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, …).
Nice try, I’m still going to wear my tinfoil
Just make sure that webcam has a piece of tape over it…
“My phone is listening, it knows what I want!”
*Uses social media, doesn’t use ad-blockers, and clicks OK to share data with 1472 Trusted Data Partners to make the annoying popups go away*
For “Hey Google”, “Hey Alexa” or “Hey Siri” to work your phone/smart speaker has to be always listening
This is only partially true. Yes, it’s listening for those keywords, but only for them. Sometimes that’s even an extra chip in your phone, otherwise it would kill your battery in no time.
Which is one of the reasons you can’t just customize the command to whatever you want to say.
And the thing is, even if you disable it, it’s still listening. It just doesn’t answer you.
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.
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.
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 agree with you, it’s crazy people still believe this is happening. However the fact that they can collect so much data about you through other means that people believe they’re spying on your directly is still pretty fuckin scary.
It is fucking happening. Why the fuck would you believe they aren’t collating your conversations when you willingly allow it to listen to trigger words?
“Hey, Siri, don’t record my shit… hur hur.”
When are people going to get it through their heads corporations don’t give two shits about you, at all. They don’t care if you live or die. They only care about profit. Stop bending over for them.
I think you’ve misread the room. I’m not defending corporations at all actually, simply agreeing that the idea they literally actively spy on you through your phone is misinformation. Unless you have any real proof other than Siri existing and saying corporations are bad?
I 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.
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.
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.
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.
We don’t care about your stock price, or your dividends.
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.
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…
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.
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?
Anything for profit, and the excusing of it.
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
We don’t care about your stock price, or your dividends.
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.
Apple
Yeah but they have a peeping hole so some people assume they don’t do it
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.
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)
I don’t buy shit from any of them. I know it sounds crazy, really crazy… but it’s possible.
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.
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.
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.
