Repeating conversations: Facebook
By: Stories Of Tintinburgh
Tags: Stuff, Photos, Talk

This post is mainly targeted at my non-IT folk. Yes they do exist.

Anyway. So I had some repetitive conversations over the last year, and I felt like putting my thoughts to a blog post. The first such a conversation is about Facebook, specifically the claim that Facebook’s apps eavesdrop on human conversations. So here are my reasons why I believe this is extremely unlikely.

How such conversation usually begins

Usually it starts with a friend telling me that they were discussing <X> privately with another person without ever searching for <X> online or reading about it passively. The couple of days later they saw Facebook ads about <X>. Their best explanation is that Facebook has been listening to their conversation and perhaps by “Keyword detection” or some other method discovered that they are interested in <X>.

So why did you talk about <X>? Did you wake up one day and suddenly thought about this new subject / product / topic without any external stimuli? Probably not. Most likely people around you (be it your friends or your general demographic group) talked about it as well, or you have stumbled on the topic <X> in a newspaper or online. But most likely you don’t remember where you first saw it, you only remember later occurrences when it started to repeat itself.

Here are some options for what could be happening:

Facebook was showing you ads for <X> long before you first talked about <X> but you only started noticing them after you had a conversation about it. You are more likely to pay attention to things that you have talked about recently so you would immediately notice an ad for an obscure subject. Ask yourself: if you never had a conversation about <X> would you notice the ad? Or would you simply ignore it?

Or would you simply ignore it? Facebook might be targeting your demographics. The ads are targeted on a very specific criteria. Maybe your friends were targeted before you were and that is why you were talking about it in the first place.

The recommendation engine (that is the thing that decides what ads you will get) are very very very good. The algorithm (no idea what Facebook uses) might group you with people who are similar to you. And these people might have searched for <X>. You are not all that unique. Maybe <X> is a new hip topic for people similar to you. So why not show an ad about <X> to you when people similar to you clicked on it in 87%? These groups tend to be very weird and hard to interpret, your group could be something like “People who liked Titanic in 2008, Listen to Techno, Don’t follow any Memes pages and are between 21 to 25, but not 24.”, even if you don’t know any such people in real life Facebook can still make assumptions about how you would behave based on your (sparsely distributed) group.

Anyway our minds are very strange machines (not really), that have a lot of biases, most likely what you have experienced is Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, (good luck searching for that in two months from now, you will most likely end searching for “two weird German sounding names phenomenon”, its not Dunning-Grugger effect for my feature self), anyway this is also called Frequency illusion. From Wikipedia: “The illusion in which a word, a name, or other thing that has recently come to one’s attention suddenly seems to appear with improbable frequency shortly afterwards”, sounds familiar?

All of the above was just to convince you that there is alternative explanation for what you have experienced and that there is a possibility that Facebook is not spying on you. (More precisely: that Facebook is not spying on you with your phone microphone but other than that Zuck is still the same creep he has always been.)

Is there a way to detect it?

Surprisingly many of my friends have a lot of misconceptions about how Android ecosystem works (Apple’s iOS is very similar in this regard). Here are some assumptions of what would have to be true in order for Facebook to listen on you (on an Android phone):

You have installed either Facebook or Messenger application. (That is you don’t use Facebook in a browser.)

For the sake of argument lets assume that you have installed these Apps through Google Play store.

You have given the app a permission to use your device microphone — a lot of people do in order to use Messenger calls.

You have un-rooted phone, if you don’t know what this means then you probably do.

The above assumptions are not too much to ask for — they hold for the majority of users.

Anyway so you have the app on your phone, but what is an app? Put simply an app is just a long list of instructions for the Android operating system to do things on its behalf. An App can never interact with your phone without operating system knowledge, this model is called Sandbox. Imagine the app execution model as conversation, for example following conversation occurs when you click on messenger app:

OS: Hey, APP, now you are running, what do you wanna do? APP: Oh, hey OS, can you download me a file with previous conversations from Facebook.com server? OS: Sure thing buddy, here it is. APP: OK, now that I have the conversation list can you please draw it as a list? OS: Sure thing bro.

The end result is that you see conversation list. What I wanted to illustrate is that an App can’t really do anything without a silent nod from the operating system (Android). Here is where things get confusing, the operating system does not really know or understand the purpose of the app. All it knows is what the app is allowed to do — use internet, use microphone, use camera… So an app could have a following conversation with the Android operating system:

OS: Hey, APP, now you are running, what do you wanna do? APP: Oh, hey OS, can you turn the microphone now and listen for 5 minutes? LIE: the user wants to have an audio call. OS: Sure thing bro, after all the user gave you permission to use microphone whenever you wish. (OS does not understands what APP does so it has no way of knowing whether User does indeed want to have a audio call right now) APP: Oh thanks bro for that recording, can you now end that recording to Facebook.com? ( so that Zuck can listen to it) OS: Sure thing bro.

So yes, technically speaking it is perfectly possible for Facebook to record you pretty much all the time. But would people notice? Well here’s the thing, with enough expertise (not really all that much) an experienced user is able to completely see and control literally everything the app does (“literally” is not used here as a figure of speech). It can see everything APP asks the OS to do, it can see all of the internet communication it has with Facebook servers (decrypted), it can see whenever the microphone was used and what data it got from it.

An app is similar to a car engine: Imagine buying a new car and trying to understands how the engine works. It would be very helpful if the car company sent you the blueprints of the car and all of its documentation, but they won’t. (Unless they are open source, this is what open source means — that you get the blue prints and plans with the car.)

You can pick the car apart and see exactly how each part interacts with each other and slowly start to understand hot it all works. With enough time you would be able to fully understand all of the details and eventually you could even re-create the blueprints and plans for the engine. This process is called reverse engineering and is quite common especially in software development.

So we are able to conduct following:

verify that the app only uses microphone when engaged in video/audio call

verify that the app is only sending information that user expects it to send

So did anybody did that? Yes! In face people do it all the time, Facebook has a bounty program where it pays “hackers” to find its security vulnerabilities for money (over the last few years FB spent over $6m on the program). Here is 10 year old receiving 10k for few hours of his time. (DO YOU FEEL USELESS NOW? That is because you are — Source). On a side note I bet he got 10k because he was 10 years old, if he was 11 he would probably only got 5k.

So yes, there are people doing reverse engineering of Facebook products and they have not confirmed this behavior at all. And it would be easy enough to spot network activity that happens without any reason.

But don’t take my word for it, Electronic Frontier Foundation already disproved this theory. And they are probably the last organization who would lie about such a thing.

Anyway, I am not saying you should not be creeped out by Facebook, but lets be rational about it.

Other stuff

In the first blog post I talked about buying a new laptop — I did buy it a few weeks ago. After a long deliberation I went for Dell XPS 15 9570.

I discovered a new cool blog: http://devonzuegel.com/

I am really sleepy.

I plan to migrate from Medium to something different — more flexible.

I hope you enjoyed today’s photos. I did really take all of them today, I started taking photos on a bike, so there should be a bit different places from now on.