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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
And the thing is, even if you disable it, it’s still listening. It just doesn’t answer you.
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:
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.
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 :)