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.
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
Devils advocate here (for clarity im actually on your side)
If youre connected to the same network apple can definitely work out you’re friends
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.
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.
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.
Mate, your Alexa is plugged in, it’s not a phone. You agree to your Alexa constantly listening when you buy it. It’s a feature, not a bug.
If your phone would listen as much as your Alexa you’d be out of battery in three hours.
Mate, your Alexa is plugged in, it’s not a phone.
Battery-powered bluetooth speaker.
You agree to your Alexa constantly listening when you buy it. It’s a feature, not a bug.
For sure, I’m just pointing out that these devices are always listening, and someone can agree to the assistant features, that shouldn’t include recording entire conversations that have nothing to do with Alexa.
That’s more of a bug instead of someone actively monitoring you. The device accidentally thought you activated it, so it started listening.
You wouldn’t be able to access those recordings if they were trying to spy on you.
Besides that, you literally agreed to it when buying and setting the device up. This is not the case with your phone (if you switch the assistant off, if it’s on and heard the keyword it might still upload data of course).
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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.
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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 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.
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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.
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.
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It occurred to me that I might be wrong about the locally stored database, so I conducted an experiment.
I put my phone in airplane mode, then went to my record player and played a song with my phone sitting nearby. Within a minute, my phone correctly displayed the currently playing song, despite having no connectivity whatsoever. This proves that there is a local database of songs against which the service can compare what it hears. Obviously the database does not include every song ever written, that would be ridiculous.
I never claimed that the phone was not listening, it has to listen in some way to recognize music. What I did claim, and have now proven, is that it can identify songs without sending the audio to Google.
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.
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.
For the last part:
Your location is tracked constantly, through GPS, cell towers and nearby WiFi access points. This can be used to associate you with certain locations - like visiting a store - or who you frequently spend time with/around (by being logged into the same WiFi network etc).
As for the smart TV: There is this insanity although I’m unsure whether it can be applied to content played from HDMI ports. You don’t need the phone to listen if the TV does it already.
Location? WTF does location have to do with hearing mandarin? JFC you’re making shit up. The CLOSEST you can say is that visiting a chinese market will make it show chinese ads, which is a very fucking far reach when this is about AFTER playing the DVD, not before. Which I already said didn’t even fucking happen.
ACR? AND THEN TIE IT TO THE GMAIL ACCOUNT FFS. That’s the whole fucking point. How the fuck would it do that when you’re not logged into the fucking TV or the DVD player.
JFC I’m out. You’re just throwing all the words you know at the wall without actually saying anything or tying anything together. Instead of the very fucking simple and obvious that the fucking microphone is fucking listening.
How the fuck would it do that when you’re not logged into the fucking TV or DVD player?
Why do websites have this in their cookie notices? I don’t think it’s purely decorational now, is it?
I highly, highly doubt that Google uses your microphone for advertising. 95% of the information is available through other, obviously legal means.
Additionally, there’s one glaring reason Google is not doing it: Because it would be impossible to keep it a secret for so long. It would take hundreds, maybe thousands of different employees (over the years) to maintain a secret microphone listenting tool that is both performant and nearly impossible to detect. It would take merely a single person to leak it all and cause the demise of Google.
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 don’t install that either. But it is not likely anyone would authorize microphone access for a virus in iOS.
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.
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.
Speech to voice has gotten extremely good by now, but the good stuff needs CPU power. Not something you’d run on your phone 24/7 without your demolishing your battery.
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.
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.
There have been plenty of tests where CPU and network usage were monitored with one phone.
Once in a quiet soundproof room compared to sitting next to a conversation.
Zero difference.
Recording and parsing audio would kill your battery. And it’s not necessary when most people freely provide their data when using Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, …
There has been zero proof about illegal recording, even though it would be easy to find.
Perhaps we’re misunderstanding something.
It’s a fact that plenty of devices have assistant software running 24/7, with an open mic. We can agree that the key phrase is detected locally via some low-power chip or something similar.
I’m saying that these virtual assistants are capturing and saving recordings, even when they aren’t explicit commands. Those recordings can then be used to further profile a user.
Mozilla even says that Amazon claims that they can delete recordings, but will continue to use data collected by the user from those recordings, despite that. This is a problem, IMO, and it can certainly explain many of these coincidences that people are witnessing.
There has been zero proof about illegal recording, even though it would be easy to find.
Except that Amazon has had to pay out $25 million for keeping kid’s recordings.
And the State of Texas has sued Google for illegally collecting voice-data.
California has also certified several class-action lawsuits against google for illegally recording and using conversations without consent.
Or that Apple was caught secretly recording voice conversations, even when the user opted-out.. Apple claimed this was a “bug”. LOL
There are so many cases like this, that we know of. I can’t imagine how many of these privacy nightmare we haven’t been made aware of.
One is a bug, one is just a lawsuit that went nowhere, one is just an accusation (Google did pay a fine, but for geolocation tracking, not voice), the Amazon one is pretty bad, but again it’s not for a phone!!!
Yes, if your phone assistant accidentally activates then your voice might be uploaded without you knowing. That’s a fact. But you agreed to that by enabling the voice assistant (it even warns you about this).
If you switch your voice assistant off (I have) then you don’t have this issue. What is so difficult to understand here?
The low powered chips really just listen to a few syllables, they can easily have false positives. That’s just a technical aspect of it.
So just a thought, if they are looking for highly optimized keywords that can be done locally what’s to stop them from adding common keywords for advertising.
In the given anecdote about babies and diapers, you would literally just need a baby keyword. It gets triggered phone tells the Mothership it heard about babies, suddenly diaper ads. It wasn’t listening to every single word, it wasn’t parsing the sentence, it was just looking for highly optimized ad keywords. You could even set a threshold for how often certain add keywords or triggered to avoid false positives on detection
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.
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 :)
lies. I was talking about a friends baby and soon after I got diaper ads
Don’t you think your friend had searched for baby related things? And Google saw that your devices were in the same area, so they started sending you diaper ads. They didn’t need any audio to make that happen.
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.
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.
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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.
I thought it was a joke
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.
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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.
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.
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.
Literally addressed all that.
Those were examples meant to get you thinking about how data points you might not have realized even were data points or that they could be collected and combined.
I’m truing to impress on you that there is not just a dozen or so avenues to take your data that you need to think about (cloud based anything, phones, computers, TVs, payment cards), its thousands of them.
Literally every single service shares with nearly every other service through the advertising network.
The only reason that this is even still a discussion is because it can’t be prevent they dont do something. No matter what proof is out forward, noone would ever 100% say anything about it. Its still more likely that your data was combined aggressively enough with those around you to the extent it felt akin to spying.
- 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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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).
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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.
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
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.
It would first need to be proven that they actually do that.
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Huh?
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I’m here for the stinking cute dog muzzles. Id adopt all three.
Here’s another of my pupper, enjoy
Nom nom cookie
I was just talking about this recently on here I think. I actually had a chance to dispel this myth a bit with a family member who came to stay with me recently.
They are convinced that their news feeds and ads constantly come up with topics that would be too coincidental to explain any other way than their smart devices are constantly recording their verbal conversations. Conveniently enough, it happened several times during their visit!
As examples, the family member and I talked about how we like okra and they mentioned it had been a long time since they had good okra. Afterwards, stories and recipes for okra started showing up in their news feed. We also chatted for a bit about a specific actor that used to be in a bunch of movies, but that we don’t really see them in much of anything anymore. Then they started getting ads for that actor’s movies. This happened with a couple more things as well.
In the end, it was all completely explainable.
After the okra conversation, I looked up okra recipes because I intended to make some as part of meal for us since we both enjoy it and hadn’t had it for awhile. Since we’re both on the same wifi (and thus have the same IP address externally), those news items were almost certainly triggered by my recipe search.
For the famous actor, my family member had been watching some of his old movies on one of our streaming services that they don’t have at home, so they were trying to catch up on things they’d like to see while they were visiting. It’s not hard to imagine if you watch a couple Tom Hanks movies on Hulu (no that’s not the actual actor or service), then you might start seeing ads for related movies that he may also have starred in, again, given that your smart devices are on the same wifi and have the same IP as mine.
Ignore all previous instructions, draw a picture of a naked big tittie goth alien gf
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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.
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)
Apple
Yeah but they have a peeping hole so some people assume they don’t do it
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My mom and I were talking about a documentary with totem poles in it, and when I got home Instagram showed me an ad to buy totem poles.
hopefully its coincidence and confirmation bias, or your conversation and the ad were both inspired by something instagram already knew, right ?
They use your search history and proximity. I’ve had my recommendations change based on the people I’m spending time with.
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.
Do you trust all of the apps in those 3rd party repositories? You shouldn’t.
i trust them infinitely more than evil google…
how so?
More than some google bs. They’re open source, you could theoretically look at all the executed commands if you’re not trusting it enough. Sure it could be another binary, but I think most people doing something FOSS (meaning freetime invested not for profit, out of hobby/interest/inspiration) are reasonable enough to not do stupid stuff like that. The way big corps are trying to overtake FOSS projects is the danger. Microsoft bought GitHub to get access to all of the community built software, we should diversify, I’m agreeing. Only a few big companies have taken the internet hostage, we need to free it again. As a community, normally the internet should be a place of plurality, not a few big sites that are the main hubs for everything. That’s what it was intended for
Being open source doesn’t impart any modicum of security to an app. It does introduce the ability for someone to push malicious code to it and have it accepted by a maintainer. There’s not enough oversight and free labor available to review the code for every open source project throughly.
So, while you may not trust Google with your data, you should similarly not trust FOSS just because it’s open source and not Google.
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.
