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

61–70 of 336 posts

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

#61

Post by Am4TIfIsER0ppos »

sampullman wrote: post #23
Am4TIfIsER0ppos wrote: post #11

I seem to recall that state of the art audio encoding can compress voice to 8kbit/s which is a single packet per second, insignificant compared to how chatty your device is. Trivial to buffer and send during a period of activity. It sums to 1.7MB over the 30 minute window in the article graphs which should be visible if it is actually counted. Why would apple or google actually make it count though? They want to spy…

Audio, screenshots, and some of the other stuff I can believe, but I think batteries need a big upgrade before the data snatchers can get away with streaming video, even at a low bitrate. I'm also not sure how easy keylogging is these days, is there even a permission that allows it? I supposed there's ways to do it with custom keyboards. Google/Apple doing it themselves would be a pretty big deal.

I think everyone acknowledges that chrome sends every keystroke in the address bar home. I don't keep up with the spyware so perhaps it is now every keystroke in the rest of the browser. It isn't much of a leap further that their operating system does the same.

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

#62

Post by marcusb »

wzdd wrote: post #58
marcusb wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apparently he gets pretty high with friends and shit talks - but when when the search started to suggest some pretty way out things along the same lines, he landed that their conversations weren't private any more. I had an experience like this several years ago. I was having dinner with a customer, and one of the guys brought up this story about how he went to school with someone who got caught cheating on Who Wan…

It could also be that YouTube started recommending this video to people for whatever reason, which was why it was on this guy’s mind.

Anything is possible, but he didn't start the conversation about cheating. Someone else brought up something to the effect of they thought game shows were fake, then he told his story and a third person the table searched for and showed the video.

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

#63

Post by danaris »

Thorrez wrote: post #54
gretch wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean yeah technically the website can’t screenshot, but it can do many functionally equivalent things. For example, it can capture the entire DOM and send it off, including the contents of input fields that have not been submitted. That DOM capture can be replayed on a browser to show what the user sees. So what’s the difference?

Well, blocking javascript would stop that. Noscript is a thing that some people use.

For an increasing plurality (possibly even majority at this point) of sites where the purpose is not purely to read text, this is effectively equivalent to saying "you can just not use the site."

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

#64

Post by Ichthypresbyter »

>Not only does the system know exactly where you are at every moment, it knows who your friends are, what they are interested in, and who you are spending time with

This actually makes sense of an anecdote a colleague uses to say that he thinks his phone is listening to him.

I am a keen skier. He used to ski a lot, but hasn't been for several years. Around the start of ski season this year, we talked about my plans to go skiing that weekend, and later that day he started seeing skiing-related ads.

He thinks it's because his phone listened into the conversation, but it could just as easily have been that it was spending more time near my phone (I had only recently started at that job) on which I regularly search for skiing-related things like conditions reports and directions to ski areas.

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

#65

Post by pixl97 »

Spivak wrote: post #43
microflash wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We’ve reached the state where you can safely presume anything “smart” is violating your privacy.

Anything network connected.

Everyday we seem to step closer and closer to the 'network connected smart dust' as written in some science fiction.

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

#66

Post by pixl97 »

fmajid wrote: post #59

At one of my previous companies we made a moderately popular mobile app SDK that app developers would embed in their apps. We were approached by a company that claimed they had a MIT developed (or was it Bell Labs?) audio recognition technology similar to Shazam, but orders of magnitude more efficient, that would be used to recognize audio from ads and record when a user was exposed to a TV or radio ad for tracking p…

Probably something along these lines

https://www.pcworld.com/article/424417/ad-tracking-tech-uses...

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

#67

Post by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF »

Ichthypresbyter wrote: post #64

>Not only does the system know exactly where you are at every moment, it knows who your friends are, what they are interested in, and who you are spending time with This actually makes sense of an anecdote a colleague uses to say that he thinks his phone is listening to him. I am a keen skier. He used to ski a lot, but hasn't been for several years. Around the start of ski season this year, we talked about my plans t…

> but it could just as easily have been that it was spending more time near my phone (I had only recently started at that job) on which I regularly search for skiing-related things like conditions reports and directions to ski areas

Bingo! This is most certainly what happened.

I’ve spent time trying to convince my friends that their phone’s microphone is not constantly listening and running sounds through voice recognition software to isolate their voice (so the individual who owns the phone can be advertised to), then through sentiment analysis software (to inform advertisement bids), all without meaningfully affecting battery life. That is usually an uphill battle but explaining location services and the fact they don’t know what I’ve searched gets the point across better. (It is actually creepier.)

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

#68

Post by daveguy »

grishka wrote: post #41
daveguy wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's impossible to use this covertly. *Unless there's a zero-day that allows it.

If you're going to exploit a privilege escalation vulnerability from your app, why not just grab the most interesting parts of the /data partition while you're at it?

Sure why not. I wasn't implying that a zero day that allows surreptitiously recording the phone screen is the only shitty thing that can be done with your phone with a zero day.

Also, it is possible for a zero day to break specific privileges (like screen record without notification) rather than root.

Post reply on HN