Am I being spied on through my phone?

[PredFan]

"All conspiracy theories are theories until proven."

I know that when I shop anywhere in the internet, that somehow Facebook then knows to throw adds at me about the very thing I searched Amazon for, or my search engine. It's not too hard to imagine how that would happen, and in my mind I don't really mind too much. I've found that waiting to purchase until all other options are presented to me, has saved me money.

However...

More and more I am beginning to get the conviction that my phone is also listening. And I know I'm not alone here. there are examples, things that happened to me that made me say "Woah!" a number of times. I can't remember the details now but I remember thinking that my phone had to be listening.

But something just happened and I decided to create this thread before I forgot the details.

On my birthday a couple of weeks ago, my oldest daughter and her husband took me to a fancy restaurant for dinner. I saw on the menu, a Tomahawk steak. I mentioned at dinner how impressed I was by that cut and also the Cowboy cut steak. I ordered it, a server brought it to the table on a cart and carved it up for me with great fanfare. we took a video of it and posted it on Facebook. After that when I was at worked I talked about the steak on several occasions, and I told family and friends that I was going to talk to my butcher about having him cut me one. Not once did I look up Tomahawk Steaks on Facebook or in a search engine. I didn't need to, I know what it is and I have a butcher who knows so why would I?

You guessed it, my Facebook feed is frequently giving me ads for Tomahawk steaks and places where I can get one or have one delivered. Again, this has happened to me before, but I have forgotten the details.

I don't know how to turn off the microphone on my phone, and I'm not sure if I want to. I use talk to text a lot. Now, I'm not more computer savvy than the average person, these things I have to try to explain to myself without benefit of that knowledge, but it seems anything is possible with technology these days.

It's not going to take too much for me to go down this conspiracy theory road, I already REFUSE to have smart devices, other than phones, in my home. I heard of a computer engineer who recently said "I'm just going to put this put there: I don't have any smart devices in my home."

This is interesting. I would think it would be related to your video you posted on facebook, not your phone. Though if you have a battery in your cell phone, yes, you are a walking GPS and also can be heard if someone wanted to listen to you. Turning off the mic would require you to remove the battery when not in use.

Back to the video. I can only throw the ideas out there, I don't know much about Facebook or how they operate, I do know a bit about Machine Learning/Neural Networks due to my personal interest in the subject, so I give what I believe is technically possible. Take this with a grain of salt, the subject matter is interesting to me.

My very first assumption would go to something you typed when posting the video in Facebook. So "here's a video of me eating a Tomahawk Steak on my birthday". Bam. Text pasted into FB, ad to follow. This to me seems far more probable than your phone listening and sending ads (is your phone number even connected to your FB account?).

To go down the conspiracy path, Facebook might use some algorithm that identified you speaking in the video about the Tomahawk steak, or, this would be a stretch; some parameter used by Facebook picked up a frame in the video by Facebook that identified that steak very specifically. Both of these are stretches as I'm not even sure Facebook is allowed to do this based on the T&C's I can only throw the idea out there. I'm certain it is technically possible, though I don't think it would be a cheap implementation nor cost effective with so many on their network.

Is it possible one of your Friended Facebook people watched your video, shared it, whatever, and THEY searched for such steaks after (or before) watching the video, and their system picked up the association between them and their viewing of the video on your page and thus, they sent the ad to you? Again, I just throw out possibilities out there, I don't know how their site works, I'm quite sure such association ads are possible in some form or another.

Machine Learning is extremely advanced and constantly progressing, becoming more accurate, even sublime. For instance, Netflix used an algorithm that picked up where viewers were pausing videos, skipping scenes, re-watching episodes etc for their series House of Cards and they used the collected data to literally write the script to cater to their audiences tastes in future episodes. The future of Machine Learning, taking what viewers tell them they like, don't like, really like, and developing future storylines that feed that interest.

Understood and I have no really solid argument except that that seems to be a lot of "ifs", "maybes" and "possiblies".

 

[luchitociencia]

Your "ifs", "maybes" and "possiblies", are well founded.

Just avoid a few things, like never answering scam calls. You don't know the origin of the caller or is an unknown number for you, you better block that number.

If the suspicious unknown caller leaves a voice message, never, remember, never opened. If you do so and the message is just "silence", then it's late for you to do something. You just have downloaded their spy program on your phone. Such is located now in the hard drive.

Their program is mostly for marketing, like your phone will be a target, an easy target for different companies. You are online and the page is filled with propaganda that you must close all the time. It can be a program to hear what you say, and worst if they can reach your cameras. Same scenario observed with smart TVs.

Same companies which sold you the PC, phone, laptop, same companies which can spy on you all the time.

You see, the internet is a TWO WAY communication.

In older computers, you were able to see how many bytes you were receiving and how many bytes you were sending all the time you were online. Such box with that information is not on the bottom of the new computers screen anymore.

This means that your computer is continually sending and receiving information. Mostly what your computer sends is its ID which is your ID as well. However, if the company that sends the "updates" to your computer, decides also to pull information from your computer, then there is nothing you can do to stop that.

So, they can be installing updates and at the same time pulling information from your folders, like documents, photos, videos, favorites, and more.

If they are doing it right now, who knows, but surely they can do it if they want to.

If you want to have your information secured, then transfer it to a computer or laptop never connected online. If the lap top or computer have WiFi, then physically disconnect the WiFi antenna. This is the only way to disable WiFi, because it can be turned On from "the other side" if you just turned it Off by clicking a key. (the turning Off of computers by others was possible since the 90's. In a forum like this, a participant became very freaky after her computer was turned Off by the other guy online. The other guy was so piss off with her that he told her he is going to put her out of the discussion, and he is going to turn Off her computer, and he did it.)

We, the others in the discussion, laughed, but since then I avoided discussing with that guy... he was trouble... big trouble...