Do you also think the phone is secretly monitoring you?

Do you always feel that you have been tapped by the app on your phone? It seems that what we say will push us relevant content, and we can see what products we talk about on a certain treasure.

Not only you have such doubts, a developer also suspects that Facebook is always listening to him, so he did some research and he discovered the computational complexity of Facebook monitoring, let’s see what he said~

A few months before the lockdown started, I invited a friend over for dinner. He is on a ketogenic diet, which is a diet mechanism of high fat, low carbohydrate, mainly meat and cheese. He also told me that Shirataki noodles are also fine. I don't know what to cook, Shirataki noodles are not a good suggestion. The other guest is a vegetarian, so they don’t eat meat, fish, eggs or cheese. I myself mumble about dark comments about the ketogenic diet. Finally, we went to a restaurant.

Later that night, when I was browsing on Twitter, an ad about a ketogenic diet popped up. I have never shown the slightest interest in dieting before, and my mind keeps working. Are Facebook and Twitter secretly eavesdropping on my conversation? I imagine Zuckerberg (the founder of Facebook) and Gene Hackman in the same figure, wearing headphones in the dark, deciding which ads to push me.

Phones have ears, laptops have eyes

Well, it can be said directly: No. Our mobile phones did not secretly monitor us.

We know there are many ways to show that Twitter and Facebook can't do this. When a developer writes an app for iOS, it runs on an operating system controlled by Apple. Facebook cannot directly access the microphone and start recording. This application must pass code written in Apple's system. When Facebook requests audio, the Apple system will ask the user if they want "Facebook" to access the microphone.

If they want, the phone will send an audio stream to Facebook. If they don't want it, then there is no. The code of the Apple system is a software protection wall. If the software is not invited by the user, it cannot be accessed.

"More" contains a lot of careful thinking. This is Facebook running on iOS

When the APP uses the microphone, a toolbar will appear at the top of the screen. When I complained about my ketogenic friends, there was no toolbar at the top of the screen. However, I still feel uneasy. I check my phone to see which apps can access my microphone. I know there is no need to do this, but I did it anyway, thinking it's better to check it just in case. This reminds me of a legend: at Harvard, rubbing the shoes of a certain statue brings good luck. The students at Ivy League schools are very smart and not superstitious. However, the shoe on the left foot is still shiny because of being rubbed. You know, just in case.

I think, maybe Facebook has found a way to bypass Apple's system security checks. However, we can verify this again by monitoring the data Facebook sends from our phones. If Facebook sends audio, we will see it. Even if they find a way to mask the traffic, sending this audio requires a lot of bandwidth. The user will find out when the phone bill is paid. Moreover, we will find that this is not feasible after calculating. Antonio García Martínez said in Wired magazine that “Internet voice calls require about 24kbps, and in the United States alone, it requires 20 gigabytes (pb) per day.” Facebook’s data center is large, but not that large.

In addition, there are also the cost and computational complexity of processing audio, finding keywords and advertising, and whether it is really effective. As Martínez said, “Human language is full of irony, innuendo, puns, and all kinds of confusion.” When I talked directly to Siri, it barely worked. Computers are not smart enough to understand our speech. Facebook can't keep recording our audio at all. Your phone will get hot and the battery will run out. Even if there is no data protection law, the laws of physics can protect us here.

Facebook also denies recording audio secretly, even though this is the most convincing evidence I have found.

Tests show that Facebook is not listening

I write software. I have friends who work on Facebook. I use APIs and mobile apps to handle things. So I can judge the authenticity of these statements very well, but I still can’t help but doubt that they are listening. Can they find a way to bypass physics? This has become my "9/11 incident was done by insiders" (conspiracy theory).

This conspiracy theory emerged in the United States after the 9/11 incident in 2001. It believed that the Bush administration had intercepted the terrorist’s action plan in advance, but deliberately failed to intercept it to make it successful. This constituted the United States’ global war on terrorism. Adjustment of military structure. Those who believe in this theory call themselves "truthers" (truth seekers).

I have done two small tests. I put my phone aside, turned on Facebook, and said loudly into the air: "Oh my God, I really want to go to the Bahamas for vacation." "God, my car insurance is too expensive. If anyone can find a cheaper offer, that would be great."

Nothing at all. I feel so silly.

But the next day, I still looked at each advertisement suspiciously. Those smart reporters who expose conspiracies are also seduced by these conspiracies. "New Statesman" magazine (New Statesman) conducted a study similar to mine (also unscientific).

Of course, they got similar results: Facebook did not listen.

I find that this is not the only rumor that rational people repeat. Planned elimination is when new products appear, old products stop working; the purpose of software updates is to slow down the speed of old equipment; smartphones cause cancer; hackers secretly monitor you through your laptop camera; and so on.

Sometimes it’s just a math problem

The problem is that technology companies do not seem to be reliable. Listening to us through the microphone for advertising is exactly what they will do. This is very characteristic of them. Apple is slowing down the processor speed of old mobile phones, undeniably in order to calmly deal with the degraded battery, but we think that the idea that mobile phones are becoming slower and slower is correct. There are more bad examples. Northeastern University (Northeastern University) doctoral student Christo Wilson said after studying multiple Android apps, “The app will automatically take selfies and send them to third parties.” Facebook once hired “external contractors to transcribe audio clips of its service users. "And store information "written by users but not published". There are many such examples. Our privacy has been violated before.

Moreover, sometimes the coincidence of advertising is incredible . I gave an example of a ketogenic diet, but everyone has their own story. When PJ Vogt asked about examples on the podcast "Reply All", he received dozens of responses. People have said time and time again that this is "creepy". They say something, and it will appear in a push the next day.

Professor Dr. David Hand explained to the BBC that the reason lies in mathematics. "If you catch something that is unlikely to happen, and then give it enough opportunity to happen, it will definitely happen." Show someone the product they just discussed, this probability is surprising. For example, the probability of one in a million, we often use this phrase to describe things that are basically impossible. With this probability, every time Facebook posts an ad, 2500 people will just discuss it. If you are thinking about something common, such as pasta, and you see a pasta ad, you might not even think of it. But when this thing becomes obscure, the idea becomes prominent. This is the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, created by a man named Terry Mullen. After he read about the Baader-Meinhof team, a little-known political faction, he encountered the term again in an unrelated article.

We were deceived, deceived by our lack of logic. Humans are good at recognizing patterns. We are so good at this that we can recognize even when there is no pattern.

No different from magic

However, I do not find these explanations particularly satisfactory. These incredible events happen frequently, and they are not accidental. What I really want to see is the series of decisions that led me to see a particular ad at a particular time, explaining how the algorithm synchronizes with my life experience. Because these ads are not accidental coincidences, they are the result of recommendation engines using data points on me.

Why don't Facebook and Google listen to us? Because they don't need it. They know our age, location, interests, websites visited and things viewed. Twitter did not advertise the ketogenic diet because it overheard me. It did this because I used Google to search without thinking about what to cook for my ketogenic friends, and one of the websites I visited had a tracking pixel that captured this information and then advertised to me. Our digital and “real” lives are so intertwined that it’s easy to forget what you’ve searched for on Google and what you just thought of. Google does not need to read our minds, we will type our thoughts on it. Facebook doesn't listen to us, it listens to our thoughts.

Arthur C. Clarke famously said: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is no different from magic." The technology is already advanced enough. Even 10 years ago, Facebook could collect 500 terabytes of data in a day. With so much data, it can establish seemingly magical connections.

This is the world of Facebook and we live in it

These explanations are no more satisfying than finding out how magicians perform magic tricks. The mirrors, magnets and trap doors are so ordinary that we can hardly believe that they are behind what is visible to the naked eye on the stage. We have all played cards, so we think we know what is possible. We forget that magicians have practiced thousands of hours of card skills, and their deck of cards is different from ours. Similarly, the way technology companies operate is very different from ours. We heard that they violated privacy laws, but usually the way is very subtle. Who can really explain the privacy violations included in Facebook's record-breaking $5 billion fine? (In fact, all the fines since then were due to knowing nothing.)

This low-trust environment is an ideal breeding ground for conspiracy theories. Professor Karen Douglas of the University of Kent said: “Research shows that people are attracted to conspiracy theories when they feel powerless.” Compared with Facebook, we appear powerless. We have discovered some things, we know their secrets, and this idea allows us to regain some strength. Psychologist Dr. Anthony Lantian wrote: "People who believe in conspiracy theories will feel that they are'special' and they will feel that they are more knowledgeable than others."

In "Democracy and Truth" (Democracy and Truth), Sophia Rosenfeld argues that conspiracy theories are very popular in societies where there is a huge gap between the ruler and the ruled. Technology companies may not be able to manage us (not literally, nor now), but they have knowledge and resources that we do not have. The gap between what they can do and our understanding of how they do is getting bigger and bigger. In the book "The Workshop and The World", Robert Crease said that this "creates a rift between those who cannot understand this particular language and those who can understand it, making the former easy Don't trust the latter."

We often think that paranoia has conspiracy theories. But a more reasonable explanation is that these ideas stem from powerlessness. Jeff Atwood wrote that even software developers must "serve the king." Everyone is in the hands of larger companies with higher levels of the food chain.

Compared with the tech giants with millions of users, we are just insignificant, small and powerless digital ant people. Someone is listening to me, the feeling of "I am unique" is really good. I am important, I have influence! Even if it's just to sell my popular low-carb diet.

I don't want Facebook to listen to me, but what is even more frustrating is that we are not so important that they want to try to listen