Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

newatlas.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

331–336 of 336 posts

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

#331

Post by udev4096 »

gruez wrote: post #161
rahen wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These discussions seem to come up frequently lately. Both /e/OS and Lineage with microG provide good enough privacy for those who can't afford high-end smartphones like the Google Pixels. The ranking would probably be: - Pixel on GrapheneOS - Any Android smartphone on Lineage or /e/OS - iPhone on recent iOS (the best choice for technically illiterate people) People concerned with privacy should avoid stock Android ph…

>- Pixel on GrapheneOS >- Any Android smartphone on Lineage or /e/OS None of those operating systems does anything for tracking/advertising SDKs in apps, which is most of where the data leaks are coming from, not google/apple. Moreover unless you're willing to go no proprietary apps (ie. most apps people actually use), you'll need google play services, which means google can still collect data on you.

A true depiction of someone who has no clue what he's talking about. Google play services are the major source of telemetry exfiltration from major android devices. It runs as a highly privileged process which can collect data in extremely intricate manner and is the main reason google sells it's gapps bundle to scamsung and other chinese phone manufacturers.

> go no proprietary apps (ie. most apps people actually use)

That is the whole point of my argument. You either make sacrifices and improve your privacy or be stubborn and refuse to improvise which a lot of people still do. If privacy were that convenient, we wouldn't be talking about it. It's not by default and never will be

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

#332

Post by saagarjha »

DrillShopper wrote: post #326
saagarjha wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of us are not billionaires.

You don't have to be to fly charter or private.

Ok, fine, centimillionaire. Maybe even some decamillionaires. Happy?

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

#333

Post by cadamsdotcom »

intended wrote: post #105

What rot. Here’s a simple experiment I ran and still works. Back in the day there was a truly ghastly add for ear wax removal that showed up on YouTube in the UK. In an experiment, and prank, I told two of my close friends about this, and how this horrid advert would kill my appetite when it came up. And then I made it a point to repeat “ear wax removal” loudly several times. Sure enough. A day later my dear friend m…

You and your friends only saw this ad in the first place because you were all targeted for it. That would’ve been simple demographic targeting.

Likely you all ignored it in week 1 of the 4 week campaign and by week 4 you’d seen it so many times it stuck in your head.

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

#334

Post by syeare »

93po wrote: post #259
arcfour wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The TSA is - objectively, by their own audits - complete security theater. Why bother to defend them, exactly? Also, the spirit of the 4th Amendment is most certainly not "here, this is the easy way!" (yes, we are conducting mass surveillance but you can sort of opt out of one piece of it by going through a manual process over here that we will make you feel like you are burdening us by requesting)

correcting disinformation isn't defending something. do you want to live in a world where we dislike someone and so we just make up random terrible things about them that aren't true, and it's fine and encouraged because they're someone we dislike, and people aren't allowed to say "hey that's not actually true, at all"

but we do live in such a world tho?

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

#335

Post by keybored »

huntsman wrote: post #141
keybored wrote: post #117

iPhone will tell me that I have a 25m drive to get to work. Literally why? I know where I work and how long it takes. I have done it enough times for it to learn what I do at 07:30 in the morning. Is it just flexing repeapetedly that it did a simple inference?

Some places, including the Bay Area where this feature was probably created, have significant variance in commute times depending on the traffic of the day so this can be a useful feature. The commute time from SF to Cupertino is certainly not constant.

As a mere hick I’m sometimes oblivious to the lived experience of the ~~~~ SC crowd.

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

#336

Post by fzzzy »

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…

My point is each app being able to send its own data to nine services is just as bad as apps trying to record extraneous data from the device. App surveillance, and OS privacy features are an arms race that cannot be won.
Post reply on HN