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  1. #1
    Special at 11:30 or w/e
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    Your Privacy and how you have none

    Didn't see a thread pertaining to this as a broad subject except the NSA one and that's over a year old. I've been looking at a VPN and trying to do more research (made a brief thread in Tech). I don't believe Big Brother is out to get me, but it's no ones business what I do every second of the day online or in person.

    I work in insurance sales for one of the largest companies in the US, but I work in an office of four at the local level. My boss is slightly paranoid about Corporate Big Brother and personal information is a huge topic for us. We heard possibilities that US insurance companies are starting to buy peoples information from various outlets and use it as a way to factor your insurance score which creates your rate.

    I took a call today from a guy that has a 2017 Camry. We rate it for low miles because he told us he drives less than X-miles per year. Well, he gets a letter from corporate saying he's driving more than the discount allows and will be charged as such. Guy says he hasn't owned the car for even a year and how would we know? Said he even just had is first service done at the Toyota dealership.

    While we have no evidence, more than likely our company buys information from car dealers and large shops like Belle Tire where they record that information. To us that is quite alarming as your info at your car dealer isn't even safe.

    Any other stories or cases where personal info you think isn't being sold or given out is?

  2. #2

    Was under the impression stuff like car mileage, service dates, and accident history were typically logged for a mix of things like carfax or just general consumer awareness if you know to look for it when buying a car (secondhand). So, I'm not really sure I'd call that a severe breach of privacy.

    Nonetheless, it is true that pretty much anything and everything can and will be sold about us if some site or other service deems it appropriate, and I'd anticipate that to get much worse if the recent ruling on net neutrality doesn't get repealed. Things like VPNs may also wind up on the chopping block given their frequent use for illicit activities. :/

  3. #3
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    Go through all of your apps and deny camera and mic functionality.

    I know it's a joke to a lot of people, but Facebook honestly does keep your mic on to listen to what you talk about in order to parse words out for targeted ads. There were a few times where my wife and i would casually mention something in the morning and there would be an ad for it when I checked FB in the office. I turned off FB's permission to use my mic and suddenly my targeted ads are limited to stuff I browse via google searches my battery life also got way better immediately.

    NoScript just added Cross Site Server Request blocking also and it's ridiculous how much normal browsing feeds info to FB and Google. The largest FB feeder I've come across is Imgur.

  4. #4
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    About VPN's, the reason I haven't pulled the trigger is 1) About the only illicit thing I do online for VPN use is downloading obscure movies such as say Sympathy for Lady Vengeance where it's very hard to find and/or shit I'm just not going to pay for and 2) The monthly charge is either high or these "lifetime services for $30" seems sketchy.

    Here is the thing about the difference between getting a Carfax and your insurance company potentially using that information to configure what you should pay. The former is using the service records so a secondhand buyer knows how many accidents, maintenance, etc it's had. There is no name attached and nothing regarding money besides the initial cost of the Carfax. The latter is using that personal information as a tool to create a score that will stick with your DL # and/or SSN (if they have it) and they will use that score to determine what you pay.

    My example is regarding miles driven and low mileage discount. Our office uses this sort of like, where there is smoke there is fire. How would corporate know he's potentially driving over the mileage for the discount? This leads us to think what other things they could use to determine rate. I've wrote business for more than 30 auto insurance companies and when asking anyone corporate about how rate is figured it turns into NOPE NOPE NOPE because they know we'll try to help people manage rate. For all we know, if insurance companies can get info regarding miles, they probably have info on say how many times the car has had brakes replaced. They could then say the person is potentially a bad driver because of that thus making their insurance score lower and rate higher. Who would know that's what they're doing and who would stop them?

  5. #5
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    I run a pihole at home, just today 809 blocked queries.
    Your network leaks a ton of data ( hi Palantir ).

  6. #6
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    Quote Originally Posted by Ragnus View Post
    Go through all of your apps and deny camera and mic functionality.

    I know it's a joke to a lot of people, but Facebook honestly does keep your mic on to listen to what you talk about in order to parse words out for targeted ads. There were a few times where my wife and i would casually mention something in the morning and there would be an ad for it when I checked FB in the office. I turned off FB's permission to use my mic and suddenly my targeted ads are limited to stuff I browse via google searches my battery life also got way better immediately.

    NoScript just added Cross Site Server Request blocking also and it's ridiculous how much normal browsing feeds info to FB and Google. The largest FB feeder I've come across is Imgur.
    I remember seeing a post about this on reddit a few months ago. A couple who doesn't and had never owned cats spent a day within earshot of their phones discussing their cats and things the cats needed. Sure enough next day they were getting FB ads for cat food.

  7. #7
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    Conspiracy theories are fun, but...

    https://www.wired.com/story/facebook...ne-microphone/

  8. #8
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    I dunno, I've noticed times when my wife and I talked about things at home and we started seeing commercials for them.

    It's definitely reamed from your browser history. It doesn't necessarily have to "listen to everything".

    Always on? Perhaps not. It's ludicrous to think your phone isn't listening though. Otherwise it wouldn't know when to trigger a search or not a search.

  9. #9
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    Quote Originally Posted by Clash Perez View Post
    Conspiracy theories are fun, but...

    https://www.wired.com/story/facebook...ne-microphone/
    Pardon me if I am not reassured by the words of someone who likened facebook's ad-targeting to his child.

  10. #10
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    Quote Originally Posted by Clash Perez View Post
    Conspiracy theories are fun, but...

    https://www.wired.com/story/facebook...ne-microphone/
    That would imply that Facebook sends all the audio home. The app itself could listen in and pick out key words to phone home with, without even sending the audio, just a couple bytes of data.

  11. #11
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    Quote Originally Posted by NynJa View Post
    That would imply that Facebook sends all the audio home. The app itself could listen in and pick out key words to phone home with, without even sending the audio, just a couple bytes of data.
    Ding ding.

  12. #12
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    I found out that an email subscription service and selling data about your lyft rides to uber.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/24/t...lash-uber.html

    Happened earlier this year but hah.

  13. #13

    i know when i was talking to a ls member on ffxi about stuff i've had the same stuff show up as a suggested topic on youtube when i visited it next, even though i hadn't googled it or anything.

  14. #14
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    Obligatory "Jesus did you even read the article" reply post

  15. #15
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    Quote Originally Posted by Clash Perez View Post
    Obligatory "Jesus did you even read the article" reply post
    Did you? As Nynja pointed out, the author is putting a lot of assumptions as facts.

  16. #16
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    Quote Originally Posted by NynJa View Post
    That would imply that Facebook sends all the audio home. The app itself could listen in and pick out key words to phone home with, without even sending the audio, just a couple bytes of data.
    Spoiler: show
    Quote Originally Posted by Article
    Could the Facebook app do the same, listening only for specific keywords that trigger ads?

    Not exactly. The Facebook targeting system had something like a million targetable keywords when I left, and it's likely held steady or increased slightly. But unlike the Amazon Echo, which listens for just one of four trigger words, millions or perhaps billions of words and phrases could land you in a Facebook targeting segment.

    For example, saying 'golf,' 'Tiger Woods,' 'The Masters,' or 'Augusta National Golf Course' all should land you in the 'Golf' targeting segment, and your phone would need to detect each and every one. Because it has no specific trigger word for Facebook, your phone would need to listen for every targetable keyword. That means the speech-to-text translation code could only run on your phone itself, a taxing demand even for the beefy cloud servers that usually handle those tasks.

    You could maybe hack around the problem by limiting the keyword list, or tightening the mapping from spoken word to targeting keyword to reduce the search space (only the literal word 'golf' instead of 'Tiger Woods'), but it's still daunting to do on every smartphone in existence, from slow, older phones to fast flagships like the iPhone X. Targeting a specific type of phone would ease that burden somewhat, but any significant scale presents an extraordinary challenge.

    Furthermore, as in our naive approach above, this would be eminently noticeable as a performance degradation on your phone, since the background inference process would soon eat all your phone's CPU and battery, something you could easily check via the device's monitoring tools. That could change as smartphones get more powerful, and mobile developers more clever at running real computation in situ, but Facebook's targeting engine won't be running on your phone anytime soon.


    His argument is that any program that processes audio in real time to perform keyword matching would either require noticeable system resource drain, or be of limited usefulness.

    Though perhaps Facebook is going hard after that $45m annual internet ad spending for pet-related items and services, the mobile-specific portion of which is less than 1/10 of 1% of the $36B mobile ad spending.


    https://www.statista.com/statistics/...-us-by-medium/

    http://www.businessinsider.com/onlin...he-most-2017-4

  17. #17
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    seconded

    It is very unlikely that Facebook is exporting a heretofore unknown voice recognition software to your phone and executing it there. Even stuff like Amazon Echo, Google Home, and Siri send the audio over the internet to servers for recognition/processing. If Facebook managed to make a reliable version of voice recognition for mobile agnostic to device, that would be very surprising.

    It's not that they don't probably *want* to do that. It's that we aren't really there yet.

  18. #18

    I'm not going to give an opinion on whether they're doing it or not, but I disagree highly with the assertion it couldn't work.

    We've had reliable speech to text algorithims that ran on computers in the early 90s, the idea that phones couldn't run local Speech2Text is not a valid argument. Keep in mind my CS specialty is computational linguistics/NLP(extended to AI), so I speak with a lot more authority than that blogger.

    What the difference is, is the LOSSYness of the algorithims. Old 90s algorithims that ran on 50mz CPUs could reliably achieve 90-95% accuracy with no training. We've spent the last 20 years pushing that 95% to 99.9999%(95% sounds like a lot, but for human recognition it's awful, for machine recognition however....), but for something as simple as pulling keywords from passive speech, this is a solved problem.

    You simply build a model that accepts a certain amount of loss, and in exchange you get a process that eats up basically no CPU time on a mid-range smartphone. This is 100% feasible, I could design this system today. You'd then send these tiny word salads over to the servers where they would presumably have an internal model for removing false positives to offset the lossyness of the phone's alogorithim, allowing you something that well not 99.9999%, hits enough points to be useful, and occasionally you get a handful of ads for pet ferrets that are false positives.

    There is no technological reason this isn't possible.

  19. #19
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    Hm. I guess that knowing you said ferret is almost as good as knowing you said "we should get a ferret." I still think it is very unlikely, though.

  20. #20
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    Psh pet ferrets are never a false positive

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