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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

#301

Post by Aurornis »

kurthr wrote: post #284
Aurornis wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 fingerprinte…

I agree it's a different algorithm, but not a higher powered one. You don't need to know context to get HELOC, Bariatric, or DUI. You also don't need 95%+ accuracy for 95% of the population. You're just doing advertising.

Doing 100 different matches updated frequently is an entirely different problem than matching a single wake word that isn’t changing.

Regardless, this would require so much coordination, network traffic, and on-device code that could be reverse engineered that you’re implying that nobody has every found a hint of it existing and no employees of these companies have ever leaked any hints of it existing.

It’s very much in the domain of conspiracy theories.

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

#302

Post by Aurornis »

theoreticalmal wrote: post #292
Aurornis wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Isn’t it more likely it’s not a coincidence though?

How often does someone look at their phone over 5-6 years?

Having one incidence where you’re talking about something and then you also see that something on your phone out of 2000 days of using a phone is definitely more likely to be coincidence.

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

#303

Post by sanswork »

intended wrote: post #296
sanswork wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or you told your friend about this horrible ad and they looked it up without thinking and got added to the retargeting list.

She wouldn't because she has much better things to do in life. Matter of fact, its an ad you would never look at, just because you don't even have a need for it.

She just spent time in the park listening to you shout about it for an extended period. And she's on YouTube enough for her to be annoyed by it so it's not like she doesn't have the opportunity.

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

#304

Post by paulcole »

intended wrote: post #295
paulcole wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was kidding… Of course you and your friends share some demographics and interests—- making it unsurprising that you’d get similar ads. > The question is, have you found a horrid ad yet? Side note, this was in the UK The question is, why does it have to be a horrid ad? Does the phone only listen for things about horrid ads to show you? You have to know that your phone isn’t listening to you right? That it’s just a c…

man, without getting into the specifics, the vast difference in medical habits because of gender, activity levels, and the fact that I had an unusual condition which caused me to look into this, ITS EARWAX removal for fs sake. What, are you saying that there is an ASMR or god knows what community that focuses on ear wax? I never got those ads in my LIFE, until I had a medical need. Have you? >why does it have to be a…

> I never got those ads in my LIFE, until I had a medical need. Have you?

Believe it or not I don’t have thephotographic recall of the ads that I see that you seem to possess.

> You could try for adult teletubbies

Why don’t we both try this and report back in 24 hours when our listening phones have had the time to work their magic.

> And yet this is not enough.

That is correct. Your phone is not listening to you.

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

#305

Post by brody_hamer »

anenefan wrote: post #81
steve_adams_86 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something I discovered when going down this rabbit hole is that if you had that conversation in your house and your visitors have access to your wifi, it may be that they performed the search without you knowing, and your ISP connected that data to you and sold it (as they do).

His phone would have to be running a hotspot for any visitors (in many parts of the rural area in my locale, mobile data is it for the internet) but if any visitors were with the same carrier network, visitors could have searched. However it's entirely improbable any of his buddies would be on their phone while they're there unless it was a legit interest. Secondly this is stuff from what I gathered, some of is stuff…

I’m basing my reasoning on the assumption that advertisers (such as google, meta, tictoc) are aware of your location at all times. (See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42909921)

Based on this assumption, it wouldn’t be necessary for any of your friends to search for the topic during an evening together.. it would simply be enough that one of the friends showed some interest in the topic prior to the hangout (searched for something, read a blog, stopped for too long on an instagram reel).

Then, during an evening together, your phones all share the same location (and possibly movement). That’s enough for advertisers to suspect there’s some relationship there. Enough of an association to attempt an ad placement (or instagram reel) for a particular obscure topic.

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

#306

Post by afiori »

hammock wrote: post #177
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...

The article omits a real, serious source of microphone data though: your smart TV. I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that my TV (a Toshiba Fire TV, although I’m sure many do it) is listening to every conversation I have within earshot, even when I am not using the voice remote, and selling it to ad networks. And of course it is also doing screen recognition (the kind of stuff OP article mentions), but that is not wha…

Another source of audio data is the accelerometer, which often has laxer permissions

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

#307

Post by afiori »

Aurornis wrote: post #274
alpaca128 wrote: post #201

Earlier 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…

> 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 s…

On the other hand it might point to something more serious, that the level of tracking Facebook and Google use lets them loosely predict what you are going to think about.

So maybe the microphones are safe and pristine, but we should be worried and appalled the same as if they were actually listening.

I like to think about it sorta thermodynamically: consider your behaviour under the blurred lens of interests, what you buy, what you read, how you react to news, etc, in this model humana have, let's say, n bits of entropy; how many of those bits can Facebook decode?

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

#308

Post by afiori »

Aurornis wrote: post #302
theoreticalmal wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t it more likely it’s not a coincidence though?

How often does someone look at their phone over 5-6 years? Having one incidence where you’re talking about something and then you also see that something on your phone out of 2000 days of using a phone is definitely more likely to be coincidence.

How often do you think this person did experiments? It is a study with n=1 but the unrelated metric of how many times something else happens does not influence the likelihood of a false positive

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

#309

Post by afiori »

lodovic wrote: post #243
dangus wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a small list of reasons why it needs to be "debunked:" 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…

This assumes that companies such as TikTok control their timeline up to the individual post, perfectly analyzed in order to extract your unique traits, and they have specifics ads lined up for you. Where - in my view - their timeline is just a bunch of random submissions. TikTik is just trying to sell ads and will try anything to match your profile to one of their active ad compaigns so they can bill their client mor…

Nope, there is no need for this.

Think of it like an attacker (the app) would breach a cryptographic target (you and every other user of the app). The attacker starts to send random messages or try to mess around with signatures/tokens/APIs and listens for errors, timeouts, spam filters, possible side channels until it learns enough to figure out how to predict how the system will behave and maybe even to influence it.

Both in the analogy and with the timeline out does not matter if you mix a few random messages between a test and another as long as you comprehensively keep track of how the target behaves.

Every interaction is a data point, some data points are more useful than others but none is useless

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

#310

Post by wsve »

DontchaKnowit wrote: post #270
dist-epoch wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

And you think that wouldnt be disabled by malware that can turn your microphone on at will? Lmfao

That seems unlikely, the code to do that would be part of the OS or maybe even part of the hardware, not really trivial things to hack.

Plus, what could a hacker really do with voice recordings that they couldn't do more easily with keylogging? It's not exactly common for people to say their credit card info or passwords aloud, much more common to type it

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