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I still don't think companies serve you ads based on your microphone

simonwillison.net

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Re: I still don't think companies serve you ads based on your microphone

#341

Post by DHPersonal »

epolanski wrote: post #280
alvah wrote: post #29

Every time I read some technical description about why this isn't happening, the technical description seems convincing. However... A friend tested the theory a few years ago. He doesn't own a swimming pool, doesn't want to, and has never expressed any desire to. He put his and his wife's phone on the table and said to the wife (loudly), "Why don't we look into pool fencing?". She agreed with him. Shortly after, on b…

The most striking example happened to me while watching a documentary about siberian cats. We were watching it in Italian, our main language, and I wanted to know more about it, as I typed "g", the first result was "gatto siberiano", exactly the cat I was looking for. Way too specific. Another time as my girlfriend said she was interested how much a specific model of a watch a friend of him costed, the very same happ…

There’s a breadth of possibilities between coincidence and the phone actively listening to everything via a microphone.

Re: I still don't think companies serve you ads based on your microphone

#342

Post by stavros »

marcusverus wrote: post #259
simonw wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where's the proof that this is happening? Lots of people run network traffic sniffers to see what apps are doing. Lots of people decompile apps. Lots of people at companies leak details of bad things they are doing. Why has nobody been able to demonstrate this beyond anecdotes about talking about swimming pools and then getting adverts for swimming pool stuff?

These are fair questions! I'm not convinced that it is happening. Nor am I convinced, as the parent seems to be, that it would be difficult to do. edit: Having re-read my comment, I can see how it could easily be read to say "It's happening and this is how it works", whereas I intended to convey something like "It could easily be done and here's how." I have a bad habit of implying my point rather than stating it out…

FWIW, I read it as "here's how it could happen", not as "it's happening".

If it were happening, it would kill our battery really quickly, and be easily measurable and obvious in a router trace, so I find it very unlikely.

Re: I still don't think companies serve you ads based on your microphone

#343

Post by stavros »

sixhobbits wrote: post #173
7e wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your phone can listen for “hey Google” because it’s only one phrase and the model can run at very low power on specialized hardware. If you want to add 1000 keywords the battery drain would be intense.

Pixel phones run song identification constantly now. They have a local database of the top 1000 (?) most popular songs. It has negligible impact on battery life. Not saying I agree that 'phones are listening to show us ads', but technically we have the capability for that to happen (sampling audio every X intervals and matching against a local database of keywords)

Song identification and speech-to-text are massively different algorithms.

Re: I still don't think companies serve you ads based on your microphone

#344

Post by rambojohnson »

snowwrestler wrote: post #99
alvah wrote: post #29

Every time I read some technical description about why this isn't happening, the technical description seems convincing. However... A friend tested the theory a few years ago. He doesn't own a swimming pool, doesn't want to, and has never expressed any desire to. He put his and his wife's phone on the table and said to the wife (loudly), "Why don't we look into pool fencing?". She agreed with him. Shortly after, on b…

Think about what this implies. If your phone is listening, it’s listening all the time, right? So like 12-18 hours of continuous audio every day. That’s a lot of ad triggers. Way too many to actually be served with ads during your browsing time, which is a strict subset of your total audible proximity to your phone (plus ad inventory is a strict subset of what you view on your phone). So how does the phone + ad netwo…

It's not a strict 12-18 hour window. Instead, it depends on the time frame between specific vocal or conversational cues / signal vs. noise.

Re: I still don't think companies serve you ads based on your microphone

#345

Post by poincaredisk »

Aurornis wrote: post #112
alvah wrote: post #29

Every time I read some technical description about why this isn't happening, the technical description seems convincing. However... A friend tested the theory a few years ago. He doesn't own a swimming pool, doesn't want to, and has never expressed any desire to. He put his and his wife's phone on the table and said to the wife (loudly), "Why don't we look into pool fencing?". She agreed with him. Shortly after, on b…

I’m fascinated that this urban legend persists among tech people because it’s so easy to disprove. Did you know that you can set up a proxy from your phone and capture all traffic from it? It would be so trivial to find the traffic from your phone. There are ways to MITM and inspect the traffic, too. There are also many people doing static reverse engineering of phone apps looking for security vulnerabilities. To bel…

>Did you know that you can set up a proxy from your phone and capture all traffic from it?

The phone knows about your proxy. There are phones - actual brands - that were caught on sending secret telemetry to their manufacturer, but only when not listened - definitely only on mobile data, no wifi, and I assume with cert pinning.

I know a person who was researching this and they needed a Faraday cage and a BTS to conduct experiments. So it's not exactly trivial.

The difference is that these were small Chinese brands that were not even that popular in my country - and still someone researched this. Imagine how much research Android and Iphone get, and there's not a single proof of and wrongdoing. Now that is unlikely.

Re: I still don't think companies serve you ads based on your microphone

#346

Post by efitz »

Ancalagon wrote: post #108
efitz wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. The big companies are scared of lawsuits and trying to get approval for something like that would be a nonstarter. As a matter of fact the device folks at the same company would be working hard to kill such an idea in its infancy because it’s already an uphill battle to sell always-listening or always-watching devices to consumers because of the creepiness factor. And people also are terrible at math. Modern…

Aren’t TikTok and Huawei easy counterpoints to this?

Neither is a US company. TikTok is on their last appeal to the Supreme Court to avoid being banned in the US. Huawei is banned by the US government for many uses, e.g 5G infrastructure. Neither is a good example.

Re: I still don't think companies serve you ads based on your microphone

#347

Post by DrillShopper »

simonw wrote: post #298
DrillShopper wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know - where is the proof it's not? It's not like I can look at the source to the ad SDKs and figure out what they're doing. It's much better and safer to assume they are than they're not, especially because I've seen many many results which indicate they are.

You may not be able to disassemble binaries or intercept network traffic but there are plenty of privacy researchers who can, and none of them have found anything.

They haven't found anything yet.

That said, there's a much easier way to test this. Take two identical voice recognition smart devices (think Amazon Echos), register them each with a new never used Amazon account. Modify one of the devices to have a switch on its mic input which you leave off, and one which you leave on. See if the one with the mic on starts showing ads for things you've never searched for on that Amazon account. If the other one doesn't then there's your answer.

That sounds interesting enough that I might just give it a try.

Re: I still don't think companies serve you ads based on your microphone

#348

Post by evilDagmar »

alvah wrote: post #29

Every time I read some technical description about why this isn't happening, the technical description seems convincing. However... A friend tested the theory a few years ago. He doesn't own a swimming pool, doesn't want to, and has never expressed any desire to. He put his and his wife's phone on the table and said to the wife (loudly), "Why don't we look into pool fencing?". She agreed with him. Shortly after, on b…

...and yet no one seems to ever be able to replicate these results.

Re: I still don't think companies serve you ads based on your microphone

#349

Post by evilDagmar »

ycombinatrix wrote: post #299
darth_avocado wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a suspicion it’s not Facebook or Google listening in, but rather other third party apps. In fact it’s not even the third party apps but the libraries/frameworks they use to show ads.

Facebook Android app used to 10+ years ago I'm pretty sure

Yeah but that app was just nightmarishly bad, including an absolutely terrible approach to roll-your-own push notifications. Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence.

Re: I still don't think companies serve you ads based on your microphone

#350

Post by smsm42 »

simonw wrote: post #336
smsm42 wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There will be no proof until somebody inside Apple who is in on the scam decides to grow a conscience and blow the whistle. Then they will be dismissed as a "disgruntled employee". Decompiling Siri probably will get you a lot of attention from very expensive lawyers that will make your life very interesting for a long while.

Apple had a whistleblower. They said nothing about recordings being used for targeted ads: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/may/20/apple-whi...

He was a subcontractor working on a specific project. If Apple used the same data in other ways, he'd have no way to know.
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