My friend took his daughter to Macy's in NYC

ragnarz

Weaksauce
Joined
Feb 22, 2006
Messages
107
with his brand new IPhone 8 in his pocket. She made him try some cologne. By the time they got on the train to head home he had received a text from the cologne vendor and a facebook post.

His phone was in his pocket the whole time, locked. He asked me about it.

I theorize that there was some Bluetooth device at the vendor specific counter that talked to his phone, extracted information and submitted it to some marketing app.

Wondering if anyone knows more.

Thanks
 
Use faceberg and the apps which monitor voice, leave BT running 24/7.
Complain about privacy.

Quite hilarious, I hope this happens more, perhaps it'll make more people realize what they give away each day.
 
It's possible Facebook or twitter app was geolocating. I highly highly doubt that Apple directly was selling his location to advertisers if that is the concern.

At my work we have these little buggers everywhere, that supposedly can track phone locations (for good purposes of course :ROFLMAO: ). Aruba Beacons.....have them about every 20 feet. No idea what they are using them for in a administrative office environment. Charge them with USB and they last for a year.


OrlandoAirport_1200.png
 
they probably have some Bluetooth beacons and use the metadata from that with other info the advertisers have
 
I’m going to call his story bullshit. There are too many safeguards and warning messages put in IOS for this to happen. Tell him to send you a screen shot of the text message and Facebook post.
 
I’m going to call his story bullshit. There are too many safeguards and warning messages put in IOS for this to happen. Tell him to send you a screen shot of the text message and Facebook post.

Me too. Not only is it not technologically feasible in current iOS, that kind of direct targeting is very illegal under present US regulations.
 
Me too. Not only is it not technologically feasible in current iOS, that kind of direct targeting is very illegal under present US regulations.

Illegal how? 99% of people click though ToS and allow permissions without even asking "why is that needed?"

I don't understand how everyone is saying this is so illegal or technologically impossible. It's actually not that hard and is all enabled by what's lumped together as "big data." Some folks have mentioned bluetooth beacons, but there's also wifi and ultrasonic. Take an app like facebook or messenger which can pick up any of these numerous inputs (that you willingly approved resource access to), aggregate it with your profile, and performing a task such as sending a facebook message or targeted ad on a wall is cake. Hell, it doesn't even need to be the phone itself reporting the data- that "free wifi" accesspoint that your phone picked up now has your wireless MAC, which was likely reported by some app at some point and linked to "you" and again, same end result.
 
I remember reading about those things years ago and this is exactly what they were going to be used for. I keep Bluetooth on because of my watch, and I forget to turn off my WiFi most of the time. I don't have any social media apps installed on my phone so it wouldn't be able to extract that data. I do know the Kohls app will blow up your phone like a crazy ex if you allow location and you're in one of their stores.
 
with his brand new IPhone 8 in his pocket. She made him try some cologne. By the time they got on the train to head home he had received a text from the cologne vendor and a facebook post.

His phone was in his pocket the whole time, locked. He asked me about it.

I theorize that there was some Bluetooth device at the vendor specific counter that talked to his phone, extracted information and submitted it to some marketing app.

Wondering if anyone knows more.

Thanks

Turn facebook background app refresh off along with god knows whatever else he is running on there.


You can't extract this information from bluetooth on ios.. android maybe, but not ios.
 
Illegal how? 99% of people click though ToS and allow permissions without even asking "why is that needed?"

I don't understand how everyone is saying this is so illegal or technologically impossible. It's actually not that hard and is all enabled by what's lumped together as "big data." Some folks have mentioned bluetooth beacons, but there's also wifi and ultrasonic. Take an app like facebook or messenger which can pick up any of these numerous inputs (that you willingly approved resource access to), aggregate it with your profile, and performing a task such as sending a facebook message or targeted ad on a wall is cake. Hell, it doesn't even need to be the phone itself reporting the data- that "free wifi" accesspoint that your phone picked up now has your wireless MAC, which was likely reported by some app at some point and linked to "you" and again, same end result.

Illegal as in against United States law and/or advertising regulations. Companies are allowed to lump customers together and target them as a group, but not to target customers directly. In other words: they are not targeting you, they are targeting you and thousands of other similar people.
 
Illegal as in against United States law and/or advertising regulations. Companies are allowed to lump customers together and target them as a group, but not to target customers directly. In other words: they are not targeting you, they are targeting you and thousands of other similar people.

I would love to read the law you’re claiming exists since so much of advertising now is individualized and directly targeted.
 
Not BS. My wife has a new iphone X. We were in Tampa, away from home talking with our friends about a particular local Indian restaurant. The second she opens up the phone to check something--first ad is for that restaurant. It happened a second time and she did some searches. Apparently Siri is listening all the time so it can know when you're calling it. But in the meantime, it is also processing everything it hears. And those Google home thingies and Alexas probably do the exact same thing. Congrats USA, you are 100% voluntarily under surveillance, and you tell big brother about all your likes and friends and activities too on fb--good job!
 
Not BS. My wife has a new iphone X. We were in Tampa, away from home talking with our friends about a particular local Indian restaurant. The second she opens up the phone to check something--first ad is for that restaurant. It happened a second time and she did some searches. Apparently Siri is listening all the time so it can know when you're calling it. But in the meantime, it is also processing everything it hears. And those Google home thingies and Alexas probably do the exact same thing. Congrats USA, you are 100% voluntarily under surveillance, and you tell big brother about all your likes and friends and activities too on fb--good job!

Siri isn’t listening all the time, your family needs to stop being stupid and allowing every app to use Location Services and Background App Refresh.

Also your wife’s friend possibly looked up the restaurant on her phone, then the ad network showed the ad to your wife. And I bet your wife saw the ad on Facebook...
 
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Siri isn’t listening all the time, your family needs to stop being stupid and allowing every app to use Location Services and Background App Refresh.

Also your wife’s friend possibly looked up the restaurant on her phone, then the ad network showed the ad to your wife. And I bet your wife saw the ad on Facebook...
Nobody here is stupid so you better watch your tone.

I'm very careful about what applications can do, but a lot of applications are designed so that they don't work without full access. iphone users have a higher level of trust of their devices (I don't have an iphone), so they probably don't look at it as much, but there's nothing you can really do even if they did. It's like reading the terms of service or a legal document of something that's a necessity and disagreeing with a clause or two--what are you going to do? Not buy that house/car/phone?

As previously posted, the technology to do this is here and here to stay. And the laws that are supposed to prevent this type of thing are not being enforced for whatever reason.

Sure our friends may have looked up the restaurant and then via fb the connection was somehow made. But there was another instance of this type of thing, the details of which I cannot recall atm, that is beyond a shadow of a doubt that this is going on. I won't believe this sort of thing unless I've seen it for myself and can't explain it otherwise. The OP's post here just reinforces what I already had discovered, and it's real.
 
Siri can't figure out when I give very clear, precise questions to it. How's it going to be in a purse or pocket and understand the name of an Indian restaurant?

I have seen Facebook get *extremely* creepy with figuring out "People you may know" based on very inconsequential passings of said people.
Not BS. My wife has a new iphone X. We were in Tampa, away from home talking with our friends about a particular local Indian restaurant. The second she opens up the phone to check something--first ad is for that restaurant.
I've never seen an iPhone spit out an ad upon waking it up. Is that an X-specific thing? I haven't seen any X I've handled do such a thing. I have a 7 so I dunno. Mine doesn't arbitrarily spit out ads for things.
 
It doesn't.

You guys are doing a misread on what SamirD said. What happened was simply allowing Google or Yelp or whatever app/search engine you were using have location data.

Seeing an add from a business you’re standing next to is how it’s supposed to work. If you don’t like that behavior, you can simply block location based data to Google, Yelp, etc.

If it’s not that, then he’s referring to data from previous searches, or locations he’s previously been inside with location data on.

Now, how that is relevant to the OP is an entirely different story.

Edit: either that or I didn’t read fully the last few posts. Whatever. This is one of those things that isn’t worth having a discussion about because it’s going to devolve fast.
 
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happened to me a couple of months ago. Friend was over one night and we were talking about candies, and he told me about Reese's Crunch bar and how good they were.
The next day I see an ad on facebook for Reese's Crunch candy bars. I never searched for that candy either on any device, just talked about while we sat at my PC with my phone on the desk.

Apparently, the facebook app is listening to you 24/7 and flagging key words that are spoken.
I believe Android phones do this as well with Google.
 
Apparently, the facebook app is listening to you 24/7 and flagging key words that are spoken.
I believe Android phones do this as well with Google.
The Facebook App on my iPhone 7 has absolutely never done anything even remotely like this. The only ads in my feed are for stuff like.. android phones (don't care), Hondas (don't care), and a "Facebook Watch" show with Mike Rowe in it (never watched any of his stuff). /shrug.

I could imagine if you're with someone and they look up pages in Facebook, that Facebook could potentially want to hit you with an ad for that too.

If Facebook was holding the mic open 24/7, your battery life would be way less than it is.
 
The Facebook App on my iPhone 7 has absolutely never done anything even remotely like this. The only ads in my feed are for stuff like.. android phones (don't care), Hondas (don't care), and a "Facebook Watch" show with Mike Rowe in it (never watched any of his stuff). /shrug.

I could imagine if you're with someone and they look up pages in Facebook, that Facebook could potentially want to hit you with an ad for that too.

If Facebook was holding the mic open 24/7, your battery life would be way less than it is.

The mic is open 24/7 already, I can just say "Hey Siri" and my phone responds so it's listening all the time.
 
The mic is open 24/7 already, I can just say "Hey Siri" and my phone responds so it's listening all the time.
It's less processor intensive to listen for "Hey Siri" then it is to listen for every other conceivable word in every language ever used by mankind.
 
It's less processor intensive to listen for "Hey Siri" then it is to listen for every other conceivable word in every language ever used by mankind.
What are you talking about, the mic is listening all the time, the phone processes every thing it hears.
 
You would have to give explicit access to your microphone to the Facebook app. Siri doesn't care what kind of candy you like, Apple isn't a marketing company. They have nothing to gain. Google and Facebook on the other hand make huge majorities of their capital for ads. Google is an advertising company first and foremost. Everything they come out with or release is to better improve the way they can deliver ads to you.

If you want to see first hand what apps are using the mic, go to Settings -> Privacy -> Speech Recognition. All of the apps that use that feature are listed here. You can also see what apps you tapped to give access to your mic, under the mic setting of privacy. If you want to get more granular than that you can go into the advertising portion of that to see if you even accidentally opted to be in any social media data collection.
 
You would have to give explicit access to your microphone to the Facebook app. Siri doesn't care what kind of candy you like, Apple isn't a marketing company. They have nothing to gain. Google and Facebook on the other hand make huge majorities of their capital for ads. Google is an advertising company first and foremost. Everything they come out with or release is to better improve the way they can deliver ads to you.

If you want to see first hand what apps are using the mic, go to Settings -> Privacy -> Speech Recognition. All of the apps that use that feature are listed here. You can also see what apps you tapped to give access to your mic, under the mic setting of privacy. If you want to get more granular than that you can go into the advertising portion of that to see if you even accidentally opted to be in any social media data collection.

there is nothing in speech recognition, but there are a lot of apps that access my mic.
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In my humble opinion, nothing on my phone ever needs to access my mic. For any reason.
 
In my humble opinion, nothing on my phone ever needs to access my mic. For any reason.

I basically don't give access to any app that wants my mic either, unless the entire app is a mic based app (like say Shazam).
Seriously, there is literally no reason that Facebook needs access to my mic.
 
I basically don't give access to any app that wants my mic either, unless the entire app is a mic based app (like say Shazam).
Seriously, there is literally no reason that Facebook needs access to my mic.
If you record video through the app or do a facebook live broadcast, it needs access to the mic otherwise there will be no sound.
 
If you record video through the app or do a facebook live broadcast, it needs access to the mic otherwise there will be no sound.

I understand. None of those things are necessary to me. And clearly leave too many loop holes open for things I don’t want.

If I ever did want to use them, I’d renenable the mic for just the period of time of the FB live, then immediately deauthorize it.

I control the mic, camera, and location settings like it’s my job.

It’s sad that I have to be so cynical. But I don’t trust any of these corporations as far as I can throw them. They know we don’t have the time or patience to read their terms of service. So in my mind it’s the only reasonable way of asserting control over what they get. And for precisely how much time.
 
Kinda makes me glad to still use a flip phone.... (I barely get cellular service outside the house, so zero reason for me to have a smartphone)

The creepy part of this all is not the facebook post or any ads like that... it's the text message sent to the guy's phone that is alarming. In this day an age I believe that it could happen, because at the end of the day, no one cares about privacy. We as people, consumers, do... and the individual people at companies might, but the company as a whole generally won't care since it pads their bottom end. If it keeps them in the green at the end of the year, they'll do whatever and see to whomever. :(
 
Can I hop in to correct some horrendous misinformation here?

SIRI IS NOT TRANSMITTING EVERYTHING YOU SAY. The same is true for Google Assistant, Alexa, and Cortana.

This stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of how voice recognition systems work: people assume that there has to be an active, non-stop recording for a device to wake up with a voice command. In truth, your device is completely oblivious to what's being said until you use that command. Devices typically have a chip or subsystem component that sits around waiting until it hears the audio pattern associated with your hotword, like "hey Siri" or "OK Google." That chip wakes up your device, and then your device starts interpreting what you're saying (and then for only as long as the command phase is active). As was mentioned earlier, your battery life would be in the pits if your phone was really a 24/7 open mic -- it'd never have a chance to sleep.

I'm also skeptical of claims about Facebook, since that's practically an urban legend (including the video Tekara posted above). Facebook has denied it, anyway. I would put more credit into Bluetooth beacons piecing together data, but they still shouldn't have your phone number unless you've shared it publicly.

Part of the problem is that these claims about voice recognition stem from anecdotes, often from people who are only semi-literate in tech. That friend swears up and down that Apple/Amazon/Google/Facebook is totally spying on them, and because you're more likely to trust a friend than not, you don't question their conclusion no matter how little they understand. They may say it was a text message when it was really a notification from an app they'd authorized for collecting data, or they may conveniently forget that they'd been searching for (or posting about) that restaurant the night before. We need objective tests for this supposed data gathering, but all we get are selectively remembered stories.
 
I doubt Google or Apple bother as they have solid revenue streams aside from advertising.

Facebook though. . . They only survive via ads, even more so, mobile ads:
https://www.statista.com/chart/2496/facebook-revenue-by-segment/ said:
Mobile advertising has accounted for more than 90 percent of Facebook’s revenue growth ever since and currently drives 88 percent of the company's total revenue.

Not saying they do or don't, but there's plenty to be skeptical over. Can't possibly imagine a major company would ever want to hide or deny their practices, especially when it's the primary source of money :D.
 
I doubt Google or Apple bother as they have solid revenue streams aside from advertising.

Google is an advertising company. Everything they do, everything they develop, every piece of hardware they work with is to make it easier to use their services so they can get more info.
 
My current Facebook ads:

"Clusterfest"
"horbito.com"
"Open networking users group"
A dice.com ad for an H1B job posting 3000 miles away (I'm a US citizen)
"DirecTV Now"

None of this is relevant to me in any way.
 
now this is really strange. A friend was over last night and we were watching a making of video and was wondering what lens was on the Canon camera.
I said it wasn't an L lens since the red ring is near the end of the lens and not near the body.
Didn't search for any lenses or Canon or anything related to video or photography.
Just now, this pops up on my Facebook feed, the brand of lenses that was in the video we watched (which was played from my hard drive as I had saved it weeks ago).

lenses.jpg
 
What are you talking about, the mic is listening all the time, the phone processes every thing it hears.
This is the truth that no one will admit to for whatever reason. Big brother IS watching (listening).
Apple isn't a marketing company. They have nothing to gain.
This is the Information Age. And like all ages that preceded it like the Iron Age, Industrial Age, etc, controlling the age was about controlling the resource in that age, whether it was iron or industries. Guess what everyone is clamoring over right now? If someone had absolute and total information on everyone on the planet, they effectively could rule the world in a way never before seen in history, exploiting each person they rule to the maximum. And IT companies are uniquely positioned to take advantage of this, especially with the large amount of access to specifically personal information--that seems to be increasing over the years btw.
Can I hop in to correct some horrendous misinformation here?

SIRI IS NOT TRANSMITTING EVERYTHING YOU SAY. The same is true for Google Assistant, Alexa, and Cortana.

This stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of how voice recognition systems work: people assume that there has to be an active, non-stop recording for a device to wake up with a voice command. In truth, your device is completely oblivious to what's being said until you use that command. Devices typically have a chip or subsystem component that sits around waiting until it hears the audio pattern associated with your hotword, like "hey Siri" or "OK Google." That chip wakes up your device, and then your device starts interpreting what you're saying (and then for only as long as the command phase is active). As was mentioned earlier, your battery life would be in the pits if your phone was really a 24/7 open mic -- it'd never have a chance to sleep.

I'm also skeptical of claims about Facebook, since that's practically an urban legend (including the video Tekara posted above). Facebook has denied it, anyway. I would put more credit into Bluetooth beacons piecing together data, but they still shouldn't have your phone number unless you've shared it publicly.

Part of the problem is that these claims about voice recognition stem from anecdotes, often from people who are only semi-literate in tech. That friend swears up and down that Apple/Amazon/Google/Facebook is totally spying on them, and because you're more likely to trust a friend than not, you don't question their conclusion no matter how little they understand. They may say it was a text message when it was really a notification from an app they'd authorized for collecting data, or they may conveniently forget that they'd been searching for (or posting about) that restaurant the night before. We need objective tests for this supposed data gathering, but all we get are selectively remembered stories.
This may be the way it should work, but it is not. The information is being gathered for sure and I'm guessing the technicalities of how are as closely guarded as military secrets.

I'm very reluctant to believe almost anything until I've seen it with my own eyes and even after extensive research have failed to determine a logical conclusion that would prove otherwise. This is one of those situations. We have a google home mini given to us as a gift sitting still in the shrinkwrap for this exact reason. My wife and I have unanimously agreed not to even open it. (But we haven't figured out how not to let the friends find out we don't use it. :D)
now this is really strange. A friend was over last night and we were watching a making of video and was wondering what lens was on the Canon camera.
I said it wasn't an L lens since the red ring is near the end of the lens and not near the body.
Didn't search for any lenses or Canon or anything related to video or photography.
Just now, this pops up on my Facebook feed, the brand of lenses that was in the video we watched (which was played from my hard drive as I had saved it weeks ago).

View attachment 69825
And if the one or two posts earlier in this thread were a fluke, why would this continue to happen? Big brother is watching for sure.
 
This may be the way it should work, but it is not. The information is being gathered for sure and I'm guessing the technicalities of how are as closely guarded as military secrets.

I'm very reluctant to believe almost anything until I've seen it with my own eyes and even after extensive research have failed to determine a logical conclusion that would prove otherwise. This is one of those situations. We have a google home mini given to us as a gift sitting still in the shrinkwrap for this exact reason. My wife and I have unanimously agreed not to even open it. (But we haven't figured out how not to let the friends find out we don't use it. :D)

Only it is the way things work. I wasn't saying what I did out of speculation or wishful thinking; it's because I've had to understand how voice assistants actually behave for the sake of my job.

You want to claim that voice assistants are recording what you say 24/7? Provide hard evidence. Anecdotes, hunches and suspicions don't count. We're too often more willing to trust our gut responses over rational, reliable proof, and I haven't seen anything other than gut responses so far.
 
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everything with a mic/camera and internet access is listening/watching and working together to do this. youre not paranoid, its actually happening.
 
Only it is the way things work. I wasn't saying what I did out of speculation or wishful thinking; it's because I've had to understand how voice assistants actually behave for the sake of my job.

You want to claim that voice assistants are recording what you say 24/7? Provide hard evidence. Anecdotes, hunches and suspicions don't count. We're too often more willing to trust our gut responses over rational, reliable proof, and I haven't seen anything other than gut responses so far.
Like I said, it's like saying 'show me the detailed plans for a nuclear bomb'--very few people on this planet will have this secret information.

There are ways to pack information into the second file streams on ntfs that's never seen normally, there are ways to run things on intel processers on the hardware level without anyone noticing. It goes fathom that the technology is there to monitor and transmit all this information, and unless you're at the very pinnacle of the technology we're discussing and can break all security clearances, nda, gag-orders, etc. that you've had to execute to prove that this technology doesn't exist and is in use, I think it's the other way around--the mics are guilty until proven innocent. At least that's how I'm going to view it as long as evidence that I personally have seen doesn't 'add up' with what I know.
 
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