Facebook denies secretly recording users' conversations for targeted advertising

midian182

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A lot of people have stories about Facebook allegedly listening in on a conversation via a mobile’s microphone and using the info for targeted advertising purposes. Rumors that the social network has been surreptitiously engaging in this practice have been around for years, but one of its executives has just been forced to deny them once again.

PJ Vogt—the presenter of tech podcast Reply All—spoke about the claims on a recent show, which involved people calling in with their own tales of possible Facebook spying. This led to the company's president of ads, Rob Goldman, responding with a tweet that read: "I run ads product at Facebook. We don't - and have never - used your microphone for ads. Just not true."

There are thousands of people who believe that after discussing a certain topic in the real world, a related ad later appeared on their Facebook feeds. While the site is filled with adverts, conspiracists say these particular ads feature the same obscure or specific products they were talking about, proving the company is up to no good.

Facebook is open about its audio recording capabilities, but these only allow users who have opted-in to identify and tag music or television programs playing in the near vicinity. If the feature is enabled, it uses a microphone for 15 seconds when a person is writing a status update; it isn’t used for advertising purposes, according to the company.

It’s incredible just how many people claim to have experienced this 'listening' phenomenon—often more than once. I know a few people myself who swear it has happened to them. But in reality, it’s hard to imagine that one of the largest, richest firms in the world would risk throwing everything away–and probable jail time—just to improve targeted advertising. Moreover, it’s likely that Facebook doesn’t yet possess the technology to make it possible.

Remember: Facebook does know a lot about you and your friends, and its ad algorithms use this data all the time. Perhaps some people forgot about a search they performed that was related to the conversation in qustion. But most of all, a lot of this comes down to pure coincidence.

Or maybe that’s what they want you to believe.

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That's worth as much as when soon to be ex-president Nixon said "I am not a liar"
also when they say "We don't - and have never - used your microphone for ads" I say, well what are you using for then? What I should have read is "We don't - and have never - used your microphone." Big difference
 
You would look into that face and think - this man could never lie....
 
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If it's not facebook then it's something else. A couple weeks ago I was at a friends house and he had just bought a Ryobi pressure washer, it was on the patio and I asked him how he liked so far because I needed to get one too. The next day there were home depot ads for pressure washers in my news feed.
 
I've been there, before even searching something I get ads about it, just by talking about it with someone, WAM targeted ads.
 
That's worth as much as when soon to be ex-president Nixon said "I am not a liar"
also when they say "We don't - and have never - used your microphone for ads" I say, well what are you using for then? What I should have read is "We don't - and have never - used your microphone." Big difference
Didn't he say "I am not a crook"? Anyway, that's no longer important seeing he hasn't said anything for a while due to his current 'dead quiet' status.
 
I believe FB's statement. They're not recording conversations just for targeted advertising. They're recording conversations for that and a helluva lot more.
Anyway, one of these days all social media will be remembered vaguely as a fad of the past and be longed for again when it's replaced with something even more sinister and evil.
 
That's worth as much as when soon to be ex-president Nixon said "I am not a liar"
also when they say "We don't - and have never - used your microphone for ads" I say, well what are you using for then? What I should have read is "We don't - and have never - used your microphone." Big difference

He also famously said "I am not a crook" and we see where that went .....
 
He also famously said "I am not a crook" and we see where that went .....
actually I made a mistake, you (and @Skidsmarksdeluxe) have the correct quote. My bad. Here are some other good Nixon ones though.

"When the President does it, that means it's not illegal." —President Richard Nixon, in a 1977 interview with David Frost
"If you can't lie, you'll never go anywhere." —President Richard Nixon, giving advice to a political associate
"I was not lying. I said things that later on seemed to be untrue." — President Richard Nixon, reflecting on the Watergate scandal in 1978
 
THE ULTIMATE FAKE PERSON AWARD
by Miles Mathis
When confronted with a whopping lie from a whopping liar, my Dad used to say, “He'd lie if the truth sounded better!” Well, the mainstream media has become that sort of liar. They lie all the time about everything, even things they don't need to lie about. I will show you one of those things in this paper. Mark Zuckerberg, the alleged inventor of Facebook, was TIME's man of the year last year. I haven't seen anyone really pull that apart, so here goes. Before I show you the whopping lies, let me just ask you if you think it makes any sense that a guy who started a social website should be the man of the year. Remember, this wasn't the first social website. There was what, MySpace before that, and dozens of others, including delicious, deviantArt, Flicker, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, LinkedIn, Netlog (formerly known as Facebox), Orkut, and XING. Plus, how much genius does it take to put a site like this together? It isn't brain surgery. Zuckerberg and some pals put it together in college, in between bong hits and kamikaze shots, and apparently they stole the idea from some fratboys even stupider than they are (Zuckerberg recently lost a judgment and had to pay out a large sum to a couple of rich jarheads from Harvard). But it gets worse, as usual. It turns out that Zuckerberg only took off after the CIA got involved. If you want to know why Facebook is now the number 2 site on the web, in terms of traffic, instead of MySpace or hi5, you only have to look at who is backing it. ACCEL corporation gave 12 million in start-up money to Facebook, and ACCEL has direct ties to In-Q-Tel—it may even be a secret arm of InQ-Tel as well as DARPA. What is In-Q-Tel? It is the venture capital arm of the CIA, as is admitted at places like Wikipedia. What is DARPA? It is the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency, the new technology arm of the US Department of Defense. Part of the new technology of “defense” is data mining. In 2002, it became known that DARPA included the IAO, the Information Awareness Office, which was data mining American citizens. According to Wikipedia,
This would be achieved by creating enormous computer databases to gather and store the personal information of everyone in the United States, including personal e-mails, social networks, credit card records, phone calls, medical records, and numerous other sources, without any requirement for a search warrant. After public outcry, the IAO was defunded by Congress in 2003, but even Wiki admits that it persisted, “and merely ran under different names.” It is alive and well today. Facebook is one of its arms. Furthermore, if you check the TOS, Terms of Service, of Facebook, you will find that Facebook now owns any and all information and content you have uploaded to it. They now own copyright to any photos you put up there, including photos of art. They can make “derivative” copies of your artwork, and you can't sue them for it (you might be able to, but you would be suing in white territory, since no
one knows if TOS agreements like this will hold up in court. Just as you can't sign away liability, it may be that you cannot sign away copyright in a TOS. But good luck!). This also applies to written art, including poems, short stories, jokes, and everything else. In the same way, you have signed away any right to privacy, since the Facebook agreement states in clear terms that they have the right to datamine you any way they like. In signing up to Facebook, you are basically giving a thumbs-up to the government to data-mine you, with no legal repercussions. You are also giving them a thumbs-up to steal your intellectual property, supposing you have any. But that still isn't all. What if you change your mind about something you posted at Facebook, and wish to take it down? Well, they have a permanent copy of it. You can take it down, but they still have the permanent file and always will. What if you wish to post something Facebook doesn't like, such as a link to an anti-CIA rally? Well, Facebook can just take it down, without even notifying you. They can break all your links, and punish all your friends by breaking their links, too. Facebook has already done stuff like this, and it is almost impossible to stop them. That's a beautiful way to get around free speech, right? You have to sue them to have free speech, but by the time you get around to winning your lawsuit, the rally is long over. Ever wonder how Facebook gets so many hits? Those are faked as well. As proof, just go to your sidebar, or wherever your computer's history is. Click on it. If you are like me, you will probably find a lot of Facebook hits, even though you haven't been there all day or all year. I am not a member of Facebook and never have been, and never go there. And yet my history list is littered with Facebook hits. How can that be? It can be because tens of thousands of websites are surreptitiously linked to Facebook, so that anytime you visit those sites, you also register a hit for Facebook. This drives the hits of Facebook up by many factors of ten, falsifying its popularity. This false popularity can then be used to sell ads, driving up Facebook's claimed revenues. The popularity of Facebook is manufactured. That is a whopping lie, but there is an even larger one. We are now told that Zuckerberg is worth something on the order of 13.6 billion. That is up from 4 billion last year, according to Forbes. Well,
since Forbes, like TIME and everything else, is now edited by the CIA, we don't have to believe that.
If we are smart, we assume that is another lie. Everything else we are told is false, so that probably is, too. Can I prove it? Yes, all I have to do is a little math. The revenue of Facebook was around 2 billion in 2010, according to Wiki. The total revenue from 2006-2009 was 1.25 billion. Before that, Facebook was nothing special, making only a few million. That is a total since founding of 3.25 billion. Zuckerberg can't have profit more than the entire company, can he? Zuckerberg owns a 24% share of Facebook. Well, 24% of 3.25 billion is 780 million, not 13.6 billion. Plus, 3.25 billion is revenues, not profit. Facebook has to pay costs, right? It has to pay a staff and rent and so on. Which probably brings Zuckerberg's share down below half a billion. That is assuming we aren't being lied to about revenues. Where did they come up with that 13.6 billion number? Well, Goldman Sachs just paid 400 million for .8% of the company, which would make the company worth 50 billion, we are told. That would make Zuckerberg's share 12 billion. Unfortunately, that is not how you determine the worth of an individual. That is market speculation, and as we have seen, market speculation doesn't always pan out. Goldman Sachs is betting that Facebook will be worth more than 50 billion in the near future, but that bet doesn't put any real money in Zuckerberg's bank account. Assuming that Zuckerberg's living costs are zero, and that he hasn't blown it all on houses and boats and hookers, his bank account has a maximum of about half a billion. That is how any normal person would determine wealth. To see how skewed this all is, and how dishonest, we can compare Zuckerberg to Steve Jobs. Forbes tells us that Jobs, the owner of Apple Computers, is worth 8.3 billion. Do you really believe that Zuckerberg is worth 61% more than Jobs, a man who has been producing and selling actual products
since 1976? I don't. What I believe is that Zuckerberg is being promoted with false numbers in order to get everyone to sign up to Facebook, so that they can be data-mined, wallet mined, and whipped with the legal pencils. I believe that Goldman Sachs was instructed to bet on Facebook, just for this purpose. Goldman Sachs has long been like a fourth branch of the government, and they have long been in bed with the CIA and the DoD and so on. Goldman Sachs has more ex-officers in the government than any other company. These appearances in the media by Zuckerberg are also paid for by the US Government. Zuckerberg appears on the AskMen lists, the TIME lists, the Forbes lists, and so on, care of the US Government.
He is a CIA creation. He now does nothing but get his picture taken. He produces nothing. He is not a genius. He is just a name and a face, another useful dupe of the powers that be. He may not even be able to keep his money. I think it is entirely possible that he is just a front, and doesn't even exist as a real financial entity. That is, it is entirely possible that he has nothing in his bank account, and that he exists solely at the discretion of the CIA. They give him a big house and some toys, to keep up the charade, and tell him to keep his mouth shut. Somewhat like the President.


http://mileswmathis.com/zuck.pdf
 
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