- cross-posted to:
- funny@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- funny@lemmy.world
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This keeps getting brought up and it’s simply not true. No, your phone isn’t listening to you, plenty of tests have been done. It could easily be traceable with higher CPU usage, higher battery usage, network usage and so on, but there is zero difference between having a conversation next to your phone or the phone being in a literal sound proofed room.
Meta data, people you spend time with, what you look up online, your age, your hobbies, your interests, ads you have recently seen, location data, … there’s so much about you online that it’s easy to predict.
And sometimes you talk about things because everyone else is talking about them. You’re not that special.
It can be a bit scary how much you can predict about a person by just using a few simple facts (sex, age, location, income, …).
It’s funny because we’ve done this exact testing with the Facebook application on iOS by leaving my friend’s iPhone14 with the screen locked next to Telemundo (a Spanish only public television channel) for 24 hours. (Our primary language is Ukrainian)
The next day, all of their ads were in Spanish.
So I do think additional research is needed for certain, the polling rate might be not as granular as you mentioned, but intermittent anonymous data collection like “primary language” could very likely be done passively with minimal impact on battery life, and it may be permissions-based and operating system dependent.
You make me (a skeptic) want to test this in a robust fashion.
Source some foreign-language content offline without carrying/using electronics… record/catalog the ads shown to factory reset Android & iOS devices… let the devices hear the foreign-language content played on an offline system… record the ads shown afterwards. Ensure no other electronics are present.
What else would be needed?
Done in a bulletproof fashion (probably can get some blinding in there too), it would be ProPublica/EFF’s story of the year, and congress would get in on it. Think it could be easily done for a few hundred bucks in about a week. (Thus I’m skeptical of course, such a low barrier to entry relative to the front-page newsworthiness of the scoop.)
It’s much easier for apple to have shared the data that your friend watched Telemundo for 24 hours and thus either has a friend with them that speaks Spanish or is learning Spanish
Or for the Facebook app on their phone to have noticed another app get installed with those details
Its not the microphone
If you’re not using a smart TV connected to an apple account or an app on the phone to watch Telemundo the only way they could even have that data is if they fucking recorded it using the microphone of your phone. 🤦♂️
Even if not for nefarious reasons, the mic is always listening for the voice activation prompt for when you want it to listen and talk to you.
Ah, so it was viewed on cable or similar? Through a service that likely has a deal to sell/share data about ads being viewed where and how?
Services communicate to each other, thats the entire point of the “your phone isn’t listening to you” thing
Even if not for nefarious reasons, the mic is always listening for the voice activation prompt for when you want it to listen and talk to you.
And that data does not go to anything other than the part dedicated to that. Rather than make a decent argument you’re just kinda showing you don’t know what you’re on about my guy
There is a lot of misinformation on what Facebook is and isn’t doing. And a lot of it is pushing 10 years old.
Facebook has long had features that detect exactly what you’re describing. They aren’t recording it, they are fingerprinting it. The target is any ads and music that is played but it could go beyond that.
This is fundamentally no different than the way a device is passively listening for the “hey, assistant” phrase which just matches a fingerprint.
Anyone who is simply looking for immediate data transfer when this occurs is a fool. There is absolutely no reason it cannot hold the list of known finger prints and add them to otherwise normal requests. The same for anyone looking for cpu spikes; these fingerprints are highly performant and it’s not recording, it’s matching so Facebook can deny all day that they don’t record your conversation and it isn’t a lie because it’s the wrong accusation.
Nice try, I’m still going to wear my tinfoil
Just make sure that webcam has a piece of tape over it…
“My phone is listening, it knows what I want!”
*Uses social media, doesn’t use ad-blockers, and clicks OK to share data with 1472 Trusted Data Partners to make the annoying popups go away*
For “Hey Google”, “Hey Alexa” or “Hey Siri” to work your phone/smart speaker has to be always listening
And the thing is, even if you disable it, it’s still listening. It just doesn’t answer you.
This is only partially true. Yes, it’s listening for those keywords, but only for them. Sometimes that’s even an extra chip in your phone, otherwise it would kill your battery in no time.
Which is one of the reasons you can’t just customize the command to whatever you want to say.
Then how does Google figure out what music is playing in the background to display it on the lock screen?
I’m very happy to have GrapheneOS on my phone now.
I’m not 100% sure we both are talking about the same things but I’m going to assume you mean playing songs on Spotify and then having your phones lockscreen display that song.
The answer to that is UI APIs, your phone likely exposed APIs to developers who make apps for your phone. They can use these system APIs to tell your phone’s music display UI thing what song you are playing and what the buttons (next, prev, stop/play should do)
These APIs are client side but I wouldn’t be surprised if they phoned home in some way.
An example of this could be that the internal UI API may phone home to tell Google that a client is choosing Spotify as their music player.
That being said I don’t know if this is practical or likely. It is possible and doable though.
I agree with you, it’s crazy people still believe this is happening. However the fact that they can collect so much data about you through other means that people believe they’re spying on your directly is still pretty fuckin scary.
It is fucking happening. Why the fuck would you believe they aren’t collating your conversations when you willingly allow it to listen to trigger words?
“Hey, Siri, don’t record my shit… hur hur.”
When are people going to get it through their heads corporations don’t give two shits about you, at all. They don’t care if you live or die. They only care about profit. Stop bending over for them.
I think you’ve misread the room. I’m not defending corporations at all actually, simply agreeing that the idea they literally actively spy on you through your phone is misinformation. Unless you have any real proof other than Siri existing and saying corporations are bad?
I also believe this isn’t true, but did have something happen that we couldn’t figure out the other day.
I was looking at this really specialized gaming keyboard on my phone (cyborg gaming keyboard). I showed it to my wife and we talked about it a bit. Later my wife, who’s not a gamer and never looks up any of this type of stuff, gets ads for this hyper specific niche gaming keyboard on Facebook. She never looked it up on her phone, she has no signed in accounts on my phone, she is not a target demographic for this device. The only connections possible that I can think of is that Facebook does know we’re married (though it’s never used that for this sort of ads before) and that we talked about it with her phone in the room.
It was freaky and I still can’t explain it.
That one is super easy. Your wife is near you and possibly friends on Facebook with you. The ad system knows that and that’s why your wife sees the ad, as there is a high likelihood that you talked with her about this topic. Though the ad seems to have a shitty target audience definition, your wife should never see it if she’s not into computers herself (waste of money marketing wise).
This is similar to a friend of yours having a new hobby, looked up a lot of stuff about it online, you hang out with them for two hours at a café and suddenly you get ads for this hobby (as it was very likely a topic in your conversation). No need to record your conversation, people are predictable.
sometimes it’s enough to just be connected to the same wifi hotspot for a time. i’ve seen people i’ve met for the first time and spent an evening with bubbling up as friend recommendations instantly 10 years ago already, i’d assume they’ve gotten a lot better at it by now
Ok, so data used was:
- My search history
- Knows I’m friends with her
- Knows both of us were in same location (either location or same wifi)
Ergo, friends search data in similar locations will be used as part of your advertising profile?
Wonder why I don’t get more makeup ads or something. Since the same should be true for stuff she searches for.
That’s just a tiny tiny part of it.
And on the other end are the actual ads, which are part of marketing campaigns. Where each campaign can define a specific target demographic (doesn’t have to, but usually they do as it’s just wasting money otherwise).
So for makeup the ad might target white single women in the age of 16 to 45 who live in better income areas for example.
I bet you have a hundred conversations with your friends where you didn’t receive a fitting ad afterwards.
Facebook does know we’re married (though it’s never used that for this sort of ads before)… It was freaky and I still can’t explain it.
I think we can crack this case.
And they haven’t used it before that you’ve noticed.
I made a joke using my name and minutes later my friend showed me a meme he go suggested to on Instagram that used my name as a punchline.
A few months ago at school my friends made some jokes about feet and stuff for feet showed up in their Instagram ads.
There are many occurrences of this happening if you allow Instagram to have the always access microphone permission.
lies. I was talking about a friends baby and soon after I got diaper ads
sigh You’re hanging out with your friend, both your phones are in the same location, same wifi, you’re friends on Facebook or whatever.
So you get ads for things they are interested in. No need to listen to your conversation.
Google and Amazon can’t even find what I’m looking for when I give them specific parameters in their search box half the time. I wish their advertising was as good as everyone acts lile it is.
If you’re already looking for something odds are you’ll buy it anyway, so better show you ads for something else to extract maximal value.
I won’t buy anything of I can’t find it in the sea of things that aren’t what I’m looking for they serve up instead.
Yea Lemmy was fun for the last year or so but I guess it’s now suffering from success. I have come across a tooon of ignorance and stupidity in the last month or so that remind me of why I left Reddit. I guess it’s time to move on again.
You do realize you’re in Funny: Home of the Haha@lemmy.world?
I wouldn’t expect high quality takes here. You’ll either have to curate the communities you see, or quit social media altogether I’m afraid.
Either way, it’s probably a good thing to check your attitude :)
I don’t know if phones are listening with an open mic, but I have no doubt they’re doing things like scraping text messages. I sent my wife a text saying “I need new dress shoes for work” then went to Amazon and the front page was filled with men’s dress shoes. And yes, I confirmed she hadn’t searched for them first.
- I once joked about getting a divorce, in a conference call. At work. On the company-provided laptop. Minutes later, my own phone’s social media feed started showing ads for divorce lawyers. I wasn’t married at that time, nor had I ever gotten a divorce.
- Got diagnosed with something I’d hever heard about before. Not a particularly serious condition, but very rare for people my age. Returning home, nothing but ads for medication, self-help groups and what have you.
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And how exactly one is supposedly capable of proving such thing? Let’s say someone video-records themselves saying something near the microphone, so to catch the moment when the phone does suggest an ad about what was spoken, then a skeptical would say “Oh, but it doesn’t prove anything because the camcorder is actually a smartphone connected to the internet”, so let’s say that, instead of a modern smartphone, one uses some pre-Internet camcorder (old Sony camcorders, JVC, etc), so to rule out the possibility that the recording itself would affect the results. Then the skeptical would say “It also doesn’t prove anything, you could’ve been googled it before”.
There’s absolutely no way to prove, except when it starts to happen with yourself, or if someone actually manages to sneak into corp’s private Git/SVN/Mercury repo containing the closed source code and point “Ha! There it is, the pesky AI module responsible for NLP and voice recognition that actually feeds ad partners with microphone data in order to increase sales and profits”.
Also, don’t expect any dev or ex-dev from such corps whistleblowing such thing publicly because there’s something called “NDA” (Non-disclosure agreement) and people that already did this (for example, Snowden) is generally seen as “crazy” or “liars” by the majority of people (and they are promised of fines and even jail for such break of corporate secrets).
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You know, people keep saying the Earth is round, the sun is the center of our “solar system,” and girls will fuck you if you aren’t a creep and you bathe. I’ve never seen any proof, so I’m going to jerk off to Rogan and Peterson until I do.
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You should say “You know, I’d really like to pound Zucberberg in his adorable little pink star fruit.” Tell us what happens.
I use an extension to remove all cookies, so the site just shows the usual random crap. I’ll log in when I’m ready to order.
Same happened to me and my mom discussing new bedsheets and covers a xouple years ago. I just started getting adds for them.
I’m here for the stinking cute dog muzzles. Id adopt all three.
My brother was in the car with me and my wife and my brother told me one of his students told him he had ADHD. When we got home and my wife’s TikTok was full of ADHD videos.
I experienced something different the other day. I was watching despicable me 4 on my PC and at the end of the movie they sang “everybody wants to rule the world” a few hours later I went to YouTube and on the home page is a video titled “the meaning behind the lyrics of everybody wants to rule the world”. real freaky. I never searched for the song in any form on YouTube.
but if you watched the movie with your google account logged in, perhaps others who watched the movie also searched the song from the end of the movies
I watched the movie using plex media player.
And why would they affect my yt home page?
because youtube and google are the same corporation, if you are logged into a google device and then log into youtube with the same master account, id expect them to know.
This shit pisses me off the most. Happens all the time and I absolutely hate it. How do we still not have legislation around this? (Because: Money)
Legislation around what?
Phones listening to your conversations and then suggesting products based on them
It would first need to be proven that they actually do that.
We don’t care about your stock price, or your dividends.
Huh?
Because they don’t do that yet so we haven’t had to legislate for it yet.
Generally government is reactionary so you won’t get legislation until after it’s an issue.
You can’t prove this.
Can you prove they do listen?
Just because it doesnt make sense to you doesnt make it wrong.
Google Assistant, Now Playing. Both closed source always listening.
Anything for profit, and the excusing of it.
I don’t buy shit from any of them. I know it sounds crazy, really crazy… but it’s possible.
Is there any kind of knowledge or research about that available by now, or are we still only talking about the one time we sat in the kitchen with friends and talked about gay dolphins and suddenly the Internet was full of reports about it (which might have been selective perception or however it’s called)
Everybody at the comments are telling about how apps indeed monitor our microphones, but have you experience apps monitoring thoughts? Exactly, mind reading! Once I thought a specific philosophical phrase (yet I don’t remember which one it was), and few minutes later a video platform recommended a deep-thought video containing such exact phrase. I didn’t even say the phrase outside of my “mind’s voice”, let alone typing/writing it. I dunno what kind of sorcery they used, but it happened a couple of times. Fact is that the app did, somehow, “read my mind”. It was this video platform only, I didn’t see other apps doing the same outside of recommending/showing things spoken near the mic or written somewhere.
Your thoughts are influenced by your surroundings, and those listening may simply link thise topics like spotify links songs.
Could just be coincidence too.
I agree that our thoughts are somehow influenced by our surroundings, except that I’m an introvert developer person with no one actually surrounding me. While I often think about philosophy, occult and esotericism (as well as scientific concepts, in a syncretic fashion; I’m passionate by all those three branches of human knowledge, the Science, the Philosophy and the Esotericism/Occult/Beliefs), it was too much of a coincidence for such app to show exactly the phrase I was thinking before, even though it was a known philosophical phrase (but philosophy is a vast field filled with many, many phrases and concepts).
I bought an iced tea with cash one day, a brand I had never bought. No points card, had left my phone in my car. Didn’t I get an Instagram ad an hour later for that iced tea.
I also found a business card for my old manager in some papers, and I put it on my desk simply for digging dust and debris out of my keyboard. I never use my desktop for social media, have never logged in on there, and ten minutes later got her as a friend suggestion on Facebook. I have nobody in common with her and worked for her for only a couple of months.
Also, for those skeptical: There’s something in human psychology field called “Emotional Facial Action Coding System” (EFACS). Our bodies “talk”, especially our faces, and we call it “body language”. There are some specialists (psychologists) that are capable of “reading” such language. Mentionable specialists are Paul Ekman (PhD) and Joe Navarro (ex-FBI and author of “What Every Body Is Talking”), as well as those within my country Vitor Santos (“Metaforando”) and Ricardo Ventura (“Não Minta Pra Mim”). There are broader specialists capable of such nonverbal reading as well, such as Derren Brown, responsible for documentaries such as “The Push”. Specialist humans are good at this, but AI is capable of detecting even subler movements. Have you noticed a camera always pointed to our faces (we call it the “selfie camera”)? It’s like having a Paul Ekman seeing your face 24/7, one that is capable of reading your nonverbal behaviors so precisely that he could actually “deduce” what exactly are you thinking.
The best way to get rid oft the spy crap entirely is to get a pixel phone and flashing GrapheneOS (de-googled Android). Dw, it’s not that hard to do, there’s a good manual. Sure you need to find alternatives to google apps, but so far I could get replacement apps for almost everything FOSS from F-Droid store. Some apps cry for play services from time to time, but only a few of them won’t work at all without them. Most of the time it can be ignored. You are able to install a defused sandboxed version if something really needs it tho. If you need an app from play store you can use Aurora Store (Foss play store client). Even E-SIM works without problems. And the best is 7 years guaranteed updates starting with the phone release. The a series is quite cheap (got Pixel 8a for ~460€). I can only recommend this setup.
Discussed whether I liked Knix bras with a coworker today, got a bunch of Knix ads all over shortly after. And I turn my microphone access off on most apps.
That’s not how that works. Stop spreading this nonsense.
Google, Amazon and Facebook aren’t dogs that sniff you through your phone? Stop spreading this nonsense.
That’s not what the meme says. It’s accusing the apps of having live microphone access to your phone at all times.
Oh, then I guess I was the one taking a meme literally.
We don’t care about your stock price, or your dividends.
I thought it was a joke
Is it any better that their profiling is so accurate they can “appear like doing this” by just knowing what devices spend time near us?
Yes. Phones not snooping 24/7 with a microphone is better than phones snooping 24/7 with a microphone. What kind of question is this? If you get people used to the idea that phones are always recording, people won’t be as offended when these dickhead companies actually start doing it.
Google listens in to recognize what music playing (default on Google Pixels) this can’t be done locally without a huge database so in way or another Google is sending processed microphone data to their servers. There’s no way they can resist getting their grubby mits on that ad data…
The database of fingerprints is actually quite small and stored locally. You could have looked this up in less time than it took you to spout bullshit.
I counted this out based on the number of obscure songs I had seen, making me think it would have to be gigabytes of names alone. This still doesn’t stop Google from sending this to their servers as long as it has network permissions.
Who the fuck said anything about fingerprints, literal or figurative. There’s absolutely no way that a database of every song ever recorded is stored on an Android phone. Wake up.
It literally is.
this can’t be done locally without a huge database
Good thing Pixel’s have a built in database of “fingerprints” of popular songs for local processing.
I did not know this, it seemed way too good for that, I might have to retract some previous statements. Though I also don’t know how to verify that it doesn’t use the network as I don’t think it is available outside the default android that comes preinstalled.
