• Yukiko [she/her]@hexbear.net
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    5 days ago

    This happens with both Android and Apple. I’ve experienced this phenomena with both platforms and I’ve never had their respective voice assistants enabled. They quite literally just do whatever the hell they please. It is quite clear that they’re listening in on everything. And $95M is literally a drop in the bucket to Apple. I guarantee they’ve made more off of this technology than they’re being fined.

    • marcie (she/her)@lemmy.ml
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      5 days ago

      This is of course all very well known. The best way to prevent this sort of data collection is to install open source FOSS alternatives or block internet access to devices at the router level. For things like Android, you can do a more finegrained approach.

      https://www.privacyguides.org/ has a decent list of alternatives, but are by no means exhaustive.

      For Siri, it is very difficult for it to still function as a device without invasive access. You’d need to find a different thing for this, there are many Home Assistant compatible options that don’t phone home. As a matter of fact, all of these sort of smart home devices tend to have home assistant compatible devices that can be stripped one way or another of all their telemetry leaks.

      Pihole can rip out telemetry data and block ad domains at the router level too. For android without software changes (like swapping to Graphene OS), I strongly recommend https://nextdns.io/ which will help block telemetry and ads even in unpaid apps.