this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2024
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This keeps getting brought up and it's simply not true. No, your phone isn't listening to you, plenty of tests have been done. It could easily be traceable with higher CPU usage, higher battery usage, network usage and so on, but there is zero difference between having a conversation next to your phone or the phone being in a literal sound proofed room.
Meta data, people you spend time with, what you look up online, your age, your hobbies, your interests, ads you have recently seen, location data, .. there's so much about you online that it's easy to predict.
And sometimes you talk about things because everyone else is talking about them. You're not that special.
It can be a bit scary how much you can predict about a person by just using a few simple facts (sex, age, location, income, ..).
It's funny because we've done this exact testing with the Facebook application on iOS by leaving my friend's iPhone14 with the screen locked next to Telemundo (a Spanish only public television channel) for 24 hours. (Our primary language is Ukrainian)
The next day, all of their ads were in Spanish.
So I do think additional research is needed for certain, the polling rate might be not as granular as you mentioned, but intermittent anonymous data collection like "primary language" could very likely be done passively with minimal impact on battery life, and it may be permissions-based and operating system dependent.
There is a lot of misinformation on what Facebook is and isn't doing. And a lot of it is pushing 10 years old.
Facebook has long had features that detect exactly what you're describing. They aren't recording it, they are fingerprinting it. The target is any ads and music that is played but it could go beyond that.
This is fundamentally no different than the way a device is passively listening for the "hey, assistant" phrase which just matches a fingerprint.
Anyone who is simply looking for immediate data transfer when this occurs is a fool. There is absolutely no reason it cannot hold the list of known finger prints and add them to otherwise normal requests. The same for anyone looking for cpu spikes; these fingerprints are highly performant and it's not recording, it's matching so Facebook can deny all day that they don't record your conversation and it isn't a lie because it's the wrong accusation.
You make me (a skeptic) want to test this in a robust fashion.
Source some foreign-language content offline without carrying/using electronics… record/catalog the ads shown to factory reset Android & iOS devices… let the devices hear the foreign-language content played on an offline system… record the ads shown afterwards. Ensure no other electronics are present.
What else would be needed?
Done in a bulletproof fashion (probably can get some blinding in there too), it would be ProPublica/EFF’s story of the year, and congress would get in on it. Think it could be easily done for a few hundred bucks in about a week. (Thus I’m skeptical of course, such a low barrier to entry relative to the front-page newsworthiness of the scoop.)
It makes absolutely no sense for advertising to switch all advertising to Spanish from a single day of recording. This would mean they disregarded ALL of the meta data they had on them. Location, things they visited, pages they visited etc. I've been on vacation and spoken a different language for two weeks and it didn't change the language of my ads. It just makes no sense to do that from a single data point, when all else contradicts them being/speaking Spanish.
Nice try, I'm still going to wear my tinfoil
Just make sure that webcam has a piece of tape over it...
"My phone is listening, it knows what I want!"
*Uses social media, doesn't use ad-blockers, and clicks OK to share data with 1472 Trusted Data Partners to make the annoying popups go away*
For “Hey Google”, “Hey Alexa” or “Hey Siri” to work your phone/smart speaker has to be always listening
This is only partially true. Yes, it's listening for those keywords, but only for them. Sometimes that's even an extra chip in your phone, otherwise it would kill your battery in no time.
Which is one of the reasons you can't just customize the command to whatever you want to say.
And the thing is, even if you disable it, it's still listening. It just doesn't answer you.
Then how does Google figure out what music is playing in the background to display it on the lock screen?
I'm very happy to have GrapheneOS on my phone now.
I used to say the same thing, but now I have some serious test cases that are very, very, compelling.
As in: a subject never before broached verbally by me or my friend (or anyone I know, and I don't associate with many people), was discussed by me and my friend in the car, with exactly 2 phones in the car, one of which is de-googled (i.e. Runs a non-Google OS with no Google Play, etc).
Both of us receive ads for that subject the next day.
Mind, neither of us had even thought about that subject before, and it was something way out of left field for both of us - as in not at all related to anything in our lives, and was a complete "shower thought" moment for me.
I get there's a lot of predictive analysis out there, but you're talking predicting something for two people with vastly different lives (we're decades apart in age, for example, in very different fields).
And this ad had nothing to do with our common ground either.
I simply can't buy the predictive analysis on this one.
I've never used any of the usual social media nonsense (it always bothered me, the invasiveness was obvious - Lemmy is my first, and only perhaps a year ago and this particular event was 3 years ago), have zero social presence online - no photo storage, etc, have always kept things separated as much as I can (since the 90's, because we saw the data mining coming back then). And neither of us did any search for the subject, because there was no need - it was a throwaway kind of thought.
Yeah, so it's quite likely that you wouldn't have noticed the ad or thought about it if you didn't talk about it earlier.
The big question is why did this topic come up "out of nowhere"?
And there can be several reasons!
You unconsciously saw an ad for it (could even be a billboard while driving) and that's why you started to discuss this topic. If it's a new ad it now also pops up on your phone (as it's a marketing campaign) and you immediately recognize it because you've seen it before and discussed it
The ad campaign has been running for ages, but you never paid attention to it. Now that you discussed this topic with a friend you suddenly noticed the ad. Nothing changed ads wise, you just never paid attention to the topic
It's a popular topic in general, could be in the news, could be hip at the moment, for some reason you and your friend started to talk about it, where did it come from?
There's so many ways this can go. And if we go back to tracking: All it takes is for a friend of yours to later search something related and it's also hard tracked (and then linked back to you as you hung out with them). Which can be a double whammy. Your phone being "ungoogled" is also worthless if you use Google, Facebook, Instagram or whatever.
Ok. Why does Instagram demand microphone access to doomscroll?
https://slrpnk.net/post/12530482
I watched a Jet Li movie in Mandarin with subtitles (on DVD on my TV so not through the phone or any app), and suddenly my search autocomplete is filled with Chinese characters. Ads in Mandarin. Hmmm.
And just to be clear I don't know Mandarin and have no searches or activity related to that at all.
Was it a smart TV or a dumb monitor? Smart TVs share tracking data about everything.
How did you acquire the movie? Did you purchase it online? If not, did you visit a Chinese supermarket? Or did you purchase it at a large store and had a membership?
Did you borrow it from a Chinese movie aficionado and spend some time with (or rather around) them?
There are SO many variables to get data from. Everything is linked. Everything.
Played a DVD, with a separate DVD player, over HDMI. It would be shocking if they can track that back to your phone and/or gmail account which wasn't touched. Not logged into the TV, so it would be seeing if it's the same wifi, or going through another HDMI cable to the chromecast.
An old DVD probably bought at HMV before smart phones existed.
???? So the microphone would hear Chinese in that way instead? It's the same fucking thing.
The extent you're going through rather than accepting the microphone is listening is fucking astounding. Occams razor.
I agree with you, it's crazy people still believe this is happening. However the fact that they can collect so much data about you through other means that people believe they're spying on your directly is still pretty fuckin scary.
It's also noteworthy that listening to audio via phone microphones is terrible. Speech to text works like shit, and the expectation is that people need to speak as plainly as possible, and over a long period of manual adjustments will it get to a point where it's halfway usable.
Ever gotten a pocket dial from someone? Can you hear anything that even resembles speech over the rustling of fabric? Seems like a wild leap to assume that corpos are listening in on random audio, when the software designed around people specifically speaking plainly and clearly to their phone barely works at all.
Plenty of things to be concerned about with info privacy, but it's important to recognize the limitations of hardware.
Speech to voice has gotten extremely good by now, but the good stuff needs CPU power. Not something you'd run on your phone 24/7 without your demolishing your battery.
I made a joke using my name and minutes later my friend showed me a meme he go suggested to on Instagram that used my name as a punchline.
A few months ago at school my friends made some jokes about feet and stuff for feet showed up in their Instagram ads.
There are many occurrences of this happening if you allow Instagram to have the always access microphone permission.
Nah, that doesn't apply to today's devices.
There are millions upon millions of people using "Alexa", "OK Google", "Bixby" and "Hey Siri", and those services require the mic to be always listening.
That's how they work. And when they hear something, that data gets recorded to the company server to do what they like with it, including targeted ads and content.
And I would find it hard to believe that these corporations, with so many privacy-related lawsuits, aren't using these always-on voice assistants to further market to their users.
The phones have highly optimized functions to listen to keywords. That's the reason why you can't change "OK Google" to "OK Jarvis" or whatever you want. Your phone needs to do this locally without wasting battery.
Until the keywords get said the listening is extremely basic. As soon as you say the keywords then the full audio processing kicks in, often including sending what you say to a server.
Well, I'd argue that you can't change "OK Google" because that's a great form of advertising. I've even seen movies where they use "Hey Siri" or "Alexa" as a product placement.
For sure.
That doesn't mean they don't “accidentally” record completely irrelevant conversations.
And that also doesn't mean that what it does record isn't being aggregated so you can be marketed to.
There have been plenty of tests where CPU and network usage were monitored with one phone.
Once in a quiet soundproof room compared to sitting next to a conversation.
Zero difference.
Recording and parsing audio would kill your battery. And it's not necessary when most people freely provide their data when using Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, ..
There has been zero proof about illegal recording, even though it would be easy to find.
Perhaps we're misunderstanding something.
It's a fact that plenty of devices have assistant software running 24/7, with an open mic. We can agree that the key phrase is detected locally via some low-power chip or something similar.
I'm saying that these virtual assistants are capturing and saving recordings, even when they aren't explicit commands. Those recordings can then be used to further profile a user.
Mozilla even says that Amazon claims that they can delete recordings, but will continue to use data collected by the user from those recordings, despite that. This is a problem, IMO, and it can certainly explain many of these coincidences that people are witnessing.
Except that Amazon has had to pay out $25 million for keeping kid's recordings.
And the State of Texas has sued Google for illegally collecting voice-data.
California has also certified several class-action lawsuits against google for illegally recording and using conversations without consent.
Or that Apple was caught secretly recording voice conversations, even when the user opted-out.. Apple claimed this was a "bug". LOL
There are so many cases like this, that we know of. I can't imagine how many of these privacy nightmare we haven't been made aware of.
One is a bug, one is just a lawsuit that went nowhere, one is just an accusation (Google did pay a fine, but for geolocation tracking, not voice), the Amazon one is pretty bad, but again it's not for a phone!!!
Yes, if your phone assistant accidentally activates then your voice might be uploaded without you knowing. That's a fact. But you agreed to that by enabling the voice assistant (it even warns you about this).
If you switch your voice assistant off (I have) then you don't have this issue. What is so difficult to understand here?
The low powered chips really just listen to a few syllables, they can easily have false positives. That's just a technical aspect of it.
So just a thought, if they are looking for highly optimized keywords that can be done locally what's to stop them from adding common keywords for advertising.
In the given anecdote about babies and diapers, you would literally just need a baby keyword. It gets triggered phone tells the Mothership it heard about babies, suddenly diaper ads. It wasn't listening to every single word, it wasn't parsing the sentence, it was just looking for highly optimized ad keywords. You could even set a threshold for how often certain add keywords or triggered to avoid false positives on detection
It's not listening to actual words, that's already too complex (you'd have to parse language for that, which those low power chips can't do). It's listening for syllables, Oh-Kay-Goo-Gle or whatever. Depends on the chip and implementation of course, which is also why you get false positives when someone says something similar.
If you add more syllables to that then your phone would activate literally all the time, with tons of false positives.
Seriously, if we had low powered voice recording + voice to text you'd already have instant conversation subtitles on your phone, instant translation and so on. We simply don't have that yet, those features do exist but they are power hungry (so if you do use them say goodbye to your battery life).