More misplaced paranoia
There's a little kerfuffle about Facebook using its apps on portable cellular devices to listen for keywords when you're not intending to speak into the Facebook universe. One professor of Mass Communications said that she had done an experiment, but it didn't prove anything. She obviously doesn't understand constants and variables. She talked to her phone about a couple of subjects, then noticed those subjects popping up in her incoming feed. Obvious problem with the experiment: she was talking about constants. Subjects that are already part of her dossier, things that she mentions often.

It shouldn't be hard to run a better experiment, by randomly picking subjects you know nothing about. Look up stuff in a paper dictionary offline, find something obscure that you've never seen before, then read it to the phone. I don't have a portable cellular device, so I'll try a similar experiment in text mode by mentioning the first branded non-computer object I see, which is a box of Diamond "Greenlight" wooden matches. They work very well! I like them! I will buy more! I can verify (via my offline blog archive) that I've never mentioned these in the blog before. I won't be surprised to see a popup ad very soon, because I've seen this happen several times. [A few hours later: No exact ads for the product, but two ads for other stuff (NHL and a credit union) that began with a big focused word: MATCH.]

More broadly this "paranoia" is misplaced both ways.

On one side you can't be paranoid at all. Web services are hugely expensive. You get the services with zero MONEY cost because you're a product instead of a customer. That's the deal. Nothing secret about it. When you're a product you have to perform according to spec. Part of your specified performance is giving the web service hints about your interests and preferences so the web service can pay for itself with advertising. If the web service wants to pick up those hints when you're not "officially" talking to it, you can't complain.

On the other side, you should be far more paranoid than you already are. You must assume that every measurable aspect of your existence is being recorded at all times, because that's the WHOLE FUCKING POINT of smartphones. Again no mystery. Snowden didn't reveal anything that wasn't already known or assumable.

  ¶ 12:53 AM