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Your phone is listening and it's not paranoia (2018)

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Re: Your phone is listening and it's not paranoia (2018)

#11

Post by elmomle »

auslegung wrote: post #2

They almost certainly aren’t listening to you https://mobile.twitter.com/RobertGReeve/status/1397032784703... . But the likely explanation isn’t any better imo.

I don't buy it. I have multiple times been served articles on my Google news feed about specific topics (e.g. dishwasher efficiency) that are orthogonal from my typical interests and that I had only ever discussed offline and never electronically in any form. I can think of no plausible explanation for this aside from Google obtaining audio that is ambiently gathered by my phone and feeding that back into their article-optimization engine.

Re: Your phone is listening and it's not paranoia (2018)

#12

Post by eightysixfour »

dolni wrote: post #3
auslegung wrote: post #2

They almost certainly aren’t listening to you https://mobile.twitter.com/RobertGReeve/status/1397032784703... . But the likely explanation isn’t any better imo.

I don't buy this. I was at a social outing some years back at pub that I had been to a number of times before with some longtime friends of mine. Somehow we got on the topic of favorite candies from childhood. I mentioned Warheads. I hadn't had one of those in two decades, and certainly hadn't seen any ads for them in a long time. But still, the very next day, I was getting ads for them on social media. Everyone I ha…

The chain of things that has to happen for this to work is implausible:

  1. The device has to record the things used by the always on mics listening for wake words somewhere, without any other developers figuring this out and sharing how it is done.

  2. Apps, using a background task, have to monitor those recordings, run speech recognition, and pick out key words, without anyone identifying this process.

  3. The apps then have send those keywords back to the ad network, without anyone ever sniffing the network traffic and seeing this process.
Other methods are similarly implausible, for example it is unlikely the ad networks would be able to get the audio off of the device for cloud (instead of local recognition) without researchers noticing. The only method that I buy for this is that open apps have a way to turn on the mic without the OS notification that the mic is on and share it while the app is open. This is still pretty unlikely (would not be hard to sniff for example), but more than the other options at least.

Re: Your phone is listening and it's not paranoia (2018)

#13

Post by eightysixfour »

smackeyacky wrote: post #6
dolni wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't buy this. I was at a social outing some years back at pub that I had been to a number of times before with some longtime friends of mine. Somehow we got on the topic of favorite candies from childhood. I mentioned Warheads. I hadn't had one of those in two decades, and certainly hadn't seen any ads for them in a long time. But still, the very next day, I was getting ads for them on social media. Everyone I ha…

Given the incredibly poor search results I get from Google Assistant I find the idea that the old Samsung phone is listening to my every word is plausible but should be extremely ineffective since when I am deliberately using it, it sucks. However, if I am half way through a movie and I want to find some detail on it, it inevitably shows up within the first few search results whether I'm watching it on DVD, a blu-ray…

Is your TV internet connected? Some have content fingerprinting technology to determine what you're watching shares that back to the ad networks.

Re: Your phone is listening and it's not paranoia (2018)

#14

Post by creato »

dolni wrote: post #3
auslegung wrote: post #2

They almost certainly aren’t listening to you https://mobile.twitter.com/RobertGReeve/status/1397032784703... . But the likely explanation isn’t any better imo.

I don't buy this. I was at a social outing some years back at pub that I had been to a number of times before with some longtime friends of mine. Somehow we got on the topic of favorite candies from childhood. I mentioned Warheads. I hadn't had one of those in two decades, and certainly hadn't seen any ads for them in a long time. But still, the very next day, I was getting ads for them on social media. Everyone I ha…

For how many topics and spoken words does this not happen for? You probably can't count them.

I don't think this happens because I don't think it's technically feasible. The hotword detection stuff that is always on ("hey siri", "ok google") is incredibly limited in vocabulary.

Maybe one day that will change, maybe it's even possible now, but people have been telling stories like yours since well before I know for sure it was technically infeasible to do it.

Re: Your phone is listening and it's not paranoia (2018)

#15

Post by grandpoobah »

auslegung wrote: post #2

They almost certainly aren’t listening to you https://mobile.twitter.com/RobertGReeve/status/1397032784703... . But the likely explanation isn’t any better imo.

Going by this twitter poster's logic, the reason OP started seeing ads for traveling to Tokyo, is because the ad networks saw OP and his friend had a long conversation, and that OP and his friend had both previously traveled to Tokyo previously, and was betting on that subject coming up in conversation, triggering nostalgia, and figured that it might be able to convince one of these guys to buy a ticket based off of that :D

Re: Your phone is listening and it's not paranoia (2018)

#17

Post by 8note »

elmomle wrote: post #11
auslegung wrote: post #2

They almost certainly aren’t listening to you https://mobile.twitter.com/RobertGReeve/status/1397032784703... . But the likely explanation isn’t any better imo.

I don't buy it. I have multiple times been served articles on my Google news feed about specific topics (e.g. dishwasher efficiency) that are orthogonal from my typical interests and that I had only ever discussed offline and never electronically in any form. I can think of no plausible explanation for this aside from Google obtaining audio that is ambiently gathered by my phone and feeding that back into their artic…

How do you know that your conversation partner did not look up dishwashers after your conversation? Or that there was not a trending YouTube video about dishwashers around the same time that prompted the conversation?

Re: Your phone is listening and it's not paranoia (2018)

#18

Post by scrollbar »

twobitshifter wrote: post #8

I like the authors attempt to experiment. It should be easy to know whether apps like Facebook are listening by only discussing topics off-line and then waiting to see if Facebook picks it up and serves related ads.

Sounded like the author did do that, the part about the new clothes for university and getting ads served up for those topics?

Re: Your phone is listening and it's not paranoia (2018)

#19

Post by Buttons840 »

auslegung wrote: post #2

They almost certainly aren’t listening to you https://mobile.twitter.com/RobertGReeve/status/1397032784703... . But the likely explanation isn’t any better imo.

What's scarier, that you saw an ad regarding very personal details of your life because your phone was listening, or even though your phone wasn't listening?

People see this happen and reach for an explanation they understand, "my phone must have been eavesdropping!" The truth is these ad and data companies know this about you without your phone having to listen.

To twist a quote from the Matrix: "So you're saying my phone listens to me? No, I'm saying these companies have such wide insights into your personal life and information that they don't have to listen."

Re: Your phone is listening and it's not paranoia (2018)

#20

Post by scrollbar »

auslegung wrote: post #2

They almost certainly aren’t listening to you https://mobile.twitter.com/RobertGReeve/status/1397032784703... . But the likely explanation isn’t any better imo.

The Twitter post you linked says it has been “debunked” but gives no citation etc. Where is this debunking? I have had these experiences, and in the article the author does their own self experiment and sees the hypothesized result
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