I seem to recall that state of the art audio encoding can compress voice to 8kbit/s which is a single packet per second, insignificant compared to how chatty your device is. Trivial to buffer and send during a period of activity. It sums to 1.7MB over the 30 minute window in the article graphs which should be visible if it is actually counted. Why would apple or google actually make it count though? They want to spy on you either for their own benefit or because the government forces them to. You say you found it taking screenshots and phoning them home. Of course! It is a surveillance device. Is it worse? Maybe. You should consider it sends everything home. Every keystroke, every touch of the screen, every sample of the accelerometers, every sample of audio. Perhaps only the sheer quantity of data in video prevents them from sending it all. Might be "remedied" with 5G bandwidth.
Your phone isn't secretly listening to you, but the truth is more disturbing
11–20 of 336 posts
Re: Your phone isn't secretly listening to you, but the truth is more disturbing
#12My younger bro is convinced phones are eavesdropping on conversations and got particularly paranoid (I thought) a year or so back in regard to talking in earshot of his phone. His evidence is empirical - Apparently he gets pretty high with friends and shit talks - but when when the search started to suggest some pretty way out things along the same lines, he landed that their conversations weren't private any more. S…
Something I discovered when going down this rabbit hole is that if you had that conversation in your house and your visitors have access to your wifi, it may be that they performed the search without you knowing, and your ISP connected that data to you and sold it (as they do).
Re: Your phone isn't secretly listening to you, but the truth is more disturbing
#13> "Apps were automatically taking screenshots of themselves and sending them to third parties. In one case, the app took video of the screen activity and sent that information to a third party.” > Out of over 17,000 Android apps examined, more than 9,000 had potential permissions to take screenshots. And a number of apps were found to actively be doing so, taking screenshots and sending them to third-party sources. W…
I doubt there's a specific "ability to send surreptitious screen shots to developer" permission. It must be a combination of permissions: one for making network connections, another for capturing the screen without making it obvious to the user, etc.
Re: Your phone isn't secretly listening to you, but the truth is more disturbing
#14There's a nation proud of overspinning enrichment turbines with a complicated computer virus that can even work offline. No conspiracy, that's just StuxNet.
So, when you start learning about tech, you get paranoid. If you're not, it's even weirder.
The fact that someone can target you, individually, is undisputable. Whether it will or not, that's another question.
What I can recommend if you think you are being observed, is to avoid the common pitfalls:
Don't go full isolationist living without technology. That is a trap. There is nowhere to hide anyway.
Strange new friends who are super into what you do? Trap.
You were never good with girls but one is seemingly into you, despite you being an ugly ass dirty computer nerd? That is a trap. Specially online but not limited to it.
Go ahead, be paranoid. When an article comes to probe how paranoid you are, go ahead and explain exactly how paranoid you have become.
But live a normal life nonetheless, unaffected by those things. Allow yourself to laugh, and be cool with it.
Hundreds of clone accounts doxxing me? Well, thanks for the free decoys.
Constant surveillance? Well, thank you for uploading my soul free of charge to super protected servers.
Dodgy counter arguments in everything in care to discuss? Sounds like training.
The paranoid optimist is quite an underrated character. I don't see many of those around.
Re: Your phone isn't secretly listening to you, but the truth is more disturbing
#15Doesn't it have to listen to everything to capture the wake word "hey siri"? How else is it done?
Re: Your phone isn't secretly listening to you, but the truth is more disturbing
#16My younger bro is convinced phones are eavesdropping on conversations and got particularly paranoid (I thought) a year or so back in regard to talking in earshot of his phone. His evidence is empirical - Apparently he gets pretty high with friends and shit talks - but when when the search started to suggest some pretty way out things along the same lines, he landed that their conversations weren't private any more. S…
Something I discovered when going down this rabbit hole is that if you had that conversation in your house and your visitors have access to your wifi, it may be that they performed the search without you knowing, and your ISP connected that data to you and sold it (as they do).
Location location location.
- User 1 shows an interest in .
- User 1 visits the same location, for the same period of time, as user 2.
- So I show an ad for to user 2.
Re: Your phone isn't secretly listening to you, but the truth is more disturbing
#17> "Apps were automatically taking screenshots of themselves and sending them to third parties. In one case, the app took video of the screen activity and sent that information to a third party.” > Out of over 17,000 Android apps examined, more than 9,000 had potential permissions to take screenshots. And a number of apps were found to actively be doing so, taking screenshots and sending them to third-party sources. W…
When it's a developer tool we call it RUM or real user monitoring. It's super useful for solving bugs, but obviously the potential for abuse or user hostile activity is super high.
Re: Your phone isn't secretly listening to you, but the truth is more disturbing
#18> As far as anyone could understand, the proposed CMG system wasn't listening through a phone's microphone 24/7, instead it was using those small slivers of voice data that are recorded and uploaded to the cloud in the moments after you activate your voice assistant with a "Hey Google" or "Hey Siri" command. That's not quite accurate. The CMG thing was very clearly a case of advertising sales people getting over-exci…
"Convincing people of this is basically impossible. It doesn’t matter how good your argument is, if someone has ever seen an ad that relates to their previous voice conversation they are likely convinced and there’s nothing you can do to talk them out of it."
It sounds more like we have evidence of what we believe, you think we should toss the evidence for your counter-theory, and people won't do that. We also have an effect where tons of people experienced this. You want us to toss that, too.
"You don’t notice the hundreds of times a day you say something and don’t see a relevant advert a short time later. You see thousands of ads a day, can you remember what any of them are?"
On Facebook, during one period this happened, they were only showing me adds for Hotworx and a massage place every time. Trying to stay pure minded following Jesus Christ means I avoid such ads. So, it was strange that it's all they showed me. Then, strange the only break from the pattern was showing unlikely topics we just talked about in person.
So, I'm going to stick with the theory that they were listening since it best fit the evidence. I don't know why they'd do it. Prior reports long ago said they used to use ML (computer vision) to profile people outside of the platform who showed up in your pics.
I'll note another explanation. Instead of always listening, they could have done it to a random segment of people who were rarely clicking ads. Just occasionally, too. We wouldn't see the capability in use all the time. A feature tested or used on a subset of users.
Also, these companies keep saying on us in increasingly creative and dishonest ways. If anyone is to be blamed, it's them.
Re: Your phone isn't secretly listening to you, but the truth is more disturbing
#19There's a nation proud of overspinning enrichment turbines with a complicated computer virus that can even work offline. No conspiracy, that's just StuxNet. So, when you start learning about tech, you get paranoid. If you're not, it's even weirder. The fact that someone can target you, individually, is undisputable. Whether it will or not, that's another question. What I can recommend if you think you are being obser…
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Re: Your phone isn't secretly listening to you, but the truth is more disturbing
#20> "Apps were automatically taking screenshots of themselves and sending them to third parties. In one case, the app took video of the screen activity and sent that information to a third party.” > Out of over 17,000 Android apps examined, more than 9,000 had potential permissions to take screenshots. And a number of apps were found to actively be doing so, taking screenshots and sending them to third-party sources. W…
I followed the links to the study they referenced, and it says:
> Unlike the camera and audio APIs, the APIs for taking screenshots and recording video of the screen are not protected by any permission
However they also talk about doing static analysis on 9,100 out of the 17,260 apps, to determine (amongst other things) “whether media APIs are actually referenced in the app’s code”.
They then talk about doing a dynamic analysis to see which apps actually call the APIs (rather than just link to a library that might call it, but the app never calls that function the library).
The soundbite is bad, it shouldn’t say “had potential permissions to take screenshots”, it should just say “had the potential to take screenshots”