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Ask HN: Is anyone monitoring popular apps to check if they're listening?

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Re: Ask HN: Is anyone monitoring popular apps to check if they're listening?

#91

Post by kempbellt »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #90
kempbellt wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you train your phone to understand "Hey Siri" it requires an internet connection for the training so that it can verify that you are actually saying, "Hey Siri" and not "Yo, phone spirit". After the initial training, it no longer requires (or uses) the internet to detect the keyphrase. You are asked to do a few iterations of training so that the phone has a model on your voiceprint for "Hey Siri". Which is why,…

This explanation does not explain why neither Google nor Apple allow you to change the wake word. Myself, I believe any technical reason, if it actually exists, is a secondary factor - the primary reason is branding. They don't want people changing wakewords, because as long as everyone uses the same, "Ok Google" and "Siri" are terms/brands.

To my understanding, there is no technical reason behind not being able to use custom wakewords besides them just not wanting you to.

I also believe it is restricted mainly for branding and easy marketing.

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone monitoring popular apps to check if they're listening?

#92

Post by fuzzfactor »

mikewarot wrote: post #63

I have learned one thing, regardless of assumptions about if they are listening... never name your smart speaker "computer", the number of false triggers is frustrating as heck.

Only Spock was allowed to do that.

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone monitoring popular apps to check if they're listening?

#93

Post by fuzzfactor »

donclark wrote: post #9

If 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 no longer as sensible as it used to be to browse the internet any more.

No need, the internet is browsing you.

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone monitoring popular apps to check if they're listening?

#94

Post by sva_ »

tompazourek wrote: post #89
sva_ wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Maybe WhatsApp knows that these 2 people are friends, so it tries to serve person B ads that worked for person A.

That's was the point I was trying to make. Maybe I wasn't clear

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone monitoring popular apps to check if they're listening?

#96

Post by solarkraft »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #6

No, 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.…

Confirmation bias, coincidences at scale, sure, certainly a part of it.

But I had always thought big tech would just correlate interests of people it knows spend time with each other. E.g. my father gets an e-bike, I get e-bike ads. It could of course be due to me scrolling over one e-bike ad less quickly once.

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone monitoring popular apps to check if they're listening?

#98

Post by bkovacev »

I was at the Zurich airport while I had a connecting flight to Barcelona from Belgrade. My friend and I briefly spoke about Zlatibor (a city in Serbia), 30 seconds later I got an ad for a hotel in Zlatibor, in the middle of Zurich Airport. We never spoke about or searched for Zlatibor.

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone monitoring popular apps to check if they're listening?

#99

Post by hutzlibu »

dylan604 wrote: post #66
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Insstead, a small compressed bit of text on keywords could be sent whether that's immediately or saved up until user foregrounds the app. Which would then appear in the packet captures that can be performed on the traffic (after circumventing certificate pinning). My premise wasn’t that each step was impossible. It was that many steps would have to take place without being detected anywhere along the chain.

How do you distinguish the, assumed, encrypted transmission from a foreground app sending this data compared to just requesting an update for the app's viewport?

With a fully reversed engeneered app, this would be possible. But I believe the effort for this is quite high. And with obfuscation even higher.

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone monitoring popular apps to check if they're listening?

#100

Post by vitno »

stonewareslord wrote: post #48
vitno wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That works somewhat similarly to the "Ok Google". Dedicated chip and super small on-device ML model. Nothing goes back to the cloud.

> Nothing goes back to the cloud What is your source on this? Every recognizable song is surely not stored on-device so something must be uploaded.

It's not every song, the model is built from a list of N (100k?) most popular songs. If you pick something a bit obscure it won't work. The model is updated on occasion and pushed in bulk to pixel devices.
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