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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

#141

Post by huntsman »

keybored wrote: post #117

iPhone will tell me that I have a 25m drive to get to work. Literally why? I know where I work and how long it takes. I have done it enough times for it to learn what I do at 07:30 in the morning. Is it just flexing repeapetedly that it did a simple inference?

Some places, including the Bay Area where this feature was probably created, have significant variance in commute times depending on the traffic of the day so this can be a useful feature.

The commute time from SF to Cupertino is certainly not constant.

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

#142

Post by Ichthypresbyter »

trollied wrote: post #75
Ichthypresbyter wrote: post #64

>Not only does the system know exactly where you are at every moment, it knows who your friends are, what they are interested in, and who you are spending time with This actually makes sense of an anecdote a colleague uses to say that he thinks his phone is listening to him. I am a keen skier. He used to ski a lot, but hasn't been for several years. Around the start of ski season this year, we talked about my plans t…

You were probably in the same place using the same IP address, and both browsed - doesn’t matter which sites you both visited, the trackers have you. You might have shown him where you were going. Ad trackers thought “I’ll serve ski ads to people that were on that IP address because somebody else looked at xyz”.

How do IP addresses work with cell towers? The WiFi where I work doesn't allow personal devices to connect, but there's reasonable 5G.

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

#143

Post by LgWoodenBadger »

Spooky23 wrote: post #131
limbero wrote: post #98

This article reminds me of this excellent tongue-in-cheek piece of writing by Jonathan Zeller in McSweeney's: Calm Down—Your Phone Isn’t Listening to Your Conversations. It’s Just Tracking Everything You Type, Every App You Use, Every Website You Visit, and Everywhere You Go in the Physical World https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/calm-down-your-phone-isn...

There is so much time spent “debunking” audio recordings being shared with various entities it makes me more suspicious. Just like Facebook’s “we never sell your data (we just stalk you and sell ads using your data)”. I’m sure there’s a similar weasel excuse… “we never listen to your audio (but we do analyze it to improve quality assurance)”

It’s similar with the TSA facial recognition photos. “We delete your photo immediately” but what they don’t say is that they don’t delete the biometrics from that photo.

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

#144

Post by beeburrt »

Thorrez wrote: post #54
gretch wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ublock origin also has that ability

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

#145

Post by bsimpson »

LgWoodenBadger wrote: post #143
Spooky23 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is so much time spent “debunking” audio recordings being shared with various entities it makes me more suspicious. Just like Facebook’s “we never sell your data (we just stalk you and sell ads using your data)”. I’m sure there’s a similar weasel excuse… “we never listen to your audio (but we do analyze it to improve quality assurance)”

It’s similar with the TSA facial recognition photos. “We delete your photo immediately” but what they don’t say is that they don’t delete the biometrics from that photo.

It's a crime that were compelled to concede our 4th Amendment rights in order to travel.

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

#146

Post by pests »

9dev wrote: post #128
dist-epoch wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Phones today show in the status bar if the camera/microphone is active.

If you can’t trust the software, why would you trust the software? Am I supposed to rely on the hope that an attacker can take over some part of the OS, but not the one rendering a tiny blob in the status bar?

Apple has moved these indicators into their “exclaves” removing any control or influence from the OS / software running.

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

#147

Post by kurthr »

Spooky23 wrote: post #131
limbero wrote: post #98

This article reminds me of this excellent tongue-in-cheek piece of writing by Jonathan Zeller in McSweeney's: Calm Down—Your Phone Isn’t Listening to Your Conversations. It’s Just Tracking Everything You Type, Every App You Use, Every Website You Visit, and Everywhere You Go in the Physical World https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/calm-down-your-phone-isn...

There is so much time spent “debunking” audio recordings being shared with various entities it makes me more suspicious. Just like Facebook’s “we never sell your data (we just stalk you and sell ads using your data)”. I’m sure there’s a similar weasel excuse… “we never listen to your audio (but we do analyze it to improve quality assurance)”

I can just say that I knew an entrepreneur in early post Y2K who developed apps to track music played in clubs in SF for folks like ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC. They gave out "free" phones (these were the small expensive candybars and nice flip/slideups) to the influencers of the day. They compressed the audio for orthogonality, and had a huge number of hashes to match. If they got more than a few consecutive matching hashes at a location that wasn't paying royalties, they got an enforcement call.

So the idea that it takes a huge amount of computing resources, battery life, permissions, or bandwidth to do matching of keywords is hilarious. That's what "siri", "hey google", "alexa" etc are all doing 24 hours a day. Just add another hundred and report them once an hour. You don't need low latency. It's just another tool in the bag!

Of course the cat food example is bad, because if they weren't looking for that you wouldn't get a response. Who would be willing to pay big for clicks on cat food. Now bariatric surgery? DUI? HELOC? Those pay.

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

#149

Post by spunker540 »

bsimpson wrote: post #145
LgWoodenBadger wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s similar with the TSA facial recognition photos. “We delete your photo immediately” but what they don’t say is that they don’t delete the biometrics from that photo.

It's a crime that were compelled to concede our 4th Amendment rights in order to travel.

Same with drivers licenses and passports having a photo requirement too

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

#150

Post by rahen »

udev4096 wrote: post #109

> User permissions for a large number of apps were all enabled This says it all. Privacy is not by default, because of souless mega corporations, including HN which has an extremely invasive privacy policy. If you don't actively take steps to improve your privacy, they will continue to exploit it. Use GrapheneOS, it is the most private and secure mobile operating system. Nothing happens without your explicit permissi…

These discussions seem to come up frequently lately. Both /e/OS and Lineage with microG provide good enough privacy for those who can't afford high-end smartphones like the Google Pixels.

The ranking would probably be:

- Pixel on GrapheneOS

- Any Android smartphone on Lineage or /e/OS

- iPhone on recent iOS (the best choice for technically illiterate people)

People concerned with privacy should avoid stock Android phones. Additionally, software only goes so far in protecting privacy. Some hygiene is also required, especially with iOS, where everything is sent to iCloud by default and E2E encryption is either not enabled by default or not available at all in some countries.

When it comes to hardware, nothing really compares to the Titan and T2 chips found in Pixels and iPhones though.

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