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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.

#31

Post by [deleted] »

kurthr wrote: post #20
wmf wrote: post #5

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41404229 There are reasons to be skeptical of this.

I mean none of the major LLM/DL developers would scrape the entire web (even against robots.txt and paywalls) just to increase the amount of data they could unprofitably train with, because that would expose them to copyright litigation... Oh, wait yeah they did. Frankly, the idea that no app or company is doing this or selling the data would require an enormous conspiracy of secret suppression. The argument that one…

[deleted]

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

#33

Post by [deleted] »

LeftHandPath wrote: post #2

I’ve noticed that my ads get far more specific when I have mic and camera access enabled for Instagram (which is required in order to post stories with certain features). In fact, I’ve often (correctly) realized I accidentally left access on after posting due to a hyper-specific ad relating to a recent conversation.

[deleted]

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

#34

Post by gruez »

d2323 wrote: post #12
n_ary wrote: post #3

I am absolutely glad that, I disable Siri immediately on all of my devices and grateful for the ominous mic-in-use indicator on all apple devices. Android also has a mic in use indicator too, but own only a Pixel to comment on Android in general. The referenced articles are light on details and appear to be “he said she said they said” and pointing to the same archived blog post from CMG. That being said, I see a ris…

Does disabling Siri disable this behaviour though? What if you're not close enough to the device at the time to see the indicator? That's the bit the worries me in terms of mic use. On Android I can toggle the camera and mic OS wide, and per app. When I'm not taking pictures or a call I turn them both off OS wide using the quick toggle buttons. On iOS I can only find options to disable them per app which doesn't give…

> What if you're not close enough to the device at the time to see the indicator? That's the bit the worries me in terms of mic use.

The odds are stacked against the attacker. Unless they can also figure out whether you're looking at the screen or not, they're rolling the dice every time they attempt a recording. As they make more recordings, the probability of being discovered approaches 100%.

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

#35

Post by lesuorac »

wmf wrote: post #28
mapt wrote: post #11

Does "Felony wiretapping" mean nothing?

Privacy policies override laws.

I dunno, Big Tech keeps having to pay money to Illinois and etc for breaking privacy laws.

But I guess your general point is still accurate; you can repeatedly break laws as long as your privacy policy says so. (no AG is going to put you in jail or something to _physically_ stop you).

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

#36

Post by navjack27 »

lakomen wrote: post #10

On Discord many years ago I spoke to someone about my "big belly". The next day I received ads about exactly that topic everywhere Adsense Facebook everywhere. So the technology is at least 10 years old and I totally believe that the story is true. The key issue here is that we don't own our phones. We have little control over what those apps do and often apps are hidden and can't be uninstalled.

Talked as in voice chat or talked as in typed chat?

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

#38

Post by alphabettsy »

synicalx wrote: post #29
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?

No, but as soon as the Siri process is listening it does. The wake word listening process is completely separate and runs on a co-processor.

https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/hey-siri

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

#39

Post by pempem »

m463 wrote: post #13

I've noticed that when calling companies on the phone, many of them have started pointing out where to read their privacy policy. I suspect many types of technologies are starting to use voice for identification, demographics, emotional analysis, and the data is being saved and/or shared. And lots of phone trees now require you to talk instead of using touchtone sounds.

Yep and you're often - in a cust service, over the phone call - automatically opted into voice recognition. Even when I ask to be opted out I have absolutely no way of determining whether they have.

Even better, lines that will not help you if they are not recorded where they ask for key information that can be used in any number of scenarios (age/birthday/address/full name) and then has their recording hacked. :chef's kiss:

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

#40

Post by fancythat »

lakomen wrote: post #10

On Discord many years ago I spoke to someone about my "big belly". The next day I received ads about exactly that topic everywhere Adsense Facebook everywhere. So the technology is at least 10 years old and I totally believe that the story is true. The key issue here is that we don't own our phones. We have little control over what those apps do and often apps are hidden and can't be uninstalled.

I have noticed a similar trends, when speaking about some specific topics without following up on the device by traditional means (keyboard), ads started to show up in a day or to.

Last occurrence, 6 months or so ago, of that happening was when one of my colleagues discussed vacation in a specific place I absolutely have no interest in visiting, so I was 100% sure I didn't google it or discussed it online. Surprisingly, the next day, I was swamped with booking.com and airbnb deals for stays in that specific area.

I emphasize next day occurrences intentionally, as I am under impression that it takes some time for them to process the data and supply the results to the marketeers.

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