181–190 of 336 posts
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.
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)”
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.
> "Apps were automatically taking screenshots of themselves and sending them to third parties. In one case, the app took video of the screen activity and sent that information to a third party.” > Out of over 17,000 Android apps examined, more than 9,000 had potential permissions to take screenshots. And a number of apps were found to actively be doing so, taking screenshots and sending them to third-party sources. W…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 somethin…
Based on the lawsuit and other sources, my guess is the phones build a word cloud that is then used for targeted advertising. Apple at el aren’t recording and selling the actual audio… but they are listening.
(1) https://www.reuters.com/legal/apple-pay-95-million-settle-si...
I’ve said it before and will reinforce it cause once again no one brings it up in the comments. People report the phone is listening to them because they talked about and now they are seeing ads for it. What they may not realise is they are talking about because subliminally the ad worked they just never noticed it. Now they have. The ad was there first like a little virus worming in your brain and then you bring it…
https://www.reuters.com/legal/apple-pay-95-million-settle-si...
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...
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…
Building a word cloud would be trivial and with minimal battery impact