"for a home 3D printer to reprint plastic household items. This idea came to me when I was thinking about the world's problem with plastic water bottles, at that time, in the car. An hour later, he opened his Facebook on his phone that was on and playing music in the car and the first ad he saw was for a 3D printer that uses recycled plastic. I know the idea in my head goes along with current popular issues of the times, so yes my thought process and Facebook ad could just be coincidence, but the fact that it was a more novel and complex idea made it amusing.
IMO this is what's known as a coincidence. The odds against seeing an advert for a product you have just talked about are incredibly low, but there are also a hundreds of millions people using Facebook every day, each seeing hundreds of ads and discussing lots of products with their spouses. Eerie coincidences are inevitable.<p>Derren Brown did a great demonstration of a similar phenomenon by asking 100s of people to bet on a series of horse races. Of course one person backed the winning horse on all races and thought it was magic. What they didn't realise is that there were a lot of others doing this too and having one person back all the winners was (in that experiment) an inevitability.
My wife and I were talking about salt. I forget the exact conversation, but was random. Not about wanting salt for dinner or whatever just a general conversation about salt.<p>Opened Facebook a little while later and ther was an ad for Morton's Salt at the very top of my feed. I've never searched on the internet anywhere for salt. I've never liked mortons salt on Facebook. I've never clicked on anything remotely related to salt.<p>I'm 99.9% convinced facebook was open and listening to us. (There is a very small possibility it was a coincidence, but I doubt it.)<p>My wife has had similar experiences where she was out at a bar talking with friends and on the Bart ride home saw ads for topics that were discussed.
Yes happened to me. I was discussing about a food item (Anchovies fish) within a day or two I saw some ad about restaurants famous for Anchovies. It was very surprising for me because I havent searched or even typed those words in my mobile.
If I assume for a moment that the microphone actually is being listened to for ad keywords… why would it have to be Facebook, specifically, who's listening? It could be another rogue service feeding back to Facebook.
Twitter has done this to me twice.<p>I had a deep and random conversation about Oreos and the tv show Colony recently.<p>Within a day ads started showing up on my timeline.
You should be able to convert this into an experiment. Find an off-the-beat market and start talking about it in the presence of your phone (and maybe with the app open, don't know the particulars of when the app can activate the microphone). If an ad for a product in the space appears it would confirm the hypothesis that FB is listening in.
Did she perhaps recently buy hard drives? Cases for drives seems like the type of thing to be advertised once they've connected that the buyer of the drives is the person currently logged into FB.
I talked to my friend about my tooth pain couple of days ago and I saw an ad for dentist yesterday. Can't have it appear again for the screenshot. Keep in mind I newer saw dentist ads before..
I think best option is try talking some 'unique' topic again and see whether related ad popups or not.<p>Please do share your results :)<p>Ps : record the topic and take screenshot if you like to make a proof.
Me and my boyfriend were talking about possible tiles to use for our future home, we never actively looked it up, as it was a conversation that sprung from watching a series. (In the episode during a bathroomshot we saw interesting tiles)
During this conversation I was holding my phone.
Next time I scrolled through fb, I got an ad for freakin' tiles.
My partner, who is bald, was sitting with his arms crossed, and I teased him for looking like Mr. Clean. We both got ads for Mr. Clean in the next 48 hours.
I run a website that shows random images.<p>I ALWAYS get emails asking why I have showed an image that relates to what they person was just talking about.<p>But the images are random! It's the well understood concept of confirmation bias.<p>It's just depressing to see here, because I thought the readers of hackernews were more sophisticated than random sampling of the general population.