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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

#121

Post by wormius »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #115
quijoteuniv wrote: post #113

« The article posits that the uncanny relevance of some ads is due to sophisticated data collection methods. Companies analyze user behavior, online activity, and social interactions to predict interests, making it seem as though devices are listening. In essence, while smartphones may not be actively eavesdropping, the depth and breadth of data analytics employed by tech companies can create the illusion of such pra…

There has definitely been cases where I have not looked up an idea at all on my devices, only mentioned it in speech at home, and the highly targeted at shows up on mobile the next day or even that day. I would take the correlation theory if I actually left data to correlate.

This... I have had on at least 2 occasions explicitly where I know for a fact I hadn't searched or looked up this topic on any system, and I brought up a topic and talked to my roommate and within the next 12 hours FB served me ads or content relating to the topic.

I get the idea that an "always on" monitoring system would be problematic (even if you discarded the data itself and only retained/filtered relevant bits for a short period of time). But ... I have no other way to explain events like this.

I suppose some weird correlation of user has x,y,z and they searched for a,b,c in the past, and other users search for D, then we show D at exactly the 12 hour time they searched for it.

Yes I am aware of recency bias, and how perhaps it was shown other times without recognizing it. But it's... hard to shake that feeling, and I am (well less so now) a skeptic...

If it's anything it's like AI that's eerily creepy like "intelligence" but not it, just like this is "like listening" but isn't. Both use statistical models to do creepy ass shit.

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

#122

Post by dist-epoch »

blurbleblurble wrote: post #107

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.

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

#123

Post by monkeyfun »

mindcrash wrote: post #101
monkeyfun wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you link to some of it? Sounds extremely interesting!

See screenshot: https://xcancel.com/kpcuk/status/601451439215353857 Do note that at first it was assumed just Chrome was involved, but then people started to message me that they also saw it when using the apps, Firefox, Safari and other browsers aswell.

Thanks!

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

#124

Post by akimbostrawman »

simonw wrote: post #34
ivape wrote: post #15

Doesn't it have to listen to everything to capture the wake word "hey siri"? How else is it done?

The iPhone has dedicated low-power on-device hardware that is trained to pick up "Hey Siri" exclusively. It only wakes up the rest of the device and captures additional audio after that wake word has been triggered. https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/voice-trigger https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/hey-siri

>pick up "Hey Siri" exclusively

until it isn't. anything apple is proprietary and any feature could silently change at any time even for only specific devices/user.

https://web.archive.org/web/20250415140321/https://www.thegu...

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

#125

Post by o11c »

VerdisQuo5678 wrote: post #111
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)

Doesnt android already have a "network" permission? On some roms you can enable it/disable it on install of the app even

No, it has a "full network" permission. It's not at all difficult to bypass it if you control both ends.

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

#126

Post by derefr »

danielrhodes wrote: post #93

People seem to ignore the cost and accuracy aspects of a phone listening to you 24/7. At least with today’s constraints, it is highly unlikely to be happening. First, the cost to transcribe audio is not free. It is computationally expensive. Any ad network or at scale service would not be able to afford it, especially in orgs where they are concerned about unit economics. Secondly, the accuracy would be horrible. Mos…

For all of these reasons, audio snooping is much more likely to be something done by wired, stationary devices that maybe have a decent amount of RAM + a fair bit of usually-idle processing capacity (to run the transcription model locally and just push the resulting text), and which are expected to draw a decent amount of power and use the Internet at vaguely-arbitrary times.

Like a smart TV, for example.

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

#127

Post by twoodfin »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #115
quijoteuniv wrote: post #113

« The article posits that the uncanny relevance of some ads is due to sophisticated data collection methods. Companies analyze user behavior, online activity, and social interactions to predict interests, making it seem as though devices are listening. In essence, while smartphones may not be actively eavesdropping, the depth and breadth of data analytics employed by tech companies can create the illusion of such pra…

There has definitely been cases where I have not looked up an idea at all on my devices, only mentioned it in speech at home, and the highly targeted at shows up on mobile the next day or even that day. I would take the correlation theory if I actually left data to correlate.

But why did you mention it at all?

That’s the point the article makes: That some idea is on your mind is essentially always correlated with any number of signals, some of which are visible or inferable by adtech.

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

#128

Post by 9dev »

dist-epoch wrote: post #120
ThinkBeat wrote: post #77

At the time I am typing this, the title on the page is: ""Your phone isn’t secretly listening to you, but the truth is more disturbing"" Which is presently also the title on this post. Then as I read it becomes clear that it is merely focusing on Facebook. However the confusion that may stem from "Your phone isn’t secretly listening to you" The blog post never attempts to establish that your phone is not listening to…

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?

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

#129

Post by BenjiWiebe »

wormius wrote: post #121
kjkjadksj wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There has definitely been cases where I have not looked up an idea at all on my devices, only mentioned it in speech at home, and the highly targeted at shows up on mobile the next day or even that day. I would take the correlation theory if I actually left data to correlate.

This... I have had on at least 2 occasions explicitly where I know for a fact I hadn't searched or looked up this topic on any system, and I brought up a topic and talked to my roommate and within the next 12 hours FB served me ads or content relating to the topic. I get the idea that an "always on" monitoring system would be problematic (even if you discarded the data itself and only retained/filtered relevant bits…

Did the roommate use the same WiFi network as you, and your roommate used the WiFi to research it?

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

#130

Post by jeroenhd »

fzzzy wrote: post #78
maxlybbert wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt there's a specific "ability to send surreptitious screen shots to developer" permission. It must be a combination of permissions: one for making network connections, another for capturing the screen without making it obvious to the user, etc.

For apps that want to send their own screens to third parties, there's no permission needed or possible. The app is drawing the content to the screen. It knows what the content is.

If you're trying to track user information (notifications, actual timezone/language, battery level, VPN usage, etc) you can use screenshots of the current screen and open keyboard. You can also see stuff from other apps if the user is using split screen modes or has chat bubbles open. Apps can otherwise only access the data they render.

The research talks about thousands of apps but I do wonder how many of these are apps people use every day and how many are Chinese clones of freemium games and other shitware with a fraction of daily users. All we know from public app store data is the number of "downloads" and even that is distributed as a range. I doubt these 19000 apps were found by doing a survey on what people actually had on their phones.

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