151
Are Phones and Smart Speakers Listening to You? Cox Media Group Claims They Can | Cord Cutters News
(cordcuttersnews.com)
this post was submitted on 23 Dec 2023
151 points (90.4% liked)
Privacy
32142 readers
1355 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Agreed, though I think it’s possible to use smart devices safely. For Android it can be difficult outside custom roms. The OEM flavors tend to have spyware baked in that takes time and root to fully undo, and even then I’m never sure I got it all. These are the most common phones, however, especially in economy price brackets, which is why I’d agree that for the average user most phones are spyware.
Flashing is not useful advice to most. “Just root it bro” doesn’t help your nontechnical relatives who can’t stop downloading toolbars and VPN installers. But with OEM variants undermining privacy at the system level, it feels like a losing battle.
I’d give credit to Apple for their privacy enablement, especially with E2EE, device lockdown, granular access permission control and audits. Unfortunately their devices are not as affordable and I'm not sure how to advise the average Android user beyond general opt-out vigilance.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/12/apple-admits-to-secretly-giving-governments-push-notification-data/
Yeah those push token systems need an overhaul. IIRC tokens are specific to app-device combinations, so invalidation that isn’t automatic should be push-button revocation. Users should have control of it like any other API on their device, if only to get apps to stop spamming coupons or whatever.
It’s funny though: when I first saw those headlines, my first reaction was that it was a positive sign, since this was apparently news worthy even though the magnitude of impact for this sort of systemic breach is demonstrably low. (In particular, it pertains to (1) incidental high-noise data (2) associated with devices and (3) available only by request to (4) governments, who are weak compared to even the smallest data brokers WRT capacity for data mining inference and redistribution, to put it mildly.)
Regardless, those systems need attention.