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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

#51

Post by number6 »

simonw wrote: post #31
edgyquant wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

A swan can't stop a hurricane

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

#52

Post by zzo38computer »

wiseowise wrote: post #10

> There is no easy way to close this privacy opening Sure there is. Hide screenshot taking behind permission and slap down hard apps that refuse to operate without them.

All I/O (including timing, date/time, internet, and everything else) should be behind permissions (although some may be permitted by default, they should still be overridable). Furthermore, all I/O should allow the user to program proxy capabilities (which can be used for testing error conditions, as well as for privacy and security, and for finer permissions, and logging, and other stuff).

However, if an app wants to make a screenshot of itself, then it could do so by emulation of itself (so no permission is needed), as long as everything it displays is rendered by its own code rather than calling other functions in the system to do so.

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

#53

Post by alganet »

simonw wrote: post #31
edgyquant wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

It is irrelevant. The suggestion that spying is for advertisement makes no difference.

That idea only exists to create fake two-dimensional anti-capilist rethoric, which is a rethoric easier to put down than the fact that privacy does not exist anymore.

So, I am supposed to do this. To "correct you" and look very lunatic.

It serves, however, a very specific goal. First, it cannot be copied en masse. If this behavior is copied (even as a meme), it implies doom to the more easier to defeat anti-capitalist rethoric and the birth of a true 3D anti-capitalist rethoric. It can only be mocked (smoking guy pointing to a conspiracy board), but that mockery is getting real serious real fast now.

Can I dive deeper into the mechanics of how this is gonna go?

We had so many chances, of doing good. You all had so many chances.

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

#54

Post by Thorrez »

gretch wrote: post #45
o11c wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It says "screenshots of themselves". The application is responsible for rendering the screen in the first place so it fundamentally doesn't need a permission. Now, what could reasonably be a permission is "access the internet", but our overlords don't approve of that thought. (Contrast this to web pages, which do not render themselves and thus can sensibly be blocked from screenshotting)

I mean yeah technically the website can’t screenshot, but it can do many functionally equivalent things. For example, it can capture the entire DOM and send it off, including the contents of input fields that have not been submitted. That DOM capture can be replayed on a browser to show what the user sees. So what’s the difference?

Well, blocking javascript would stop that. Noscript is a thing that some people use.

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

#55

Post by simonw »

Supermancho wrote: post #49
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…

Knowing how digital advertising works, it's more likely that a payload is delivered to the phone in some app or by os or by browser that has a dictionary of keywords paid for to be associated with specific ad campaigns. If the device detects that term (via sound, search, or media) it triggers a message home as an analytics to target you and your device now calls for those campaigns.

If it works like that, why aren't the app companies describing exactly how it works to advertisers in order to earn their business?

They describe how everything else they do works in great detail if you're someone who buys ads.

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

#56

Post by simonw »

number6 wrote: post #51
simonw wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

A swan can't stop a hurricane

OK wow that actually fits here. https://simonwillison.net/2025/Apr/23/meaning-slop/

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

#57

Post by simonw »

Supermancho wrote: post #50
simonw wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The Chrome Browser can transcribe audio into text, with what I consider good accuracy. It's well out of the realm of a conspiracy theory when it's been demonstrable for a couple decades.

Don't forget energy usage. The phone would need to be on high power mode all the time to run those kinds of algorithms. There's a reason "Hey Siri" has dedicated low-power hardware - it means it can work without burning through the battery.

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

#58

Post by wzdd »

marcusb wrote: post #8
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…

> 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. I had an experience like this several years ago. I was having dinner with a customer, and one of the guys brought up this story about how he went to school with someone who got caught cheating on Who Wan…

It could also be that YouTube started recommending this video to people for whatever reason, which was why it was on this guy’s mind.

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

#59

Post by fmajid »

At one of my previous companies we made a moderately popular mobile app SDK that app developers would embed in their apps. We were approached by a company that claimed they had a MIT developed (or was it Bell Labs?) audio recognition technology similar to Shazam, but orders of magnitude more efficient, that would be used to recognize audio from ads and record when a user was exposed to a TV or radio ad for tracking purposes.

I don’t remember the name, that was at least 10 years ago before Apple started enforcing permissions on microphone access and showing an orange dot, but they wanted to do a revenue-share deal in exchange for us quietly bundling their SDK inside ours.

Needless to say we turned them down so we never learned more or tested the veracity of their claims, but there are some really sleazy companies out there. Modern smartphones have sufficient horsepower to do the audio processing on-device so the argument that this would show up in network traffic does not hold.

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

#60

Post by Am4TIfIsER0ppos »

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.

You need to know what keywords to listen for before discarding the audio data. An advertising giant might know but a government doesn't.
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