Yes my phone is listening. To almost every word, and using that information to serve me ads. I would bet my entire net worth on that, as I'm 100% certain.
Your phone isn't secretly listening to you, but the truth is more disturbing
271–280 of 336 posts
Re: Your phone isn't secretly listening to you, but the truth is more disturbing
#272Earlier quoted context omitted.
Image capture is optional, your other option is something possibly unpleasant and may make you miss your flight
That is not the other option at all. The other option is essentially just the traditional screening process. > Standard ID credential verification is in place – Travelers who decide not to participate in the use of facial recognition technology will receive an alternative ID credential check by the TSO at the podium. The traveler will not experience any negative consequences for choosing not to participate. There is…
> The other option is essentially just the traditional screening process.
I know that, and you know that, but you have to convince the average traveler that nothing bad will happen if they say no. In the mind of the average traveler, it’s safer to just say “okay” to whatever the TSA wants. There needs to be some kind of neutral ombudsman to placate travelers’ fears of reprisal for opting to preserve their rights.
Re: Your phone isn't secretly listening to you, but the truth is more disturbing
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
What kind of keywords would you imagine provide an actual, profitable advantage to an ad company? I can't imagine "computer 2", "fridge 3", "egg 4" being all that valuable compared to.. literally my whole browser history and my reaction to other ads/videos (I looked at that short for 10s vs immediately skipping builds a very nice profile). And now add i18n in the picture - even the main AI assistant products suck in…
Low, even very low, return of value is not no return. Therefore, given they make some return, and it has some value, that's enough for them to do it. Ads and ad data are two sides. We are often not the target for an ad, but our data provides stats about how an ad is performing. If more consumers are influenced to spend $1000 on something than not, then it's worth if for them. It's an aggregate cost benefit analysis n…
Return of value is with respect to the costs of it. A lawsuit/brand value loss from illegally recording every communication you make (which we would have definite proof if it were happening, given that there our more phones than people on Earth) would far outweigh the tiny benefit (if any? I'm not convinced you would get any extra information in the general case compared to the tracking of the regular usage of your phone)
Also, I don't see the relevance of your second paragraph. The baseline is not "no ads", the baseline is "ads supported by all the tracking that Meta/Google currently does".
Re: Your phone isn't secretly listening to you, but the truth is more disturbing
#274Earlier 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)”
> There is so much time spent “debunking” audio recordings being shared Not really. 99% of the time it's someone claiming that it happens. And it's always an anecdote, never clear proof that it happened. Let alone that it happened because of the audio and not web activity. And that the conversation was actually the cause for the ad and not the other way around. Is it technically possible? Sure. But if so many people…
> Not really. 99% of the time it's someone claiming that it happens.
It’s never packet captures, reverse engineering of the app, or one of the tens of thousands of employees working for these companies blowing the whistle.
Nobody can even show that their phone app is using background CPU when they talk, utilizing the microphone, or sending packets from that app. All of which are in reach for anyone with Android and some basic skills.
It’s always an anecdote about someone who said something out loud and then saw ad for it later. That’s it. That’s the entire basis for the conspiracy. Yet it persists.
It’s a very good litmus test for people who don’t understand technology as well as they claim to.
Re: Your phone isn't secretly listening to you, but the truth is more disturbing
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There is so much time spent “debunking” audio recordings being shared Not really. 99% of the time it's someone claiming that it happens. And it's always an anecdote, never clear proof that it happened. Let alone that it happened because of the audio and not web activity. And that the conversation was actually the cause for the ad and not the other way around. Is it technically possible? Sure. But if so many people…
I observed a clean experiment that showed a friend’s Google Pixel phone listening to us and adjusting news stories on Google app’s home screen. However: — IIRC the phone was unlocked, — this only affected the news feed, and — this was 5–6 years ago. We 1) noted how Google app shows some selection of news after opening, 2) talked clearly for a minute about a very random and conspicuous topic in presence of the unlocke…
This was a coincidence.
That’s why it’s something you observed one time 5-6 years ago, not something that happens repeatedly in a testable way.
Re: Your phone isn't secretly listening to you, but the truth is more disturbing
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
lol so it's getting that bad. Assigning meaning to random phrases is BS. If it keeps on going it'll start attributing meaning to misspelled words. LLMs are only as good or bad as they are created - or their function / parameters? Google got real sad mid 00s - it's all about the money now isn't it. Topic recently [1] re Google A.I. BSing. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43748171 ('Epistemological Slop: Lies,…
Isn't this how proverbs come to life? "Bobs your uncle" - all these proverbs are made up...
Yes people are creative and time to time come up with phrases, comments or sayings that catch on. It's how popular jokes start out as well.
I'm not sure if you first thought it up or just repeated the term - as I see simonw meaning-slop link was posted as a separate post at HN 2 days ago.
However it's certainly bad when some piss poor LLM starts flogging some nonce as a meaning. For example when using less well documented idioms or terminology - google sadly isn't that great any more at finding stuff, so ... not good if it just makes stuff up instead. New creative stuff, sometimes people can get the gist of it but all the same no one wants the likes of a search assistant vomiting all over it.
Re: Your phone isn't secretly listening to you, but the truth is more disturbing
#277Earlier 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)”
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 hash…
> So the idea that it takes a huge amount of computing resources, battery life, permissions, or bandwidth to do matching of keywords is hilarious.
I also knew an entrepreneur who tried this same thing, but with TV shows.
Fingerprinting specific audio is a different algorithm problem entirely. You only need to sample a short section of audio every few minutes and then process the spectral peaks, which are fingerprinted against a database of known samples.
This is how apps that name a song work. It’s not the same as constant full speech to text.
But you’re skipping the key part of the story: They had to hand out phones specifically for this because you can’t get constant audio background processing from installing an app on a modern phone OS without the user noticing.
> That's what "siri", "hey google", "alexa" etc are all doing 24 hours a day.
Again, wake word monitoring is a different algorithm. Monitoring for a wake word is a much simpler problem. They’re not processing everything you say, concerting it to text, and then doing a string compare for the wake word. It’s a very tiny learning model trained to match on a very specific phrase, which might run at a hardware level.
Re: Your phone isn't secretly listening to you, but the truth is more disturbing
#278At 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…
I guess hackernews has an aversion to this topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43809203
Re: Your phone isn't secretly listening to you, but the truth is more disturbing
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
Different person here, but Apple has tried it multiple times in different ways. They started in ios14, iOS 17 got new Secure Exclave path that (A18, M4). Search for “Secure Indicator Light”. Also searching for “Secure Exclave” will reveal some fun reads.
That’s cool, but on iPhones, there is no indicator LIGHT. Only part of the screen indicates it. And if they can trigger stuff on your phone, maybe a daemon that accidentally covers that part with black also appears, and you wouldn’t notice.
Nope, it interfaces directly with the display driver and overwrites anything from user land or the OS.
Re: Your phone isn't secretly listening to you, but the truth is more disturbing
#280One 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.
A few times per year I similarly have a conversation with my wife at night (lastly about a hair type) and the next morning a corresponding ad was presented at her at Facebook (shampoo). Only her Android phone was at the room (open, logged in Facebook in Chrome, no app). I definitely believe they hear us but they trigger the action with care and selectively, so as not to get caught (eg to low tech people, when the ad…
> but they trigger the action with care and selectively, so as not to get caught (eg to low tech people
That would be an awful plan. Low tech people are the ones who most frequently complain of this because they have no basis to think it wouldn’t happen.
> I am astonished that nobody had ever done a reverse engineering research yet.
They have. It’s described in the article.