31–40 of 431 posts
How exactly does a headphone app have access to your alcohol use and menstruation history? Where is it pulling this data from?
Re: Personal fitness and menstruation history - Is that shocking? They're earbuds, but they're marketed as fitness buds that track personal data. It looks like Fitbit for your ears. Fitbit and Apple Health (or whatever it is called) does these kinds of things as well. Re: Bose collecting all that stuff I can see "why" they would want all that, in order to optimize their sound output of their buds to the kind of music…
I can't see why they would need so many samples. Wouldn't using the data from (say) 100 Bose employees be sufficient to cover most noisy environments these buds are used in?
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Isn't this really only an issue if you use the companion app? I doubt the usb-c/lightning/bluetooth headphones can exfiltrate data if you don't have the companion app installed.
You also can't get firmware updates if you don't install the companion app and allow them to spy on you.
Ahh, this is real reason why the phone manufacturers want to get rid of the headphone jack. I was so naive to think it was only about DRM/licensing.
There were two things that happened when Apple got rid of the headphone jack: (1) they added water resistance, (2) the phones got thinner. Plus, Apple had seen the trends heading toward wireless headphones. They still included a dongle to give you a standard headphone jack. While Apple could likely have gotten their water resistance even with the headphone jack, they couldn’t have made the phones as thin. People may…
No. They didn't.
iPhone 5: 7.6 mm thin, 6: 7 mm
iPhone 7: 7.1 mm
> While Apple could likely have gotten their water resistance even with the headphone jack, they couldn’t have made the phones as thin.
Except that's a pretty obvious lie. Not just that the phones did not get thinner (or lighter), they stayed around the same thickness (+- 0.5 mm), while getting larger, much heavier and much more expensive. But also the thinnest Android phone with a 3.5 mm jack is just 5.1 mm thick, for example. Sony even made a waterproof phone that's 6.5 mm thin and still has a 3.5 mm jack, which is thinner than any iPhone ever.
Everything about this argumentation is wrong or an outright lie. The only reason they did this is because they could moneygrab through accessoires better when they eliminate standardized I/O.
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Isn't this really only an issue if you use the companion app? I doubt the usb-c/lightning/bluetooth headphones can exfiltrate data if you don't have the companion app installed.
You also can't get firmware updates if you don't install the companion app and allow them to spy on you.
Has anyone had any experience with new Bose headphones? If you use the Bose Connect app, I believe what the author wrote is accurate. But that app doesn’t work on the newer headphones (at least, not the ones I have). Instead I need to download the “Bose Music” app which doesn’t seem to give you the same options for privacy. And if you don’t use that app, the headphones are much less useful (eg, no hardware controls t…
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Ever tried to connect a corded headphone into a microphone jack? It works quite well
Is there some kind of diode for AC signals?
I've come to believe that this can only be fixed with legislation and regulation. There are no technical fixes that could practically be deployed as there is far too much "attack surface" and anyway there is zero incentive to deploy them.
In the meantime: install as few apps as possible on phones, be careful about IoT and personal assistance devices, and use Apple or Linux (not Android) based systems as they seem to have the best record for security and privacy.