Interesting
Interesting
117 comments
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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.
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- 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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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
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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.
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Same happened to me and my mom discussing new bedsheets and covers a xouple years ago. I just started getting adds for them.
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I'm here for the stinking cute dog muzzles. Id adopt all three.
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Here's another of my pupper, enjoy
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Nom nom cookie
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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)
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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.
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hopefully its coincidence and confirmation bias, or your conversation and the ad were both inspired by something instagram already knew, right ?
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They use your search history and proximity. I've had my recommendations change based on the people I'm spending time with.
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Your thoughts are influenced by your surroundings, and those listening may simply link thise topics like spotify links songs.
Could just be coincidence too.
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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.
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Apple
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Yeah but they have a peeping hole so some people assume they don't do it
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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.
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Do you trust all of the apps in those 3rd party repositories? You shouldn’t.
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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
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i trust them infinitely more than evil google...
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how so?
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That's not how that works. Stop spreading this nonsense.
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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?
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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.
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I thought it was a joke
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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…
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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.
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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.
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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.
117 comments
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
The big question is why did this topic come up "out of nowhere"?
And there can be several reasons!
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.
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.
Ok. Why does Instagram demand microphone access to doomscroll?
https://slrpnk.net/post/12530482
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)