211–220 of 336 posts
One time my wife and I had a random conversation, utterly random, about cat hamster wheels. Like, why doesn't that exist? I got an ad for it the next day (it exists). I don't believe that my phone is not listening to me and I challenge you to choose a random word out of the dictionary and say it 100 times in front of your phone.
Was there a smart tv in the room with you during that conversation?
One time my wife and I had a random conversation, utterly random, about cat hamster wheels. Like, why doesn't that exist? I got an ad for it the next day (it exists). I don't believe that my phone is not listening to me and I challenge you to choose a random word out of the dictionary and say it 100 times in front of your phone.
The phone is listening. Services like Shazam and Alphonso are constantly fingerprinting audio from the mics and sending these fingerprints up for "matching". What are they matching against? Against key "content". To check if the fingerprints from your phone mic match the "content" they have to do some kind of nearest neighbor search. What if the fingerprints aren't super close but they're somewhat close? To "content"…
Shazam only records when you open it.
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)”
1. Your phone is gathering data that you don't realize that it gathers.
One of the biggest examples of this is real-time location data that is brokered by cellular carriers and sold as aggregated marketing data. You don't have to give your apps permission to do anything like that because your cellular carrier can get that data regardless of your phone's OS.
2. Your phone is gathering data that you gave it permission to gather, perhaps gathering it in a way you didn't think it would do.
For example, let's say you give an app permission to read your entire photo library so that you can upload a photo. But since you gave it that permission on the OS level, it might be uploading more images than you explicitly select. Another example used to be clipboard data before the OSes asked permission for use of the clipboard. One last example is text that you enter but do not submit.
Another big aspect of this is that people don't realize how these ad networks work in real time. It's not a slow thing for an advertising company to learn something about you and react accordingly, it can happen in a few short seconds.
2. The average person doesn't have any comprehension of how easy it is for data science practices to uncover information about you based on metadata that seems benign or that you don't know exists.
Most people don't understand how your behavior in an app can be used to tell the company things you like and dislike. The TikTok algorithm is a great example, it can tell what you like just by extremely subtle inputs, how you swipe, how long you watch the video. A lot of people don't realize how many things about them aren't particularly unique and how many preferences can be tied to a really specific persona that you fall into.
A real world example of all of this put together is that I was spending a lot of time browsing appliances because I just bought one, and I went to physically visit a friend. We were talking about my new appliance, and later they got ads for that specific appliance. So, the person's reaction would naturally be "it was listening to us!!" but in reality, it is more likely that our cellular carrier or carriers knew we were physically in the same place and reported that piece of information to some kind of data broker. Consider how there are a limited amount of cellular carriers, that location data may not have needed to even exit the cellular carrier to sell this data to someone. I.e., if we both have the same cellular carrier , our company already has that information and it isn't selling it to another company, it's perhaps just telling a data broker that Person A and Person B interact with each other.
Just note that I'm not claiming this is exactly how it all works as I'm not in that industry, but the general ideas here apply. The general takeaway is that literally recording audio with a microphone just isn't necessary to derive hyper-specific things about people.
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.
More generally, having your stuff screened for security to get on a commercial plane isn't a 4th amendment violation, the word "unreasonable" is right there in the amendment for a reason. You're in public in an enclosed flying object bringing your goods onto someone else's plane with 100+ strangers aboard, it is completely reasonable and necessary for the freedoms of everyone involved for the TSA to ensure that your stuff doesn't have dangerous objects aboard.
Don't forget that freedom also involves the freedom of other people to not be negatively impacted by you exercising your "freedom."
The phone is listening. Services like Shazam and Alphonso are constantly fingerprinting audio from the mics and sending these fingerprints up for "matching". What are they matching against? Against key "content". To check if the fingerprints from your phone mic match the "content" they have to do some kind of nearest neighbor search. What if the fingerprints aren't super close but they're somewhat close? To "content"…
> The phone is listening. Services like Shazam and Alphonso are constantly fingerprinting audio from the mics and sending these fingerprints up for "matching". Could you please provide a source for this? Just on the outset this sounds pretty wild if true. In the settings I do not see any permissions associated with Shazam, and only when I open it do I see the usual microphone indicator light up. I will say though, it…
Shazam has an "auto shazam" feature you can enable for constant background listening, since 2016 at least!
But look into Alphonso. That's like Shazam but explicitly for covert "content recognition" listening in microphone enabled apps. And it's old.
People who say it's too expensive or impractical to do bulk listening for ad-tech just aren't paying attention.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a crime that were compelled to concede our 4th Amendment rights in order to travel.
Literally not compelled in this case, the TSA signage says that the image capture is completely optional. More generally, having your stuff screened for security to get on a commercial plane isn't a 4th amendment violation, the word "unreasonable" is right there in the amendment for a reason. You're in public in an enclosed flying object bringing your goods onto someone else's plane with 100+ strangers aboard, it is…
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)
Doesnt android already have a "network" permission? On some roms you can enable it/disable it on install of the app even
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 p…