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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

#151

Post by LeafItAlone »

kurthr wrote: post #147
Spooky23 wrote: post #131

Earlier 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…

>That's what "siri", "hey google", "alexa" etc are all doing 24 hours a day.

You might have just convinced me that the “phone is listening” is total bunk, because these dedicated devices are just so bad at recognizing the very specific, short, phrases when explicitly directed at them that I can’t imagine they are listening for much more. Listening to my in-laws try to activate their Alexa and Google Homes is something the CIA might consider for their next torture method.

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

#152

Post by badc0ffee »

jeroenhd wrote: post #130
fzzzy wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Is that true, that these apps can capture screenshots of the notification area/clock/chat bubbles?

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

#153

Post by lud_lite »

benlivengood wrote: post #22

The thing is, it's not even people doing the correlations. Just like transformers can learn most of human knowledge just by trying to predict tokens, I would not be surprised if the ad-serving machine learning systems have learned about people in similar detail. State of the art about 10 years ago was 4 9s of accuracy predicting click-through rates from the available context (features for user profile, current websit…

> 4 9s of accuracy predicting click-through rates

Having a hard time parsing what that means.

Lets say the CTR for 1000000 impressions of an add is 24.5898% and the ML predicts 25.1926%. How many 9s of accuracy is that?

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

#154

Post by wrs »

EasyMark wrote: post #104
microflash wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We’ve reached the state where you can safely presume anything “smart” is violating your privacy.

yeah, I liked the simplicity of having things on my tv, but I gave up and got an apple tv box. I was getting way too many "I was just talking about that!" ads on some of the "free" services i was watching old tv shows and movies on. I'm a pretty frugal guy for the most part but buying a separate box that doesn't sell everything you do and say to advertisers is worth it.

According to the paper, your TV may send snapshots even when it’s in a “dumb” HDMI input mode. So make sure it’s not on the network at all.

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

#155

Post by gruez »

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.

Sounds like they showing geoip for tweets/profiles?

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

#156

Post by ThinkBeat »

9dev wrote: post #128
dist-epoch wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I think Snowden worked with someone to create a bulky, apparatus that you could put your iphone into and it would measure if any signals at all were coming from it.

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

#157

Post by bentt »

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.

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

#158

Post by gruez »

udev4096 wrote: post #109

> User permissions for a large number of apps were all enabled This says it all. Privacy is not by default, because of souless mega corporations, including HN which has an extremely invasive privacy policy. If you don't actively take steps to improve your privacy, they will continue to exploit it. Use GrapheneOS, it is the most private and secure mobile operating system. Nothing happens without your explicit permissi…

>including HN which has an extremely invasive privacy policy

???

What information are they getting their hands on in the first place, aside from geoip data?

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

#159

Post by gruez »

pests wrote: post #146
9dev wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Apple has moved these indicators into their “exclaves” removing any control or influence from the OS / software running.

Source? AFAIK they only have hardware indicators for webcams on cams, and it's not used for microphones.

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

#160

Post by gruez »

badc0ffee wrote: post #152
jeroenhd wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Is that true, that these apps can capture screenshots of the notification area/clock/chat bubbles?

Probably not, but all the information can be obtained via system APIs. There's no shortage of "system info" apps that show all manner of information about your phone (including battery level and network status), and don't require any special permission prompts.
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