I feel this comment lacks some nuance. Someone who didn’t read the article might think microphones were involved, or that Meta recorded any conversations, which they didn’t.
What has actually happened: The Flo app, as part of onboarding, asks the user about their goal for using the app, with possible choices being “I am pregnant” and similar sensitive info. They are using Meta’s analytics SDK for tracking what users do in the app, and they included an event for when a user selects the goal. All these events go to their analytics dashboard, which lives on Meta’s servers. Flo promised they are not sharing this information with third parties, but they clearly do. So in the end, information about someone being pregnant ended up on Meta’s servers. Meta later learned that this data is sent their way, and incorporanted it for their own use for advertising.
Both Flo and Meta are clearly guilty here. But no eavesdropping occured here, “just” the usual event tracking of which radio button a user selected when installing the app. I.e. no conversation was recorded by anyone, which is what someone may picture seeing the word “eavesdropping”. Which doesn’t make this any better of course.
What I’m trying to get to is this:
they were found guilty of fucking eavesdropping. I can’t wait to see people defending this as not being true for advertising.
This story is once again an example showing that your devices don’t need to listen to your conversations, and aren’t eavesdropping on you. Because all the apps you use are already tracking everything you do, and eavesdropping is not necessary.
ganymede@lemmy.ml 2 days ago
don’t be silly. i know that’s IMPOSISBLE because i read a headline from a big-tech-sponsored publication which said they can’t do that (even though the article - which i didn’t actually read - says they can)