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.
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.
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 makes absolutely no sense for advertising to switch all advertising to Spanish from a single day of recording. This would mean they disregarded ALL of the meta data they had on them. Location, things they visited, pages they visited etc. I’ve been on vacation and spoken a different language for two weeks and it didn’t change the language of my ads. It just makes no sense to do that from a single data point, when all else contradicts them being/speaking Spanish.
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.
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.
Yes, it’s listening for those keywords, but only for them.
If you use those services, I would ask that you do a data takeout and actually HEAR what recordings they have.
We used an Alexa-enabled speaker, and it recorded many, many conversations that were not direct Alexa commands. Perhaps it was an “oops” type of eavesdropping, but Amazon still felt that the recordings needed to be saved on their server.
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.
That’s not what they were referring to. I have a setting on my pixel 7 (and have had it on 2 older pixels) that automatically listens foe music playing anywhere around the phone and shows the title on the always on display and on the lockscreen. It samples audio once every several seconds and listens for music and if it hears some it activates, records some of the song, and finds the info. The battery usage is negligible in my experience and it’s actually very useful, if you don’t care about privacy.
IIRC, it uses a database of common and popular songs stored locally on your phone (possibly adapted to what Google knows about your taste in music, idk) and only goes online for matches when you do a manual song search.
Just… no. Fuck no. It’s listening, and it’s not just the audio, it’s snooping on what you’re accessing on your network connections. Shazam is definitely doing this, as what you search will appear instantly in most cases.
I used to say the same thing, but now I have some serious test cases that are very, very, compelling.
As in: a subject never before broached verbally by me or my friend (or anyone I know, and I don’t associate with many people), was discussed by me and my friend in the car, with exactly 2 phones in the car, one of which is de-googled (i.e. Runs a non-Google OS with no Google Play, etc).
Both of us receive ads for that subject the next day.
Mind, neither of us had even thought about that subject before, and it was something way out of left field for both of us - as in not at all related to anything in our lives, and was a complete “shower thought” moment for me.
I get there’s a lot of predictive analysis out there, but you’re talking predicting something for two people with vastly different lives (we’re decades apart in age, for example, in very different fields).
And this ad had nothing to do with our common ground either.
I simply can’t buy the predictive analysis on this one.
I’ve never used any of the usual social media nonsense (it always bothered me, the invasiveness was obvious - Lemmy is my first, and only perhaps a year ago and this particular event was 3 years ago), have zero social presence online - no photo storage, etc, have always kept things separated as much as I can (since the 90’s, because we saw the data mining coming back then). And neither of us did any search for the subject, because there was no need - it was a throwaway kind of thought.
Mind, neither of us had even thought about that subject before, and it was something way out of left field for both of us - as in not at all related to anything in our lives, and was a complete “shower thought” moment for me.
Yeah, so it’s quite likely that you wouldn’t have noticed the ad or thought about it if you didn’t talk about it earlier.
The big question is why did this topic come up “out of nowhere”?
And there can be several reasons!
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You unconsciously saw an ad for it (could even be a billboard while driving) and that’s why you started to discuss this topic. If it’s a new ad it now also pops up on your phone (as it’s a marketing campaign) and you immediately recognize it because you’ve seen it before and discussed it
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The ad campaign has been running for ages, but you never paid attention to it. Now that you discussed this topic with a friend you suddenly noticed the ad. Nothing changed ads wise, you just never paid attention to the topic
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It’s a popular topic in general, could be in the news, could be hip at the moment, for some reason you and your friend started to talk about it, where did it come from?
There’s so many ways this can go. And if we go back to tracking: All it takes is for a friend of yours to later search something related and it’s also hard tracked (and then linked back to you as you hung out with them). Which can be a double whammy. Your phone being “ungoogled” is also worthless if you use Google, Facebook, Instagram or whatever.
Ok. Why does Instagram demand microphone access to doomscroll?
Ask Meta?
Could be anti bot protection, or a feature where you can instantly start recording for creating new posts.
I don’t install shit like Facebook, Instagram or TikTok.
I watched a Jet Li movie in Mandarin with subtitles (on DVD on my TV so not through the phone or any app), and suddenly my search autocomplete is filled with Chinese characters. Ads in Mandarin. Hmmm.
And just to be clear I don’t know Mandarin and have no searches or activity related to that at all.
Was it a smart TV or a dumb monitor? Smart TVs share tracking data about everything.
How did you acquire the movie? Did you purchase it online? If not, did you visit a Chinese supermarket? Or did you purchase it at a large store and had a membership?
Did you borrow it from a Chinese movie aficionado and spend some time with (or rather around) them?
There are SO many variables to get data from. Everything is linked. Everything.
Was it a smart TV or a dumb monitor?
Played a DVD, with a separate DVD player, over HDMI. It would be shocking if they can track that back to your phone and/or gmail account which wasn’t touched. Not logged into the TV, so it would be seeing if it’s the same wifi, or going through another HDMI cable to the chromecast.
How did you acquire the movie?
An old DVD probably bought at HMV before smart phones existed.
spend some time with (or rather around) them?
??? So the microphone would hear Chinese in that way instead? It’s the same fucking thing.
The extent you’re going through rather than accepting the microphone is listening is fucking astounding. Occams razor.
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.
It’s also noteworthy that listening to audio via phone microphones is terrible. Speech to text works like shit, and the expectation is that people need to speak as plainly as possible, and over a long period of manual adjustments will it get to a point where it’s halfway usable.
Ever gotten a pocket dial from someone? Can you hear anything that even resembles speech over the rustling of fabric? Seems like a wild leap to assume that corpos are listening in on random audio, when the software designed around people specifically speaking plainly and clearly to their phone barely works at all.
Plenty of things to be concerned about with info privacy, but it’s important to recognize the limitations of hardware.
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.
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.
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.
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.
No, your phone isn’t listening to you, plenty of tests have been done.
Nah, that doesn’t apply to today’s devices.
There are millions upon millions of people using “Alexa”, “OK Google”, “Bixby” and “Hey Siri”, and those services require the mic to be always listening.
That’s how they work. And when they hear something, that data gets recorded to the company server to do what they like with it, including targeted ads and content.
And I would find it hard to believe that these corporations, with so many privacy-related lawsuits, aren’t using these always-on voice assistants to further market to their users.
The phones have highly optimized functions to listen to keywords. That’s the reason why you can’t change “OK Google” to “OK Jarvis” or whatever you want. Your phone needs to do this locally without wasting battery.
Until the keywords get said the listening is extremely basic. As soon as you say the keywords then the full audio processing kicks in, often including sending what you say to a server.
The phones have highly optimized functions to listen to keywords. That’s the reason why you can’t change “OK Google” to “OK Jarvis” or whatever you want.
Well, I’d argue that you can’t change “OK Google” because that’s a great form of advertising. I’ve even seen movies where they use “Hey Siri” or “Alexa” as a product placement.
Your phone needs to do this locally without wasting battery.
For sure.
That doesn’t mean they don’t “accidentally” record completely irrelevant conversations.
And that also doesn’t mean that what it does record isn’t being aggregated so you can be marketed to.
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.
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.
There are many anecdotes, and even I can think of a handful of times where I wondered the same. Officially, yes our phones are listening all of the time, but supposedly only for keywords for voice assistants, mostly.
Amazon, Google, and Facebook deny that they record all conversations, and Google even had users opt out of voice collection when accusations about these things first popped up.
It is likely that these companies have so much data about us and the people around us, that they are able to infer things that come up naturally in conversation with friends and family. For instance, they know when someone else in your vicinity searches for something. So, for example, when one of your friends searches for a movie that you talked about in conversation, these companies know to show you that movie’s preview.
Still, I wouldn’t be surprised if at least one of these companies is doing something shady with audio data.
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).
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.
They are totally listening.
I will use my new roof as an example.
back in February I needed a new roof. I have done zero internet searches for roofs, or related subjects (no searches about materials, contractors, regulations, aesthetics, nothing). My home also has no listening devices, so no Alexas or Google Homes, or any voice activated or automation of any kind. I dont even have any accounts on my phone, google or otherwise. My phone is for nothing but phone calls and text messages, with almost all the google and other stuff that can be disabled, being disabled to make it all the more creepy.
In my home, the first time I mentioned it to anyone aloud was to my grandmother, talking about the issues with the roof and how I’ll have to be getting a new one soon.
The only device in the room was my phone. on the kitchen table, infront of me.
I did no searches for roofs or anything roof related afterwards, on any device. Nor did my grandmother (she half blind and can barely answer her phone, much less start doing internet searches about shit)
By the end of the day I had gotten 12 spam mails about roof contractors/new roofs/etc, where I had never received any prior (searched my emails to prove this fact, they go back years)
And every day since, I have gotten between 5-25 new spam mails, pushing every kind of roof related spam you can imagine. Despite the roof long since being done and over with.
And thats not the first time its happened either, Its just what made me start taking notice. It has happened several more times now that I’ve been taking notice of it.
The phone is listening, and I don’t care who says otherwise.
Coincidences can happen, but multiple coincidences cease to be coincidences and start becoming a pattern of behavior and concern.
edit
THEY DO LISTEN https://www.tweaktown.com/news/100282/facebook-partner-admits-smartphone-microphones-listen-to-people-talk-serve-better-ads/index.html
The way this stuff works is by collecting many data sources and combining them. It doesnt have to be you that searches for roof stuff, could just be someone connected to you searched for it while on your WiFi, or say you call your mom or dad and then they start searching for a roof company online.
I’m here for the stinking cute dog muzzles. Id adopt all three.
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)
Phones listening to your conversations and then suggesting products based on them
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.
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.