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

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

#81

Post by anenefan » Sat, Apr 26, 2025, 3:35 PM UTC

steve_adams_86 wrote: post #12

anenefan wrote: post #5

My younger bro is convinced phones are eavesdropping on conversations and got particularly paranoid (I thought) a year or so back in regard to talking in earshot of his phone. His evidence is empirical - 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. S…

Something I discovered when going down this rabbit hole is that if you had that conversation in your house and your visitors have access to your wifi, it may be that they performed the search without you knowing, and your ISP connected that data to you and sold it (as they do).

His phone would have to be running a hotspot for any visitors (in many parts of the rural area in my locale, mobile data is it for the internet) but if any visitors were with the same carrier network, visitors could have searched. However it's entirely improbable any of his buddies would be on their phone while they're there unless it was a legit interest. Secondly this is stuff from what I gathered, some of is stuff that no one would really even think exists - it's shit talk speculation that's out past the black stump - no one once they're back to earth is ever going to bother to look up even a small aspect of it.

In his case a realistic answer falls towards loose or sneaky permissions in regard of an app that have slipped through that have allowed a weird conversation to influence suggestions in internet activity later on.

However for more grounded subject matters, the more probable strange coincidences falls to queries and visits to the net being scraped by external API and content (fonts scripts etc) providers. I've no idea how much meaningful info would normally be shared between the site and third party providers that seemingly need to be contacted while a site loads.

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

#82

Post by daneel_w » Sat, Apr 26, 2025, 3:45 PM UTC

adolph wrote: post #24

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…

If that were true why are cell phone voice calls still so terrible?

Because cellular carriers keep the same pace as a snail on vacation.

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

#83

Post by ajb92 » Sat, Apr 26, 2025, 4:02 PM UTC

jancsika wrote: post #32

benlivengood wrote: post #22

The thing is, it's not even people doing the correlations. Just like transformers can learn most of human knowledge just by trying to predict tokens, I would not be surprised if the ad-serving machine learning systems have learned about people in similar detail. State of the art about 10 years ago was 4 9s of accuracy predicting click-through rates from the available context (features for user profile, current websit…

> an obscure new thing that had come up Since you've provided no explicit counter-evidence, I'm gonna go ahead and say I have four nines of accuracy in predicting that your smartphone was squarely in the dependency chain of any "obscure new thing" you could have imagined discussing. Edit: wording

Kind of a weirdly sad, uncharitable assumption to make

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

#84

Post by kevinsync » Sat, Apr 26, 2025, 4:04 PM UTC

I get all the proximity-based aggregation, and creating graphs of relationships to leak content between personal "algorithms" (dislike that wording but that's the colloquial usage), and tracking between sites + social networks, and all the basic stuff ... but can somebody explain how I immediately get served ads relevant to text typed into (presumably-encrypted) iMessage conversations?

I also have a couple distinct memories of getting served ads for products I've never searched for or never bought before, after I either bought it in a store or, even weirder, literally just picked it up, looked at it, and put it back on the shelf in a store?

I can craft some kind of super-surveillance-state theory as to how you could achieve that, but it feels very unlikely to be deployed at a small CVS lol

Anyways, these might just be coincidences but still perplexing to understand how it's done.

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

#85

Post by mindcrash » Sat, Apr 26, 2025, 4:05 PM UTC

Way back then I exposed massive data collection from Twitter by Google which made it possible to plot locations at which you used Twitter in Google Maps by simply putting your Twitter handle into the search field. Somehow they knew about these locations even when you opted out of sharing location data with Twitter (I checked) -- so this was only possible by Twitter privately providing this information to Google.

This "experiment" has since then been shut down, but exposing this and many other other forms of activism permanently has cost me my Twitter account, to the point that asking to reinstate it several times because I was permanently suspended for no valid reason led to X Support directly rerouting every attempt to appeal this decision into the digital trash can.

Let's say nothing surprises me anymore.

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

#86

Post by immibis » Sat, Apr 26, 2025, 4:06 PM UTC

mindcrash wrote: post #85

Way back then I exposed massive data collection from Twitter by Google which made it possible to plot locations at which you used Twitter in Google Maps by simply putting your Twitter handle into the search field. Somehow they knew about these locations even when you opted out of sharing location data with Twitter (I checked) -- so this was only possible by Twitter privately providing this information to Google. This…

Doesn't every site route every support request for every reason into the digital trash can? You're supposed to just make a new account, using as many mechanisms as possible to make sure the site can't link it to your old account.

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

#87

Post by viraptor » Sat, Apr 26, 2025, 4:07 PM UTC

kevinsync wrote: post #84

I get all the proximity-based aggregation, and creating graphs of relationships to leak content between personal "algorithms" (dislike that wording but that's the colloquial usage), and tracking between sites + social networks, and all the basic stuff ... but can somebody explain how I immediately get served ads relevant to text typed into (presumably-encrypted) iMessage conversations? I also have a couple distinct m…

> how I immediately get served ads relevant to text typed into (presumably-encrypted) iMessage conversations?

Are you using a third party keyboard? Or any apps you don't 100% trust if you sent the message from a Mac?

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

#88

Post by HWR_14 » Sat, Apr 26, 2025, 4:09 PM UTC

kevinsync wrote: post #84

I get all the proximity-based aggregation, and creating graphs of relationships to leak content between personal "algorithms" (dislike that wording but that's the colloquial usage), and tracking between sites + social networks, and all the basic stuff ... but can somebody explain how I immediately get served ads relevant to text typed into (presumably-encrypted) iMessage conversations? I also have a couple distinct m…

My guess on iMessages is that the ads are actually tracking your friend (or other person at your location) looking up details/a link to use in the iMessage conversation. And that only works some percentage of the time, but that's the percent you notice.

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

#89

Post by kevinsync » Sat, Apr 26, 2025, 4:12 PM UTC

viraptor wrote: post #87

kevinsync wrote: post #84

I get all the proximity-based aggregation, and creating graphs of relationships to leak content between personal "algorithms" (dislike that wording but that's the colloquial usage), and tracking between sites + social networks, and all the basic stuff ... but can somebody explain how I immediately get served ads relevant to text typed into (presumably-encrypted) iMessage conversations? I also have a couple distinct m…

> how I immediately get served ads relevant to text typed into (presumably-encrypted) iMessage conversations? Are you using a third party keyboard? Or any apps you don't 100% trust if you sent the message from a Mac?

Nope, regular iOS/macOS on all ends. Literally just stock Apple Messages on devices. I just notice sometimes topics will come up (what appears to me to be randomly) and then relevant ads and/or content will appear on Instagram or web.

I guess it's possible that, to me, it appears "organic" (ex. somebody just mentions Taco Bell or whatever) but they had actually been searching on their device, and since our digital proximities are known, the next thing you know I'm Living Más lol

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

#90

Post by TheDong » Sat, Apr 26, 2025, 4:13 PM UTC

immibis wrote: post #86

mindcrash wrote: post #85

Way back then I exposed massive data collection from Twitter by Google which made it possible to plot locations at which you used Twitter in Google Maps by simply putting your Twitter handle into the search field. Somehow they knew about these locations even when you opted out of sharing location data with Twitter (I checked) -- so this was only possible by Twitter privately providing this information to Google. This…

Doesn't every site route every support request for every reason into the digital trash can? You're supposed to just make a new account, using as many mechanisms as possible to make sure the site can't link it to your old account.

I too sell my phone and buy a new one and also get a new phone number each time I get banned