this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2024
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Because people's (presumed private) conversations on Messenger are not the same thing as things people post publicly.
Personally, I would never install that malware on my phone. But if you even have FB Messenger installed on your device, chances are that it's constantly sending your data to Facebook. Go take a look at what permissions it "needs."
We can see what it's sending to facebook though, and it's not constant. There's a bunch that it does send and receive, but this isn't hypothetical speculation, like, we can just see that it's not using your microphone for that, or sending anything like audio data. You can check this yourself, wireshark is free and packet specifications are available.
I get that, but it just happens far too often to be coincidence.
I'm not going to claim to know how, but it's naive to take the word of corporations when we have so much circumstantial evidence that shows these firms are targeting people with ads for things that they had never shown interest in, but happened to mention once in the presence of a device with a microphone and internet connection. There have been people who have tested this, and have gotten results that indicate that this just cannot be a coincidence. It has happened to me personally on several occasions (before I started keeping my mic off at the OS level, hasn't happened since).
I've been around long enough to know that, just because the general public doesn't know how some proprietary tech that corporations spend billions on R&D for might work, doesn't mean it's impossible. People have come up with insane shit, and that's just the stuff that people have voluntarily (usually) disclosed. God knows what kind of proprietary shit is out there that we have no awareness of.
I mean, for fuck sake, you can now steal a person's password by listening to their keystrokes:
https://www.tomsguide.com/news/the-sound-your-keystrokes-make-is-enough-for-ai-to-steal-them-how-to-stay-safe
Not to mention the fact that the NSA likely has back doors in every major piece of software and hardware in the US...
I know that stuff isn't directly related, but the point is that these things always seem impossible, until it gets leaked that it's been possible for years now.