I wonder if anyone is monitoring the apps you can get on pirate bay (windows, photoshop, etc.)
Ask HN: Is anyone monitoring popular apps to check if they're listening?
21–30 of 101 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone monitoring popular apps to check if they're listening?
#22How do Android and iOS known when you say "OK Google" or "Hey Siri" if they are not listening all the time? Or, is it accepted that they are?
The listening for the initial keyword (e.g. “Hey Siri”) is done on hardware designed specifically for that purpose. That’s why you can’t change the keyword to whatever you want. Only when that keyword is heard does it actively listen to and process whatever follows. “Actively” listening all the time would simply consume too much CPU/bandwidth/battery.
What exactly prevents the 'hardware designed specifically for that purpose' to include in its purpose the translation of your voice to text, with voice fingerprinting for good measure? Have you ran an electronic microscope atom layer slicing of the hardware to guarantee its complete set of functionalities?
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone monitoring popular apps to check if they're listening?
#23No, Facebook and Instagram are not monitoring conversations. Yes, many security researchers routinely examine traffic from these apps to see what’s being communicated with the servers. Recording and interpreting speech would require a lot of CPU (if done on device) or network bandwidth (if uploaded to the cloud). Enough that it would be immediately obvious if apps were trying to do this. That is, if they even could.…
> If hundreds of millions of people are spending hours on social media each week, some number of them will see ads related to some conversation they had recently by pure random chance
Another, probably more common reason that people often don’t think about is that a participant of such conversation may have searched for said product, or be otherwise profiled for it, and you might get the ad because Big Ad knows you are related to them. For example FB doesn’t need to know the contents of your Whatsapp or FB messenger messages to know how close you are to someone: how often you message, how many messages, when etc
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone monitoring popular apps to check if they're listening?
#24No, Facebook and Instagram are not monitoring conversations. Yes, many security researchers routinely examine traffic from these apps to see what’s being communicated with the servers. Recording and interpreting speech would require a lot of CPU (if done on device) or network bandwidth (if uploaded to the cloud). Enough that it would be immediately obvious if apps were trying to do this. That is, if they even could.…
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Re: Ask HN: Is anyone monitoring popular apps to check if they're listening?
#25No, Facebook and Instagram are not monitoring conversations. Yes, many security researchers routinely examine traffic from these apps to see what’s being communicated with the servers. Recording and interpreting speech would require a lot of CPU (if done on device) or network bandwidth (if uploaded to the cloud). Enough that it would be immediately obvious if apps were trying to do this. That is, if they even could.…
"Recording and interpreting speech would require a lot of CPU (if done on device) or network bandwidth"
It was my understanding that typically phone voice audio quality is a few kilo bits per second - not much more than a kilobyte per second. This would get positively lost in the noise of modern smartphone constant background connectivity, no?
(largely agree with your other points, though my understanding of original post was question for specifics on who actually may be checking these things rather than "somebody surely would've caught it")
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone monitoring popular apps to check if they're listening?
#26No, Facebook and Instagram are not monitoring conversations. Yes, many security researchers routinely examine traffic from these apps to see what’s being communicated with the servers. Recording and interpreting speech would require a lot of CPU (if done on device) or network bandwidth (if uploaded to the cloud). Enough that it would be immediately obvious if apps were trying to do this. That is, if they even could.…
It's not only a matter of "big numbers", but also of confirmation bias.
We're never paying any attention to irrelevant ads - we're ad blind to them. But the moment we see a very relevant ad to a recent conversation, that will inevitably pop up.
"See, this one ad is tied to this conversation I had yesterday: they must be listening", while in reality it's more like "See, this one ad out of 100s I've seen in the last day is tied to this one conversation out of 10s I had in the last day".
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone monitoring popular apps to check if they're listening?
#27If they are not actually listening, has someone mapped out how I get an ad related to a verbal conversation? What did they do to put the pieces together? I would imagine several different scenarios to get an actual match - but Ive wondered this at least a couple of times (too close a coincidence that is).
It's a mixture of things. The first is "Baader–Meinhof phenomenon" / frequency bias. Your friends talk about X, all of a sudden you notice adverts about X.
Of course, you discount the thousands of adverts you see which aren't about X.
Why are you and your friends talking about X? Because it's a demographically popular topic. And advertisers have noticed that $gender people of $age_range in $city are searching for X. So you get an advert. You're not as unique as you think!
Or, while hanging out, you're attached to the same WiFi spot. One of you does a search for X before talking about it. So the retargetting continues.
The key thing is - why are you talking about what you're talking about?
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone monitoring popular apps to check if they're listening?
#28No, Facebook and Instagram are not monitoring conversations. Yes, many security researchers routinely examine traffic from these apps to see what’s being communicated with the servers. Recording and interpreting speech would require a lot of CPU (if done on device) or network bandwidth (if uploaded to the cloud). Enough that it would be immediately obvious if apps were trying to do this. That is, if they even could.…
> Recording and interpreting speech would require a lot of CPU (if done on device) or network bandwidth
I'm skeptical regarding bandwidth.
Modern codecs can achieve spectacular compression, you don't necessarily need to record audio-cd-level quality audio, and Facebook has state of the art hardware and software in terms of ai/ml and a very well trained workforce in the field.
If anything, one should regard Facebook as "capable of pulling this off".
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone monitoring popular apps to check if they're listening?
#29If they are not actually listening, has someone mapped out how I get an ad related to a verbal conversation? What did they do to put the pieces together? I would imagine several different scenarios to get an actual match - but Ive wondered this at least a couple of times (too close a coincidence that is).
Wondering the same thing..I'm having targeted ads based on my verbal conversations, way too many for coincidence.
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone monitoring popular apps to check if they're listening?
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
The listening for the initial keyword (e.g. “Hey Siri”) is done on hardware designed specifically for that purpose. That’s why you can’t change the keyword to whatever you want. Only when that keyword is heard does it actively listen to and process whatever follows. “Actively” listening all the time would simply consume too much CPU/bandwidth/battery.
What exactly prevents the 'hardware designed specifically for that purpose' to include in its purpose the translation of your voice to text, with voice fingerprinting for good measure? Have you ran an electronic microscope atom layer slicing of the hardware to guarantee its complete set of functionalities?
Power consumption