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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

#171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s similar with the TSA facial recognition photos. “We delete your photo immediately” but what they don’t say is that they don’t delete the biometrics from that photo.

It's a crime that were compelled to concede our 4th Amendment rights in order to travel.

Amtrak and Greyhound do not require those biometrics, nor does renting a car and driving (or driving your own).

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

#172
post #126

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.

First thing I do is disable that feature on every TV I buy.

Second thing I do is block the TV access to internet after I do one firmware update.

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

#173
post #41
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's impossible to use this covertly. *Unless there's a zero-day that allows it.

If you're going to exploit a privilege escalation vulnerability from your app, why not just grab the most interesting parts of the /data partition while you're at it?

You could do both

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

#174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a crime that were compelled to concede our 4th Amendment rights in order to travel.

Amtrak and Greyhound do not require those biometrics, nor does renting a car and driving (or driving your own).

Some of us want to be able to cross the country in an afternoon, and not have to spend days on a slow, uncomfortable train to make the same trip. I don't think that's unreasonable.

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

#175

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…

While I think that audio recording is not a thing, your economic argument is not complete.

What if only the audio of "high value" targets is recorded. Meaning people who buy a lot of stuff. So it might be worthwhile to only record their sounds. Which will explain why random testing (usually with new/clean phones) is never successful in detecting a recording event.

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

#176
post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amtrak and Greyhound do not require those biometrics, nor does renting a car and driving (or driving your own).

Some of us want to be able to cross the country in an afternoon, and not have to spend days on a slow, uncomfortable train to make the same trip. I don't think that's unreasonable.

Certainly not unreasonable. But it does require you to commission your own transport subject to the rules that that private entity seeks to impose. Public entities which indiscriminately service residents and visitors of a given territory would obviate this requirement. But if you're in the US, good luck convincing taxpayers to agree to pay for that.

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

#177
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 what I’m talking about. I’m talking about microphone data picking up live conversation from people in the room.

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

#178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a crime that were compelled to concede our 4th Amendment rights in order to travel.

Same with drivers licenses and passports having a photo requirement too

The TSA photos are worse. They use a stereoscopic camera to take a 3d image of your head, which makes facial recognition up to 10x more accurate.

You can opt out, just say you do (and preferably cover the camera with your hat or bag)

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

#179
post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same with drivers licenses and passports having a photo requirement too

>drivers licenses and passports having a photo requirement too You're free to take the bus, or hire a chauffeur. A private pilots license doesn't have any pictures either.

For better or worse, we didn’t have to make such hard choices for the first 80 years of aviation. And Greyhound etc require photo ID these days as well

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

#180
post #126

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.

It is 1000% being done by smart TVs. They listen even when you are not using the voice remote. And the data is used to target ads (anywhere)
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