71–80 of 361 posts
people surf the net so automatically that they forget they are doing it and blame Alexa for snooping.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ahh this one. Thanks for sharing, important point! Basically this is just a random small-ish company trying to get new clients with a flashy feature. Ultimately they have to use the same data as everyone else, which I’m 99.99% sure doesn’t involve any intentional (much less “active”) recording by Google, Apple, or Meta. Maybe they have their own hardware partners that have networked microphones, maybe they’re really…
Cox Media Group is attached to Cox Enterprises which owns Cox Communications, one of the largest US cable providers. They distribute set-top boxes with an integrated voice assistant. So, I would wager that is at least one source, and I would actually put down money that it is the only source. Cox Media Group doesn't make any claims about where they get the data or how much they have, and it seems like it would be ver…
There was a class action lawsuit back in 2019 alleging that Apple accidentally recording people's conversations with siri counted as wiretapping. If no enterprising lawyers has tried this lawsuit with cox, and no news articles has come out criticizing their broad ToS, it's probably safe to assume cox isn't doing it.
My experience working at one of the companies that gets accused of this a lot is that many colleagues wish we were as evil as claimed because it would be so much easier do their jobs that way than struggling through the reality of it which is endless red tape over the tiniest issues that have even the slightest proximity to privacy. So I've been a bit skeptical too.
And people also are terrible at math. Modern ML (regression & neural nets) are ridiculously good at predicting stuff you might be interested in, particularly when rich data sources like browsing and e-commerce histories are available; the decision to show the ad to you at some point almost certainly was made long before any audio-to-marketing pipeline could act on it.
We search for everything we talk about these days…our location services are always on. The times I’ve noticed this I can usually trace it back to a friend had been searching for something and then we (our phones) were in the same place. Even the guy from the lawsuit with the doctor… his phone knows he was at that doctor and that doctor offers that procedure. Seems possible without listening.
Yes, but I think that's the part that feels... unsettling. I watched a Nigerian film on the seat back display on the plane the other day. I looked it up on my laptop when I got home because I didn't finish it. The next day in my Instagram explore page I had a Nigerian meme... Yes, I get it -- could be frequency illusion or some IP address/cookie shenanigans. Still feels weird.
That is the real mechanism for triggering the ads and memes, not that “your phone is listening to you.”
At least feel creepy about the real cause and not some imagined monster under the bed.
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…
Why did they pick a swimming pool? Did they see people in their area installing pools? I think that's often people's best guess, is that the "random" thing people use to test this actually isn't random and subconsciously they already had this topic seeded to them.
But, recently I started thinking about the average user, who will install anything and approve any permissions requested without reading it. And imperfect App Store reviews approving a Trojan horse accidentally.
Am I positive someone hasn’t inadvertently allowed mic access to a malicious party? I wonder if that person’s phone may, in fact, be listening to them.
Apple will pay $95M to settle Siri privacy lawsuit
We search for everything we talk about these days…our location services are always on. The times I’ve noticed this I can usually trace it back to a friend had been searching for something and then we (our phones) were in the same place. Even the guy from the lawsuit with the doctor… his phone knows he was at that doctor and that doctor offers that procedure. Seems possible without listening.
Has he read this: https://www.404media.co/mindsift-brags-about-using-smart-dev...
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/12/no-a-marketing-firm-...
They don't need to: they can read your mind. My proof? Yesterday I was driving home and I saw an old Toyota Previa minivan and thought to myself "Oh, a Previa, you don't see those very often these days." When I got home, I started scrolling through my Google News and it showed me an advert for the new Previa. I agree with Simon: you basically aren't going to convince someone that their phone doesn't listen to you and…
I think people are prone to believing that their phone is listening to them out of an instinct to believe they are a lot more unique than they actually are. A clash between western individualism and hyper-efficient consumerism. That's not me taking a stance on whether it's true, though. There would be a lot of fame in it for a whistleblower, but on the other hand if Google or Meta figured out a way to do it with a lo…
This is trivializing people in my opinion. The non-trivializing interpretation would be that for whatever reason people are skeptical that a black box that they don't understand very well, don't know how to audit, and don't know how to exert low level control over is doing things that they don't want it to do.
When framed that way it is immediately clear that this is an incredibly reasonable stance to take. The default assumption should always be that a third party who has a vested interest is pursuing it.
As an example. It is paranoia to assume that a 1970s era vehicle with almost no electronics in it is reporting on me to the manufacturer. It is willful ignorance bordering on delusion to assume that a vehicle manufactured in 2020 is not.