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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

#131

Post by Spooky23 »

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)”

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

#132

Post by jeroenhd »

intended wrote: post #105

What rot. Here’s a simple experiment I ran and still works. Back in the day there was a truly ghastly add for ear wax removal that showed up on YouTube in the UK. In an experiment, and prank, I told two of my close friends about this, and how this horrid advert would kill my appetite when it came up. And then I made it a point to repeat “ear wax removal” loudly several times. Sure enough. A day later my dear friend m…

If what you're talking about is the source of the ad, why did you see the ad yourself? Were you shouting about ear wax removal at your phone?

There are millions of ways the adware running on your phones could've correlated your profile and spread the "infection" to your friend. Basic location access being the most important one, but sharing an IP address (your friends' WiFi?), being near the same Bluetooth beacons, having the same stored SSIDs, or mere coincidence that your friend saw the same ad targeting a wide demographic are much more probable than "my phone is listening 24/7".

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

#133

Post by intended »

jeroenhd wrote: post #132
intended wrote: post #105

What rot. Here’s a simple experiment I ran and still works. Back in the day there was a truly ghastly add for ear wax removal that showed up on YouTube in the UK. In an experiment, and prank, I told two of my close friends about this, and how this horrid advert would kill my appetite when it came up. And then I made it a point to repeat “ear wax removal” loudly several times. Sure enough. A day later my dear friend m…

If what you're talking about is the source of the ad, why did you see the ad yourself? Were you shouting about ear wax removal at your phone? There are millions of ways the adware running on your phones could've correlated your profile and spread the "infection" to your friend. Basic location access being the most important one, but sharing an IP address (your friends' WiFi?), being near the same Bluetooth beacons, h…

Sure. But its fun, and we can always replicate, just need a terrible ad.

Do note, this was tested in a park, so no shared WiFi, no Bluetooth beacons/devices. Also, this ad doesn’t/didn’t show up for others, ever.

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

#134

Post by jeroenhd »

xg15 wrote: post #79
NemoNobody wrote: post #74

That was a stupid study. Phones know if they are being used - the phones for 3 days around ads is meaningless. Tracking isn't all the time - that would be tough. They do record stuff when you doing certain things tho... It's not impossible at all, actually it's rather easy if you have access to their actual online activity too.

I think it would be interesting to try to do a "constructive debunking" - try to build a system yourself that uses a tampered phone and constantly records and transcribes all audio around it, without being obviously detectable by battery drain, CPU usage or network traffic. Variants/difficulty levels could be about: capture everything, or just keywords? What if you have a million keywords? Transcribe on-device or in…

Comparing a small project like that with the vast cyberstalking industry we call advertising today isn't going to yield similar results if the conspiracy theory is true. I can make a full tracker that drains the battery like crazy but that doesn't mean the smartypants who know when women are pregnant weeks before they do themselves can't come up with a system that's more efficient with acceptable data granularity.

Worst case scenario you succeed, and you've built yourself the torment nexus. If you publish your results, you'll have to publish the torment nexus to prove you don't have anything up your sleeve, making the world slightly worse for everyone else now that there's an accessible torment nexus ready to go. If you don't publish your torment nexus, nobody will believe you. Hell, if you succeed, you might've actually invented the thing! At best, the result of your success is knowing for sure you _could_ be spied upon any time, anywhere.

There's probably a much easier method to know for sure: work for advertising companies and learn their secrets.

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

#135

Post by jeroenhd »

simonw wrote: post #47
IggleSniggle wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DNS lookups are still frequently in the clear, and even if they're not, that just means you're trusting some DNS-over-HTTPS provider. The incentives are perverse. And of course whoever you are performing your search with, like, oh, an ad company like Google, Meta, or Facebook? They just might use that search data for something.

Exactly. Google or Meta can correlate behavioral data like this. Your ISP cannot do that by intercepting your searches. I care about accuracy when it comes to privacy conversations. I don't want people wasting their time on theories that aren't true when they should be focusing on the real issues at stake.

For what it's worth, the ISP may not know the search terms entered, but it can see "google.com" followed by "itchybuttcream.net" when people click the first results. The data will grow more granular over time as users click the second or even third result on Google.

On WiFi you control this risk can be mitigated (force DNS to your own server that uses ODoH or similar) but for most people ISPs are still sitting on data gold mines obtained from passively observing DNS.

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

#136

Post by NikkiA »

hyperpape wrote: post #94
mindcrash wrote: post #85

Way back then I exposed massive data collection from Twitter by Google which made it possible to plot locations at which you used Twitter in Google Maps by simply putting your Twitter handle into the search field. Somehow they knew about these locations even when you opted out of sharing location data with Twitter (I checked) -- so this was only possible by Twitter privately providing this information to Google. This…

It's really indefensible to post this without linking to your research to show people what you found.

Tweets were geolocated, with a 'see tweets near me' page until about 14 years ago, so it's entirely feasible that at least some of that infrastructure has survived the feature being removed.

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

#137

Post by xg15 »

jeroenhd wrote: post #134
xg15 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it would be interesting to try to do a "constructive debunking" - try to build a system yourself that uses a tampered phone and constantly records and transcribes all audio around it, without being obviously detectable by battery drain, CPU usage or network traffic. Variants/difficulty levels could be about: capture everything, or just keywords? What if you have a million keywords? Transcribe on-device or in…

Comparing a small project like that with the vast cyberstalking industry we call advertising today isn't going to yield similar results if the conspiracy theory is true. I can make a full tracker that drains the battery like crazy but that doesn't mean the smartypants who know when women are pregnant weeks before they do themselves can't come up with a system that's more efficient with acceptable data granularity. Wo…

Good points. Though I there are other options - e.g. build a proof-of-concept in a closed environment, e.g. as an university project, demonstrate it with a small (but still sufficiently large) group of people, so you have witnesses and publish a paper about it.

I know the prevailing wisdom is to always publish your code with a paper, to ensure maximum reproducibility, but this would be a valid case where you DON'T want to make reproducibility easy.

It's essentially the same dilemma that security research already has today: You want active research into vulnerabilities to be able to close them, at the same time you don't want people abusing your research to exploit them.

There is also the point of how feasible such a system would be to deploy on new phones. E.g. if you require a rooted phone and a custom Android image, chances are relatively slim your system will be used in the wild.

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

#138

Post by paulcole »

intended wrote: post #133
jeroenhd wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If what you're talking about is the source of the ad, why did you see the ad yourself? Were you shouting about ear wax removal at your phone? There are millions of ways the adware running on your phones could've correlated your profile and spread the "infection" to your friend. Basic location access being the most important one, but sharing an IP address (your friends' WiFi?), being near the same Bluetooth beacons, h…

Sure. But its fun, and we can always replicate, just need a terrible ad. Do note, this was tested in a park, so no shared WiFi, no Bluetooth beacons/devices. Also, this ad doesn’t/didn’t show up for others, ever.

I’m assuming like most friends you and your friends have nothing in common like interests, demographics, etc.?

And I’m assuming you also made them aware of other ads you’d seen recently so they could see if those showed up as well?

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

#139

Post by [deleted] »

xg15 wrote: post #137
jeroenhd wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comparing a small project like that with the vast cyberstalking industry we call advertising today isn't going to yield similar results if the conspiracy theory is true. I can make a full tracker that drains the battery like crazy but that doesn't mean the smartypants who know when women are pregnant weeks before they do themselves can't come up with a system that's more efficient with acceptable data granularity. Wo…

Good points. Though I there are other options - e.g. build a proof-of-concept in a closed environment, e.g. as an university project, demonstrate it with a small (but still sufficiently large) group of people, so you have witnesses and publish a paper about it. I know the prevailing wisdom is to always publish your code with a paper, to ensure maximum reproducibility, but this would be a valid case where you DON'T wa…

[deleted]

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

#140

Post by weare138 »

This fact is important, because if an app were accessing a microphone and sending the audio to a cloud server for analysis there would be detectable traces of data consumption.

Because that's not how it works and companies like Meta know this when misleading it's users about their privacy.

Speech-to-text transcription is handled on your device. They never transmit the raw audio, there's no need to. A compressed text transcription of your conversation would only generate a few kilobytes of data. You would never notice it.

And the mic needs to be active in order to receive legitimate voice commands. If it can respond to your voice, the microphone is on and listening. That's the only way it can work.

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