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Company Says It Uses Your Phones Mic to Serve Ads for Facebook, Google, etc.

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Re: Company Says It Uses Your Phones Mic to Serve Ads for Facebook, Google, etc.

#21

Post by Intralexical »

pcstl wrote: post #17
Intralexical wrote: post #15

With billions of phones in circulation, and rumors of audio eavesdropping being quite common, why has apparently nobody ever run a typical smartphone with network logging and memory snapshotting to actually check what all these widely popular apps are doing?

People have. And it's always shown that no apps are opening your mics when you're not using the app, and that if you're using the app they generally will only open your mic when it makes sense to do so. These companies are most likely lying or exaggerating their capabilities. Since so many people believe in audio eavesdropping anyway, it's in their interest to make the buyers of their software believe they're much mo…

> People have. And it's always shown that no apps are opening your mics when you're not using the app, and that if you're using the app they generally will only open your mic when it makes sense to do so.

Can you link to people who have checked?

I had a couple of the last BlackBerry phones, that ran Android. They came with this "DTEK" [1] app that monitored when apps accessed your phone's sensors. And I remember every time I checked it, the various social media apps had all been caught snooping something like hundreds of times a day­. This was happening even when I didn't use the apps, so there definitely didn't seem to be any reason that "makes sense" to do it. Not sure if it was microphone, or maybe just location or something, but audio eavesdropping isn't really out-of-character based on that.

1: https://docs.blackberry.com/en/apps-for-android/dtek-by-blac...

https://crackberry.com/how-control-your-mobile-privacy-black...

Re: Company Says It Uses Your Phones Mic to Serve Ads for Facebook, Google, etc.

#22

Post by kmeisthax »

I'm a firm "ad audio spying denialist", but that's mainly an "uhm, ACKTUALLY" kind of denial. Ad firms absolutely do spy, but probably not through the use of microphone audio... mainly because that's way too much information for what they actually want to do. That and every mobile OS shows very obvious warnings whenever media capture is being used, and I'm not aware of a sanctioned way to defeat those that isn't a 0day exploit that would get caught, patched, and banned off the App Store / Google Play in short order.

What I suspect is actually going on is the boring ol kind of location tracking and fingerprinting. Locations, searches, and call history. Metadata, in the language of surveillance law. Of course, the cruel joke of surveillance law[0] is that metadata is content: you can infer the content of a conversation from the circumstances of which it took place. Three-letter agencies rely on the fact that nobody understands this, and so do advertisers (of whom they pay money for data from).

[0] I'm resisting calling it the "holographic principle of surveillance" on principle.

Re: Company Says It Uses Your Phones Mic to Serve Ads for Facebook, Google, etc.

#23

Post by tqi »

Intralexical wrote: post #15

With billions of phones in circulation, and rumors of audio eavesdropping being quite common, why has apparently nobody ever run a typical smartphone with network logging and memory snapshotting to actually check what all these widely popular apps are doing?

Because when they do and it and the answer invariably comes back "no", it's not considered "newsworthy" so journalists don't give a shit.

Re: Company Says It Uses Your Phones Mic to Serve Ads for Facebook, Google, etc.

#24

Post by Intralexical »

tqi wrote: post #23
Intralexical wrote: post #15

With billions of phones in circulation, and rumors of audio eavesdropping being quite common, why has apparently nobody ever run a typical smartphone with network logging and memory snapshotting to actually check what all these widely popular apps are doing?

Because when they do and it and the answer invariably comes back "no", it's not considered "newsworthy" so journalists don't give a shit.

They can still post the evidence on their blog or whatever.

Re: Company Says It Uses Your Phones Mic to Serve Ads for Facebook, Google, etc.

#25

Post by WillAdams »

kmeisthax wrote: post #22

I'm a firm "ad audio spying denialist", but that's mainly an "uhm, ACKTUALLY" kind of denial. Ad firms absolutely do spy, but probably not through the use of microphone audio... mainly because that's way too much information for what they actually want to do. That and every mobile OS shows very obvious warnings whenever media capture is being used, and I'm not aware of a sanctioned way to defeat those that isn't a 0d…

For a good example of this, with a bit of the underlying mathematics see:

https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013/06/09/using-metad...

Re: Company Says It Uses Your Phones Mic to Serve Ads for Facebook, Google, etc.

#26

Post by skybrian »

bag_boy wrote: post #16
skybrian wrote: post #6

I don’t see confirmation of anything in particular here, other than some ad sales company made some rather vague and dubious claims. Does anyone know what specifically they were talking about and if there’s anything to it?

From a Cox VP of Digital Strategy's blog post: "Our technology is on the cutting edge of voice data processing. We can identify buyers based on casual conversations in real time. It may seem like black magic, but it's not-it's AI. The growing ability to access microphone data on devices like smartphones and tablets enables our technology partner to aggregate and analyze voice data during pre-purchase conversations."…

Since we don’t know which partner it is and we don’t have any other proof that shows that they’re not just lying about what the tech can do (or confused), that’s more of a salesperson’s unverifiable tall tale than a smoking gun.

Some reporter would have to dig deeper to get to the bottom of it.

Re: Company Says It Uses Your Phones Mic to Serve Ads for Facebook, Google, etc.

#29

Post by synicalx »

kmeisthax wrote: post #22

I'm a firm "ad audio spying denialist", but that's mainly an "uhm, ACKTUALLY" kind of denial. Ad firms absolutely do spy, but probably not through the use of microphone audio... mainly because that's way too much information for what they actually want to do. That and every mobile OS shows very obvious warnings whenever media capture is being used, and I'm not aware of a sanctioned way to defeat those that isn't a 0d…

> That and every mobile OS shows very obvious warnings whenever media capture is being used

Does that show up with the always-on "hey siri/google" listening?

Re: Company Says It Uses Your Phones Mic to Serve Ads for Facebook, Google, etc.

#30

Post by pcstl »

Intralexical wrote: post #21
pcstl wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have. And it's always shown that no apps are opening your mics when you're not using the app, and that if you're using the app they generally will only open your mic when it makes sense to do so. These companies are most likely lying or exaggerating their capabilities. Since so many people believe in audio eavesdropping anyway, it's in their interest to make the buyers of their software believe they're much mo…

> People have. And it's always shown that no apps are opening your mics when you're not using the app, and that if you're using the app they generally will only open your mic when it makes sense to do so. Can you link to people who have checked? I had a couple of the last BlackBerry phones, that ran Android. They came with this "DTEK" [1] app that monitored when apps accessed your phone's sensors. And I remember ever…

https://futurism.com/the-byte/phones-listen-theory-debunked https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVazBWGgg64

They're sending pretty much everything BUT audio.

Main reason is that audio is just tremendously inefficient compared to other signals. It's large and expensive to store and process and doesn't really give you that many bytes of information you can't get elsewhere for how expensive it is to handle.

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