Does "Felony wiretapping" mean nothing?
Company Says It Uses Your Phones Mic to Serve Ads for Facebook, Google, etc.
11–20 of 69 posts
Re: Company Says It Uses Your Phones Mic to Serve Ads for Facebook, Google, etc.
#12I am absolutely glad that, I disable Siri immediately on all of my devices and grateful for the ominous mic-in-use indicator on all apple devices. Android also has a mic in use indicator too, but own only a Pixel to comment on Android in general. The referenced articles are light on details and appear to be “he said she said they said” and pointing to the same archived blog post from CMG. That being said, I see a ris…
Does disabling Siri disable this behaviour though? What if you're not close enough to the device at the time to see the indicator? That's the bit the worries me in terms of mic use.
On Android I can toggle the camera and mic OS wide, and per app. When I'm not taking pictures or a call I turn them both off OS wide using the quick toggle buttons. On iOS I can only find options to disable them per app which doesn't give me as much confidence.
Re: Company Says It Uses Your Phones Mic to Serve Ads for Facebook, Google, etc.
#13I've noticed that when calling companies on the phone, many of them have started pointing out where to read their privacy policy.
I suspect many types of technologies are starting to use voice for identification, demographics, emotional analysis, and the data is being saved and/or shared.
And lots of phone trees now require you to talk instead of using touchtone sounds.
Re: Company Says It Uses Your Phones Mic to Serve Ads for Facebook, Google, etc.
#14Flagging this because it's clearly trash / fake news. Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41404229 for background.
Re: Company Says It Uses Your Phones Mic to Serve Ads for Facebook, Google, etc.
#15With billions of phones in circulation, and rumors of audio eavesdropping being quite common, why has apparently nobody ever run a typical smartphone with network logging and memory snapshotting to actually check what all these widely popular apps are doing?
Re: Company Says It Uses Your Phones Mic to Serve Ads for Facebook, Google, etc.
#16I don’t see confirmation of anything in particular here, other than some ad sales company made some rather vague and dubious claims. Does anyone know what specifically they were talking about and if there’s anything to it?
From a Cox VP of Digital Strategy's blog post:
"Our technology is on the cutting edge of voice data processing. We can identify buyers based on casual conversations in real time. It may seem like black magic, but it's not-it's AI. The growing ability to access microphone data on devices like smartphones and tablets enables our technology partner to aggregate and analyze voice data during pre-purchase conversations."
IMO, the smoking gun here is their partner ingesting and analyzing the voice data.
Re: Company Says It Uses Your Phones Mic to Serve Ads for Facebook, Google, etc.
#17With billions of phones in circulation, and rumors of audio eavesdropping being quite common, why has apparently nobody ever run a typical smartphone with network logging and memory snapshotting to actually check what all these widely popular apps are doing?
People have. And it's always shown that no apps are opening your mics when you're not using the app, and that if you're using the app they generally will only open your mic when it makes sense to do so.
These companies are most likely lying or exaggerating their capabilities. Since so many people believe in audio eavesdropping anyway, it's in their interest to make the buyers of their software believe they're much more powerful than they really are.
It's the same as how it's good for AI companies to talk about how AIs are just on the verge of ending the world and must be regulated at any cost - more people believing that what they're selling is absurdly powerful is good for sales.
Re: Company Says It Uses Your Phones Mic to Serve Ads for Facebook, Google, etc.
#18This is very likely fake.
But why would a company say they do this? It's because so many people believe that this happens anyway that there's next to no cost to them in saying it - and the buyers for this kind of technology think of this as a good thing.
It might be fake, but people being scared of your powerful technology is good for sales.
AI labs do the same thing by actively courting fearmongering.
Re: Company Says It Uses Your Phones Mic to Serve Ads for Facebook, Google, etc.
#19I don’t see confirmation of anything in particular here, other than some ad sales company made some rather vague and dubious claims. Does anyone know what specifically they were talking about and if there’s anything to it?
From a Cox VP of Digital Strategy's blog post: "Our technology is on the cutting edge of voice data processing. We can identify buyers based on casual conversations in real time. It may seem like black magic, but it's not-it's AI. The growing ability to access microphone data on devices like smartphones and tablets enables our technology partner to aggregate and analyze voice data during pre-purchase conversations."…
Yeah but they say "pre-purchase conversations", could be some BS about how they call consumers sometimes, from call centers... it doesn't say that they eavesdrop.
Re: Company Says It Uses Your Phones Mic to Serve Ads for Facebook, Google, etc.
#20Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41404229 There are reasons to be skeptical of this.
I mean none of the major LLM/DL developers would scrape the entire web (even against robots.txt and paywalls) just to increase the amount of data they could unprofitably train with, because that would expose them to copyright litigation... Oh, wait yeah they did.
Frankly, the idea that no app or company is doing this or selling the data would require an enormous conspiracy of secret suppression. The argument that one can't easily hash compressed sound fragments in a way that matches for copyrighted music or generic advertising terms and send that data back linked to a location/ID is sort of laughable.