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Your phone isn't secretly listening to you, but the truth is more disturbing

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Re: Your phone isn't secretly listening to you, but the truth is more disturbing

#31

Post by simonw »

edgyquant wrote: post #9
anenefan wrote: post #5

My 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…

He’s right and everyone knows it. It's pretty blatant and there have been lawsuits settle rather than go to a trial that would surely reveal the extent to which this thing that’s obviously happening is happening https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/apple-siri-priva...

I attempted to debunk that one here (an admittedly impossible task but I can't help myself trying): https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jan/2/they-spy-on-you-but-not...

Re: Your phone isn't secretly listening to you, but the truth is more disturbing

#32

Post by jancsika »

benlivengood wrote: post #22

The thing is, it's not even people doing the correlations. Just like transformers can learn most of human knowledge just by trying to predict tokens, I would not be surprised if the ad-serving machine learning systems have learned about people in similar detail. State of the art about 10 years ago was 4 9s of accuracy predicting click-through rates from the available context (features for user profile, current websit…

> an obscure new thing that had come up

Since you've provided no explicit counter-evidence, I'm gonna go ahead and say I have four nines of accuracy in predicting that your smartphone was squarely in the dependency chain of any "obscure new thing" you could have imagined discussing.

Edit: wording

Re: Your phone isn't secretly listening to you, but the truth is more disturbing

#33

Post by Narkov »

Am4TIfIsER0ppos wrote: post #11

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…

What makes you think the raw audio stream needs to be sent anywhere. Modern phones are capable of doing keyword extraction on-device.

Re: Your phone isn't secretly listening to you, but the truth is more disturbing

#34

Post by simonw »

ivape wrote: post #15

Doesn't it have to listen to everything to capture the wake word "hey siri"? How else is it done?

The iPhone has dedicated low-power on-device hardware that is trained to pick up "Hey Siri" exclusively. It only wakes up the rest of the device and captures additional audio after that wake word has been triggered.

https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/voice-trigger

https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/hey-siri

Re: Your phone isn't secretly listening to you, but the truth is more disturbing

#35

Post by [deleted] »

alganet wrote: post #25
ivape wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

There is a list of things I keep under profound consideration always. Information that travels backwards in time is one of them. I have a pretty good idea on how it could be possible and who would have the resources to do it. God is also another. However, I am a very unorthodox student of religion. I deeply respect anyone that uses it to foster a good behavior. Whoever uses it to trick others, I tend to see more as a…

[deleted]

Re: Your phone isn't secretly listening to you, but the truth is more disturbing

#36

Post by simonw »

Narkov wrote: post #33
Am4TIfIsER0ppos wrote: post #11

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…

What makes you think the raw audio stream needs to be sent anywhere. Modern phones are capable of doing keyword extraction on-device.

This conspiracy theory has been around for a lot longer than phone hardware has been capable of doing that.

Re: Your phone isn't secretly listening to you, but the truth is more disturbing

#37

Post by grishka »

diggernet wrote: post #3

> "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…

There is a permission to record the screen. It requires user consent and there's an icon in the status bar while it's being used. It's impossible to use this covertly.

What I believe the article is speaking about, is an app taking screenshots of its own windows. This is obviously possible and obviously requires no permissions whatsoever. Just make a screen-sized bitmap and do

    getWindow().getDecorView().draw(new Canvas(bitmap));
It does sound believable that third-party advertising/marketing/tracking SDKs, which many apps are chock full of, could be doing this.

Re: Your phone isn't secretly listening to you, but the truth is more disturbing

#38

Post by alganet »

Ferret7446 wrote: post #29
alganet wrote: post #14

There'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…

Sounds like the age old adage: if it's too good to be true, it is.

I also tend to be very skeptical towards popular sayings. Sometimes, they fail.

"true" in the sense you used here. Have you thought about what it means in that context?

We live in an age full of fear of missing out baits and reversed versions of such. There is no sense of "oh, this is good for me" that can be relied upon (implied in the original comment, you are going to find it), although there are sayings.

Re: Your phone isn't secretly listening to you, but the truth is more disturbing

#39

Post by daveguy »

grishka wrote: post #37
diggernet wrote: post #3

> "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…

There is a permission to record the screen. It requires user consent and there's an icon in the status bar while it's being used. It's impossible to use this covertly. What I believe the article is speaking about, is an app taking screenshots of its own windows. This is obviously possible and obviously requires no permissions whatsoever. Just make a screen-sized bitmap and do getWindow().getDecorView().draw(new Canva…

> It's impossible to use this covertly.

*Unless there's a zero-day that allows it.

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