I wonder if anyone is monitoring the apps you can get on pirate bay (windows, photoshop, etc.)
I’m also curious about this. Would be nice to have some kind of general independent service (or wiki?) similar to consumer reports for cybersecurity.
Ask HN: Is anyone monitoring popular apps to check if they're listening?
31–40 of 101 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone monitoring popular apps to check if they're listening?
#32No, 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.…
> some number of them will see ads related to some conversation they had recently by pure random chance.
Or perhaps, they're just correlating the interests of people:
1. Person A reads about X online
2. Person A tells Person B about X
3. Person B sees ads about X, without ever having searched for it, concludes they're being spied on
I'm 99.9% sure WhatsApp does this, perhaps illegally or at least grey-area.
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone monitoring popular apps to check if they're listening?
#33How 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.
Don't Android phones have passive listening? Pixel phones have always-on song detection (Shazam-like) and usually display song info on the lockscreen within ~10 seconds of the song being played nearby.
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone monitoring popular apps to check if they're listening?
#34[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone monitoring popular apps to check if they're listening?
#35Earlier 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.
Don't Android phones have passive listening? Pixel phones have always-on song detection (Shazam-like) and usually display song info on the lockscreen within ~10 seconds of the song being played nearby.
That works somewhat similarly to the "Ok Google". Dedicated chip and super small on-device ML model. Nothing goes back to the cloud.
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone monitoring popular apps to check if they're listening?
#36No, 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…
> This would get positively lost in the noise of modern smartphone constant background connectivity, no?
If you’re only looking at total up/down traffic for the entire device, it might.
But we can inspect traffic per-app, including decoding the actual traffic (if you go through steps to circumvent certificate pinning).
Security researchers can, and do, look at the actual raw data coming out of apps. If voice was in there, it would be seen.
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone monitoring popular apps to check if they're listening?
#37No, 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.…
> The myth persists because coincidences will happen in high numbers at scale. 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.
It's certainly more frequent than just by random chance, but by virtue of the fact that we say many things, and the things we will say can be predicted (at least to some extent), by our browsing history, which already is constantly being churned through however many ML algorithms to know what ads will be relevant to us. I'm also convinced location data is thrown in there too; after I recently started spending more time in a new area, I stared getting ads for one of the adult braces companies that I've only ever seen there a block away. In those cases there's a decent probability someone will mention it because it's new to them, only for the algorithms to also figure: 'this is probably the kind of person that would be interested in this, and they're nearby now!' It happens frequently enough to almost everyone I know that the random argument loses its credibility to me.
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone monitoring popular apps to check if they're listening?
#38No, 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.…
[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone monitoring popular apps to check if they're listening?
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
The hardware runs an algorithm to detect the wakeword. What makes you confident that a different algorithm can't be run to translate voice to text? They will be in the same family of algorithms, just with different purposes.
To make it more interesting, let's assume that 2021 algorithms can't do that. Will better low power algorithms be developed in the next 20 years? How is a democratic society supposed to work when would-be-snitches are ubiquitously deployed?
To make it even more interesting, as more an more of our communications move to the internet (oooOOOooo, covid, cower in fear), what confidence you have that voice2text and voice fingerprinting does not already apply to all your phone/Zoom conversations? Do you run the phone/Zoom servers and monitor all potentially suspicious traffic? Have you heard of one Edward Snowden?
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone monitoring popular apps to check if they're listening?
#40I wonder if anyone is monitoring the apps you can get on pirate bay (windows, photoshop, etc.)
I’m also curious about this. Would be nice to have some kind of general independent service (or wiki?) similar to consumer reports for cybersecurity.
From the discussion here, it appears that no one is monitoring broadly. The big apps (fb, insta) potentially are being checked as they have bug bounties and warrant research time. But for less popular apps, or pirated apps, it sounds like no one is checking.