Techbros really went full police state just to deliver ads I wouldn’t click on straight into my adblocker
You’d be surprised how many people raw dog the internet.
It’s terrifying
I’ve had people that refuse to use an adblocker because “the creators deserve to get paid”. Well, your funeral if you get malvertising…
It’s about to be a lot more with the chrome manifest update. I got my dad into chrome some 15 years ago and explaining why he should switch to Firefox is completely confusing for him. He thinks his own business listing on Google won’t work if he’s not using Chrome.
Even people you’d really expect to use adblockers. A good example is right here on Lemmy, people here are generally pretty tech-savvy yet you get threads with lots of people complaining about ads. This has been a weird lesson as I get older, seeing that most people somehow don’t even think about lifting a finger to fix things they see as problems, they really just complain and then do absolutely nothing to help themselves. It’s the same with if someone mentions something they don’t know what it is, instead of taking 5 seconds to just look it up they comment to ask about it and then never reply to people answering their question. I’m certain that it’s very common to have some weird need to make others do work for you, they don’t actually care about finding out what something is or how to do something to fix a problem, they just care about making others spend any kind of effort for them.
They’re called help vampires in the programming world.
if someone is like, half of the described vampire i don’t mind. Honestly it feels strange to have our ancient way of finding things out (asking your friends if they know) be somehow seen as wrong nowadays. I want to learn from other human being, not disembodied pieces of information oftentimes tied to ads for driver updating software
I encountered a user a week or two ago who was confused by the inaccurate output of an LLM, didn’t/couldn’t understand that it’s more or less just fancy autocomplete, who then tried to interact with the post replies as if the users were also an LLM. I had a great time calling that out. It was kinda hilarious, tbh.
Dude. Paragraphs.
I mean, five sentences is a paragraph.
I work as a software engineer with other software engineers. Even software engineers and UX designers using the internet that way. Talented ones. Many of them - maybe the majority. It takes me a second to get over my astonishment when they share their screens. Not only astonishment at how overboard ads have gotten w/o an adblocker, but also that this particular person doesn’t use an adblocker.
So many people aren’t well-informed about what ad networks or doing, or how different the web experience could be.
I see people doing it and its terrifying.
I have a friend that pays Google a YouTube tax every month… He tells me he wants to support the creators.
I’m just kind of sad for him… I tried to explain direct donations were a million times more effective, but he clearly just doesn’t want to learn how to use an adblocker.
This guy is like 30 years old.
Why in the world would you think that someone paying to use a service is a problem? Sure direct donations are more helpful, but that doesn’t run servers to actually distribute the content you’re viewing. Your problem is completely different than what we are discussing about ad blockers.
Do you mean YouTube premium? Old YouTube music because they’re different things I think premium includes music actually but you can just have the music subscription.
Youtube music is actually better than something like Spotify for creators, so it’s not the worst justification in the world.
Dildos, lots of dildos! I’m just gonna repeat that while I’m driving to see if I start getting Google ads for dildos.
If that works, you should try it with a product that you aren’t interested in too and compare the results.
I tried that. Didn’t work. There may be some filters so they don’t serve inappropriate ads to people with families or some such.
Keep us updated!
Hold on, I just tripped on another goddamn dildo, you don’t wanna know where I fell.
I’ve tried that, it didn’t work…unfortunately.
“Meta does not use your phone’s microphone for ads and we’ve been public about this for years,” the statement read. “We are reaching out to CMG to get them to clarify that their program is not based on Meta data.”
Ah, yes. The tried and true defense of “we’ve denied it for years and continue to deny it” must be credible coming from a source as trustworthy as Facebook. I hear they’re planning on holding a press conference to pinky swear they’re not listening to the microphone they demand access to in order to show you ads that make them money.
FWIW, this was debunked when CMG originally made the claim. It was a marketing guy overselling their product and they had to correct their statement. They use the same info data brokers collect, and phones actively listening to you is not true.
No it was quite a lot more than “a marketing guy” - there were pages and pages of details about their Active Listening program on their website, investor presentations etc. They went far into detail about how much they could listen to and what they could do with all that audio data.
Here’s the Internet Archive link:
https://web.archive.org/web/20231116115055/https://www.cmglocalsolutions.com/cmg-active-listening
Even what they said could be true without applying to phones. They said “smart devices” a lot. They never said “smart phone”.
There are a lot of IoT devices, some of which have microphones, a lot less secure than either iPhone or Android.
The fundamental question is, “Do you trust Facebook?” They have the resources to manipulate the story and twist the truth. They have the capability to spy on you with mics, but they say they don’t do so. Do you trust them?
goes close to a smartphone “BLOODY MARY! BLOODY MARY! BLOODY MARY!” gets advertisements from local pubs and restaurants serving Bloody Mary at a discount
I am not against this.
I had a bloody mary last weekend, you’re clearly listening in on my conversations.
This is why I don’t have the Facebook app installed. However, what about messenger? Did the collect the data from messenger?
Any closed-source software is a potential privacy threat. You are always at the mercy of big tech in that case. If the product is free, you are the product
Think about it.
unless this is provably and demonstrably true, this is definitely not true, because up until now, this has been entirely speculation.
“Meta does not use your phone’s microphone for ads and we’ve been public about this for years,” the statement read.
Meanwhile:
Not defending Facebook, but if you record a video with sound, then the FB app has to have permission to record your audio.
That said, delete Facebook. Fuck Zuck.
if you record a video with sound, then the FB app has to have permission to record your audio.
It really doesn’t. The OS can provide a record-video API, complete with a user-controlled kill switch and an activity indicator, and the app can call it.
Pretty sure that qualifies for that permission.
But the whole point of doing so is to use it in the app, and you for sure can’t do that without the permission.
I think this is more a teological argument he is making and I agree. We’ve become numb to these permission warnings. Oh this app needs access to my camera because I need to take a photo of something once at registration. Why can’t it link to my default trusted photo app and that app can send a one time transfer to it? I hardly question these permissions anymore since many apps need permissions for rare one off functions. The only thing I deny every single time is my contact list.
teleological
I will thank you
about a million words from now
I don’t give anything mic or camera access on iOS. It’s really not an inconvenience, and anything that demands it is something I don’t want on my phone anyways.
You don’t use the camera or phone?
Come on man, you know they didn’t mean it literally 💀
I’m very obviously not talking about system apps.
You don’t have to give third party apps permissions they don’t need.
Pretty sure that qualifies for that permission.
I don’t know what you mean. Existing behavior does not provide the control or visibility that I described.
One important difference is that the “permissions” in the screen shot are effectively all-or-nothing: if you don’t agree to all of them, then you don’t get to install the app. They’re not permissions so much as demands.
(Some OS do have settings that will let you turn them off individually after installation, but this is not universally available, is often buried in an advanced configuration panel, leaves a window of time where they are still allowed, and in some cases have been known to cause apps to crash. Things are improving on this front with new OS versions, but doing so in microscopic steps that move at a glacial pace.)
If your app touches the camera and mic, it will show up on that screen that it does so. “Using the API” (which is just how the OS works) doesn’t prevent it from appearing on that screen, especially when you’re doing so for the purpose of putting video and audio in posts.
If your app touches the camera and mic, it will show up on that screen that it does so.
Showing up on that screen is no substitute for what is actually needed:
- Individual control (an easy and obvious way to allow or deny each thing separately)
- Minimal access (a way to create a sound file without giving Facebook access to an open mic)
- Visibility (a clear indication by the OS when Facebook is capturing or has captured data)
All of those things are implemented in modern Android. Well, almost.
- Whenever the app wants to use microphone an OS popup asks you if you want to give the app permission to use the feature. The options are “when using app”, “only this time” (it will give the app one-time-use access to the mic) and “never”. If you click the 1st or 3rd options, you wouldn’t see the popup again and you’ll have to change the permission from settings. If you choose the 2nd option, you can manually choose to give permission each time it’s requested.
- This is impossible? The OS can either let the app use the mic or not, it can’t tell what the app is doing with the mic. Unless you mean give a one-time permission this time, but not in the future, then we covered that in previous point.
- Android always shows a green indicator on screen (upper right corner) when any app is using the microphone or camera API. Well, almost always, some system apps might not trigger it. But if you want to see which app is using mic/camera you can tap the indicator.
I downvoted because of the snark in first paragraph.
No snark intended. Do you run into that so often that you’ve come to expect it?
Intention vs. Impact, look it up.
I downvoted because of the snark in first paragraph.
Ooh, I spy more snark!
Yeah watch me not deny it tho; I intended for it to be snarky and anticipated this impact.
That rude and condescending comment lends nothing useful to the discussion, and has just earned my only downvote of the day. Enjoy. Bye.
That is not the same thing as listening in the background.
Nobody said it was the same thing. It’s still relevant and important.
I trust that most adults understand the implications of an exploitable permission and a strong incentive to abuse it, as well as the track record of corporate denials.
Using the permission to record audio triggers an on-screen indicator that the mic is recording. Someone would probably notice it on 24/7 recording. Someone would have also by now found the constant stream of network traffic to send the audio to be analyzed, because they also aren’t doing that on-device.
Meta said it does not, but what about 3rd parties…
What a horrifying list of data collection. Fuck all that hahaha
Why wouldn’t you want to share your fitness data with the company that will sell it to the company setting your health “insurance” premiums? </s>
What’s the last “bombshell scandal that would ruin a company” that actually ruined a company?
Unroll.me was a service that would scan your email and clean up your inbox. The New York Times reported that the company was gathering sales receipts emails, anonymizing them, and selling them to rival companies; for example Uber paid them to hand over all the sales receipts they could on Lyft rides in people’s mailboxes. The bad press made them eventually sell the company to Slice, mainly for the email archives they amassed.
Slice like… the pizza website?
That’s what I assumed too but it appears to be a package tracking website
Enron? Maybe the SBF thing? Seems like financial scandals are the only thing that matters.
As a business you can be a maverick against many laws, just not the laws regarding finance.
Cambridge Analytica, but only because what they were doing was so monumentally illegal. I’m sure the government would have let them get away with it if they could have thought of a way out for them. A lot of them mates were involved in that scandal.
Ngl man I’m not buying it. With all the protections in mobile OSes against this exact kind of thing it straight up doesn’t seem possible
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call me a normie but I do like having contact with my family. And though I’d love to move somewhere where my privacy is respected - there’s no point in using a messaging app if you’re the only one there
and no I can’t convince my 76 year old grandma to move to signal, she barely wrapped her head around Facebook
That’s a BS reason. I have 2 members of the Baby Boomer generation in my Signal contacts, they use it all the time with no problems. It’s no harder than iMessage to use. They would like it better when they see that Signal doesn’t gimp the image quality between Android and iOS phones unlike iMessage
Well i’m very happy for you and for them, but my 76 year old Polish grandmother - who got her first mobile phone at the age of 60ish, probably doesn’t even know what image quality is, definitely doesn’t know the difference between android and iOS, and has recently called me panicked to ask why all her photos were on Facebook, they weren’t, she was looking at her gallery preview through the Facebook app - is not going to be very enthusiastic about learning to use an app only her grandson uses.
so I’ll just stick to messenger
It isn’t. I’ve personally had it happen where a relative who went to some country that bans video calling and VoIP (except for the unencrypted/honey pots of course) and used Signal to call people back home (only because I told them it would be unblocked due to censorship circumvention). Despite everyone in my household being familiar with WhatsApp, I was the only who did video calls with them and had to share my device so others could also call them. Even when I’d set up Signal on one of their devices, they still complained it was to difficult to use, insisted I’d uninstall it when the trip was over and used it a grand total of once.
I honestly think it’s partly to do with the nerd factor. This same relative turned out to also have installed the backdoored unencrypted app to chat with others, but hid it from us due to me being vocal about not using that. These other households, also WhatsApp based, managed to install, sign up and use that just fine. They also couldn’t be bothered to set up Signal for some reason, yet gladly accepted the suggestion to use the honey pot.
I think that these people in my circle don’t care about security at all and only care about the platform. If it’s “secure”, “private” and “censorship resistant” and they haven’t heard of it until I, the “techie”, explain the technological benefits of it, they’ll think it’s a niche “techie” thing they’re not nerdy enough to understand. If I get them to use it, they’ll keep thinking this whenever something is slightly different than WhatsApp and be frustrated. Meanwhile they can get behind the honey pot because “WhatsApp doesn’t work there, this is just what people in that country use”. It appears normal because “normal people” use it all the time, and they’ll solve any inconvenience themselves because “normal people (can) use this, and I’m normal too”.
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What’s a normie in this context?
An average person
What ? A corporation that earn money in selling personal data, that don’t want to share its code that run on a device with a microphone, actually use it ? I’m shocked
There were whole threads of people saying this stuff doesn’t happen. They would say it just didn’t make sense that companies would do this, it’s not worth it to them. That all the ads I was seeing at convenient times were just a coincidence.
Right and your evidence is “I think it happens”.
Show me the stack trace.
I have my camera and microphone deactivated on the OS level because Youtube and Spotify would show me things workmates mentioned way too often.
I didn’t notice it since.
Could still be a major coincidence though, the biggest of them.
Same exact thing for me, and same exact results. Also too major of a coincidence in my mind.
The next iteration of gaslighting is already here: That it’s no big deal anyway since you can just use an ad blocker. Riiight, let’s all just turn our eyes away to make the monster go away. Surely, it’ll get bored and stop listening and recording, and surely, it will not sell its collected data off to banks, insurance providers, the government, law enforcement… right?
Seriously… If ad-blockers worked at a high enough level to actually impact this shit, then they wouldn’t be doing it. They know most people don’t bother with ad blockers, and because of that, they’re low-hanging fruit.
And they are right. This company is full of shit. Show me any proof the tech from the deleted advert actually existed.
They’re here in this thread lol. No matter what, these people will deny its happening. I don’t understand it.
There are simps in this thread trying to say “uuuuhmmmm AKSHUALLY it’s not Facebook directly” like that’s fucking relevant to the problem.
At this point it doesn’t even matter if it’s real or not, after Snowden no sane person believes big tech since they were all in on PRISM.
This is why I don’t like the push of everything needing an app. I sure do wish people in congress cared about this type of privacy issues the way they did Tiktok.
Shocked, I tell you!
