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Company Says It Uses Your Phones Mic to Serve Ads for Facebook, Google, etc.

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Re: Company Says It Uses Your Phones Mic to Serve Ads for Facebook, Google, etc.

#51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Ad firms absolutely do spy, but probably not through the use of microphone audio... mainly because that's way too much information Ultrasonic tracking has been a thing for a long time https://www.zdnet.com/article/hundreds-of-apps-are-using-ult...

Yes but as a result of that coverage it's now very clear when apps use the microphone. That pretty much killed this practice.

for certain devices such as smartphones, other Smart devices such as TVs are still used for that.

Re: Company Says It Uses Your Phones Mic to Serve Ads for Facebook, Google, etc.

#52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but as a result of that coverage it's now very clear when apps use the microphone. That pretty much killed this practice.

for certain devices such as smartphones, other Smart devices such as TVs are still used for that.

How does it work for tvs in practice? Skimming the article, it seems a large practice was to use the sounds as confirmation of user location (were they at an event). What ultrasonic source is my tv likely to pick up?

Re: Company Says It Uses Your Phones Mic to Serve Ads for Facebook, Google, etc.

#54

I'm a firm "ad audio spying denialist", but that's mainly an "uhm, ACKTUALLY" kind of denial. Ad firms absolutely do spy, but probably not through the use of microphone audio... mainly because that's way too much information for what they actually want to do. That and every mobile OS shows very obvious warnings whenever media capture is being used, and I'm not aware of a sanctioned way to defeat those that isn't a 0d…

They probably do have microphone audio (they say so specifically) but they're buying it from some skeezy app or game that has the permissions for legit reasons and looks for a way to monetize the install base.

Re: Company Says It Uses Your Phones Mic to Serve Ads for Facebook, Google, etc.

#55

With 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?

Because my aunt Glenda (who uses my wifi when she visits) was just talking about the new Hermes Banana Bag last week and today I saw a Banana Bag ad. I have NEVER googled Hermes bags or data correlation techniques.

Re: Company Says It Uses Your Phones Mic to Serve Ads for Facebook, Google, etc.

#56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

for certain devices such as smartphones, other Smart devices such as TVs are still used for that.

How does it work for tvs in practice? Skimming the article, it seems a large practice was to use the sounds as confirmation of user location (were they at an event). What ultrasonic source is my tv likely to pick up?

I noticed Microsoft teams seems to do something like this. If I walk into a meeting room it tells me the same meeting is on speaker and do I want to mute my laptop.

Re: Company Says It Uses Your Phones Mic to Serve Ads for Facebook, Google, etc.

#57
I'd make the more believable assumption that it's basically collusion between all kinds of device makers, OS makers, and software makers to transcribe voice to text that is stored in once central location on the device, then made accessible to a wide variety of apps. This is how keywords trigger ads and various content items. The EULAS that need the most scrutiny are those with device makers and OS makers, because they can deny certain access to app makers at the root of operations on devices, which they regularly dont, and they also complicate the transparency of how apps access our data and run in the background by design.

I'd assume that at major social media and software companies, this data from individual devices is accessible in almost real time, feeding a dashboard of information that only top executives can secretly monitor world-wide conversations and user activity for people that have their specific devices.

I'd also assume that this method of bootleg monitoring has been in play legally and illegally for some time now... It's far too tempting to company execs and CEOs to not get hooked on the god complex of having access to this level of data... If you think about it, imagine being able to access any photos and conversations from anyone on the planet any time you want...

Congress does nothing about it because many of them are afraid it will destroy the economy and upset the wealthy backers to these companies that fund all of them. One day long into the future, there may be a low-key class action settlement that won't change a damn thing, and lawyers will sweep up most of the paltry settlement money.

We pay thousands of dollars now for devices that spy on us, while they barely provide any means of opportunity and extra utility to us. Use black tape and cover your front camera, and leave devices at home sometimes... We're really defenseless against corporate greed and corruption though, watch what you say around tech devices now more than ever.

Re: Company Says It Uses Your Phones Mic to Serve Ads for Facebook, Google, etc.

#58
post #3

I 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…

Happy owner of several Samsung Note devices over the years. None have had a mic-in-use indicator.

When every app on your phone runs at start up and in the background, how can you tell which app is using the mic?

Re: Company Says It Uses Your Phones Mic to Serve Ads for Facebook, Google, etc.

#59
post #20
post #5

Previous 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…

If it’s baked into the firmware of major cell phone manufacturers components how many people would it take?

A team of CS engineers at NSA.

1-2 people in privileged positions either at the point of assembly/programming deployment to ensure the code is delivered. - for each company which is basically just alphabet, Samsung, and Apple or their chip providers which is about five companies.

This does not seem all that impractical - how many people are dumping firmware from in the wild consumer cellular devices and reverse engineering enough of the code to see if this functionality exists or not? Anyone with that skill is likely making a killing doing other work.

Re: Company Says It Uses Your Phones Mic to Serve Ads for Facebook, Google, etc.

#60
Well, my wife and I have been on a months-long experiment. We have HomePod minis, Macs and iPhones/iPads in the house. They are able to access the internet without restriction (other than using my own DNS resolver for ad/malware blocking purposes.

Our TVs (2020-era Vizio and 2018-era Samsung) are on a separate VLAN for home automation control, and are otherwise blocked from the internet¹. Additionally, they have the various "content intelligence" features disabled...just in case.

We also have a few Nest devices (the 1st gen wired Hello doorbell cam, The Nest/Yale deadbolt, a 2nd gen thermostat, and some Nest Protects) that are normally similarly segmented, though the Hello is allowed to communicate to the necessary domains for video streaming and PubSub notifications.

On August 1, while on a neighborhood walk without any electronic devices, we formulated the plan: every day, we'd find a reason to discuss mulch² in the presence of various devices in our home. What color of mulch we think would look best around various trees. The virtues of recycled rubber as a mulch substitute. The drainage issues it causes. And so on.

We committed to never searching for mulch online (to hide from the ever-present surveillance online), never discussing it with anyone (to avoid social network effects), never buying it (no data broker can hoover up mulch purchases), not dwelling on any social media post about mulch (analytics, man, it's crazy what that bit of metadata can do)...not even hanging around the garden department of local stores (gotta avoid bluetooth/BLE/wifi tracking).

But I DID disable the DNS blocklists (much to our browsing frustration). And while the smart home stuff remained on its own VLAN, I allowed it otherwise unfettered access to the internet during the month of August.

Since the experiment began, we've seen the net sum of zero (0) targeted ads about mulch. No banners, no interstitial social media posts, no phone calls, no flyers in the mailbox. Nothing.

I really don't believe that our devices are eavesdropping on us, but in the interest of science, the experiment continues for another month.³

---

1) Yes, I recognize that Sidewalk/ethernet-over-HDMI/hard-coded DNS/etc is a purported "thing", but I don't believe it's likely. I'm controlling for this during the month of September by re-enabling the filtering mentioned at the start; if our TVs are committed to exfiltrating surveillance data.

2) We've not really been discussing mulch. I'm using that as a proxy here, because all of the internet is a series of tubes that lead to advertising networks. But we did choose a unique topic of conversation that would be relevant to our demographics, geographical location, and season, and meaningful to advertisers.

3) On September 1, I re-enabled all the blocklists and VLAN network filters/blackholes. But we continue to discuss, er, mulch. Like I said, if our stuff really really wants to phone the mothership to have Big Mulch pay us a visit, there are supposed to be ways for them to do that. Right?

___

EDIT: The topic we chose is also something that's not typically discussed in our social network, nor our kids' social networks. I will say that it's related to a profitable market, and we're in the target demographic, but we did our best to identify a market that we didn't have in common with our social groups.

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