Android only solution, I think. Admittedly I don’t know I iPhone very well.
Anecdotally, it’s not even a solution. I’ve run into “coincidental” ads without having the FB app installed (visiting FB via browser).
Then they’ve installed a root kit on your computer because that’s the only way they could have access to your microphone, the web browser blocks it otherwise.
Except it’s not Facebook doing this, it’s Cox Media Group.
If you look at the slideshow, cox media group doesn’t claim to be the ones harvesting the data, only to be processing it using AI to then provide that aggregate information to advertisers. Which makes sense, they literally have no means to directly collect voice data from you
Also no offense but, I thought lemmy users were a little bit better than this whole “read headline, make assumptions, storm to comments” thing that Reddit loves to do
These companies absolutely do use your microphone to listen.
My wife and I have tested this and you can too.
Have a conversation near your phones about purchasing something offbeat. We used a kitchen garbage disposal in our test. Talk about them for a few minutes, about needing to buy one, different brands, etc.
Almost immediately you’ll be served garbage disposal adds.
This has been common knowledge for several years now.
And there have been push back against the idea by naive, trusting people who think the toggles for that do anything. The fact that there’s leak conversations now of advertisers admitting they do it will sink any counter argument against it.
Also, if advertisers are doing it, you can bet that the government can too.
No that’s being pushed back on the idea from people with tech skills who work in the cyber security industries. You don’t think they would realize if something like this was happening and shout it from the rooftops?
It’s everyone’s favorite past time to dunk on Facebook but that doesn’t mean we should make stuff up without evidence. Calling people naive because they don’t believe you is the same as saying it’s true because you want it to be.
Evidence must be presented. I’ve never seen any not in the 10 years these claims have been made. No one has ever bothered to provide a shred of evidence and all of it is who I talked about X and then I saw an ad for X.
Pardon me for wanting something a little bit more concrete
You don’t think they would realize if something like this was happening and shout it from the rooftops?
Nope. Too many people are just trying to collect a paycheck. This is testable without access to the backend or source code and too many sociopaths work in the industry. My default is to distrust anything when the other party has a profit motive to lie. It’s anti-skeptical, but you have to prove that they aren’t spying on me if you want me to trust something.
Okay so address my fundamental point which is show me the evidence because otherwise you’re living in exciting reality of your own creation. I am positive it is very fun in there, but it doesn’t have much to do with here on Earth
Come leave here on the other side of the reality curtain we have donuts.
I took a morning summer Bio110 course. The teacher would recommend making easy projects rather then interesting projects, the students were just fulfilling their credit requirements and one time, I was the first one in and over heard the teacher shit talking community college students. Regular session students were dumb and summer session students that were home on break were just drifting through the class for the requirements. This same teacher denied my experiment because the school didn’t have the equipment to run it, but I was planning on doing it at home anyway. It was basically just a yeast growing project with a special microbe.
I was doing this class in parallel with an online high school course because I wanted a classroom to go with it. The online high school material was more advanced then the CC material and didn’t help at all.
This was the most recent time I tried. How much money do I need to throw away before my opinion is valid to you?
Sure thing… Just install Facebook Messenger on your phone and don’t pay attention to all of the permissions it needs that are completely unrelated to communicating with people in a messaging app. It is literal malware.
It’s wild how much trust people are willing to put into capitalist corporations again and again as if they give a single shit about them.
People are lazy and life is easier when you just blindly trust things you don’t understand. People think I’m weird that I don’t want a Ring camera INSIDE my house. I wouldn’t even put on outside my home.
The reverse is just as true:
“People are lazy and life is easier when you just blindly hate things you don’t understand.”
As a network engineer, it’s frustrating to see laymen make outlandish claims about technology with their source being “corpo bad”. I hated corporations too, but it would be an absolute bombshell if it were. There’s just no possible way that every single hacker and security engineer are in league with the corporations.
Honestly, with how people reacted to covid numbers being fudged downward or accepting whatever lie that claims that climate change is fake, I do not believe that any more evidence that corporations are listening in on your conversations would get any reaction out of the population. Hell, did anything come from the Panama Papers or Paradise Papers? The average person does not care.
Sure, people might not care, but that doesn’t change the facts. Experts aren’t denying the legitimacy of the Panama or Paradise Papers, but they are saying that the idea of megacorporations secretly listening to your microphone and selling you products based on that is false. If they were doing that, it would be pretty easy to find out. Smartphones aren’t some mysterious black box; security engineers and hackers are constantly checking for these kinds of exploits. If corporations were actually spying on us through our phones, it would be the biggest topic at DEFCON. Believing that this could be kept secret would require assuming that all these experts are either paid off or in cahoots with the corporations, which veers into full-blown conspiracy theory territory.
I used to work in adtech and the most we could do was track locations. Even that didn’t work properly for our purposes because most shops are in malls where several different stores co-exist on the same coordinates. It only worked for outlets in retail parks which were separated from one another.
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This is not the court of law and no one is going to jail because of my distrust of corporations. “Innocent until proven guilty” does not apply here. Any batshit idea I could come with on how a corporation could siphon my data, they have already thought of and tried. They do not deserve the benefit of the doubt.
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There are deniers. They’re wrong.
I’ve tested this many times and never saw it happen.
I even got an email out of nowhere right in my inbox from Dell the same day I was talking about Dell laptops with my book club. I would be so shocked if these examples are mere coincidence
Having worked on the tech side of email marketing campaigns I would actually be impressed
Setting aside confirmation bias (idk, because it’s boring?): So people you’re in a book club with, an established group which it is very easy to associate you with, were discussing Dell laptops… and you think it’s strange you got looped in? If three people from your book club all looked up dells later, or earlier, or etc. etc., why wouldn’t they figure you might also be interested in dell laptops? An approach that doesn’t require NLP of god only knows how much hypothetical audio taken from pockets, and works much better?
This is why I don’t have the Facebook app installed. However, what about messenger? Did the collect the data from messenger?
Any closed-source software is a potential privacy threat. You are always at the mercy of big tech in that case. If the product is free, you are the product
Think about it.
I am so numb to outrage that this just seems… Meh. What happened to me.
Normative nihilism is going to get us all.
It’s the world we live in. It’s very much intentionally designed to make you complacent.
They spent decades gaslighting you so you thought you were crazy for even imagining it.
yeah like tell me something I don’t know.
“This just in: to the surprise of no one, your phone has, in fact, been spying on you from day 1. Now we go to Jim with sports. Jim?”
tell me something I don’t know
My grandad said “It’s really humid today isn’t it?”
I said “Tell me something I don’t know!”
He said “Err… Ok… I can fit my whole fist up yer gran’s arse”
For everyone saying apps need permission to use your mic I want to point you to “play services”. The permissions protections only apply to user space apps not system apps. Thats how u can say “OK google” and get the chat ai to pop up even tho its “not listening” according to the OS.
Also if you read the website they are not piping audio to their servers. They push triggers (keywords, etc) to the local ai on your phone that listens for things like “OK google” and then sends those reports back.
Meta apps would need permission to to mic but I think if y’all check your big tech apps u will be surprised how many have that permission.
I can’t speak to iOS because its closed source but it probably has similar backdoors for apple.
Thank god those moral people would never sell stuff to law enforcement nor sell it to companies that would then sell it to law enforcement.
Nope. Those people are all moral, good, and rich thus we are safe.
It remains funny to me that futurism.com became mostly about covering the dystopia we live in.
Not, like, “haha” funny…
Yeah that’s a shame, electronics seems to have reached a level where most people just don’t need or dream of a better something (PC, phone, etc) and other tech is hard to grasp like biotech.
The future is going to be amazing! Well, it has the potential to be amazing if we use tech the right way. No I mean, like in an ethical way. Without exploiting people. No not like that, in a way that helps people. Well yes, billionaires are people, but I meant… at least it should be in legal ways. Or at least policed. Not hostile to average people. Not an openly criminal endeavour. Maybe just dont criminalise resistance to it? … oh, actually the future is going to be a techno-monopolistic dark age, I see. We can pivot to covering that.
We know? It’s not a coincidence that when you mention something like Cheap Flights to Dublin, it soon ends up on your ad rotation.
Honestly I’d rather that than ads for the things I already bought.
uOrigin user : you have ads?
Isn’t this an old article?
easy to test. men can say “tampons glitter lotion” several times a day. women say “garage exhaust cable”.
What’s the last “bombshell scandal that would ruin a company” that actually ruined a company?
Unroll.me was a service that would scan your email and clean up your inbox. The New York Times reported that the company was gathering sales receipts emails, anonymizing them, and selling them to rival companies; for example Uber paid them to hand over all the sales receipts they could on Lyft rides in people’s mailboxes. The bad press made them eventually sell the company to Slice, mainly for the email archives they amassed.
Slice like… the pizza website?
That’s what I assumed too but it appears to be a package tracking website
Enron? Maybe the SBF thing? Seems like financial scandals are the only thing that matters.
As a business you can be a maverick against many laws, just not the laws regarding finance.
Cambridge Analytica, but only because what they were doing was so monumentally illegal. I’m sure the government would have let them get away with it if they could have thought of a way out for them. A lot of them mates were involved in that scandal.
Most of the non tech people reaction
It’s the reverse. Non tech people believe the snake oil, tech people know this is snake oil.
But before that, when it was not acknowledged by social media, it was more like ’ you’re paranoid. And you think you’re that important that they listen to you? Common, get back to reality ’
Yeah, being not paranoid is hard in XXI century.
TBH the same scenario has been mentioned in the “ex machina” movie from 2014 when colleb has been asking how the humanoid robots work. The deep blue was AI of search engine taking data from listening to the phone calls
I feel like we’ve been gaslighted so bad about this that we were even denying each other’s reality.
I knew they had to be doing this so I turned off all mic permissions. One day it pissed me off so much I started keeping my phone off completely unless I needed to use it.
The only good thing that came out of it was I learned about ad blockers. Fine, listen to me since I can’t fucking stop you(keeping phone off was inconvenient), but it’s futile now and you wasted money since I won’t see your stupid fucking ads anyway now.
I knew they had to be doing this so I turned off all mic permissions. One day it pissed me off so much I started keeping my phone off completely unless I needed to use it
It might be an easy to just stop using Facebook really.
I’ve had enough time to work out which of my relatives are racist, so I don’t really need it anymore.
I don’t have fb or the youtube app and haven’t for years… so I’m not sure what was doing it. I have ublock origin now, so if it’s still happening I wouldn’t know.
Honestly the thought of them pouring that much money into r&d and launching that spyware just to have us plebs block the end result(ads) does feel kinda good at least.
Wonder what it’ll get out of ‘Kill Zuckerberg’ and other things.
I remember reading some time ago that “the idea (of phones listening to everything you say to serve ads) makes no economic sense, because it’d be too expensive to run”
Looks like it actually isn’t “too expensive” to run in the end.
Yep, and it’s not just Facebook, not just microphone. My lappie recently started serving ads for something I searched on a device not linked to it. I’m guessing it’s my ISP engaging in these sneak tactics.
Depemds if you are logged i to google services on your phone and on you pc browser. If you log into anything google on your browser it retains that log in across all the apps
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Oh you know what? Gmail!
That’ll do it 😀
It’s not when it’s your device doing the computing. All electronic devices should have visible hardware indicators for when their camara or microphone is on, but that’s a consumer rights issue most people are dismissive of, so it’s not happening. Some people even always want it on for the assistant functionality.
The mic is always on for android phones anway, thats how it hears “Hey Google”
Not how it works.
They have an ultra low power processor that listens for the “hey Google” keyword, then that wakes up the main audio processor. But the main microphone is not actually on, and that small processor isn’t capable of recording audio it’s just looking for a certain matching sound wave and then triggering.
That’s why it sometimes triggers if you just go “hurr ner dorrll” because those random sounds are close enough to what it’s looking for.
That is why some older devices can’t actually install the assistant software. They lack the necessary hardware to do it in a power efficient manner.
my Samsung has a green light in the task bar when my camera is on
Yeah, a marketing agency selling snake oil to people that actually think they can do it is not expensive. Of course they never actually built the tech.
Even then, you have local voice recognition. You don’t need to stream all microphone recordings to some central server for processing, you just do voice recognition and keep a log of say the last 100 nouns and a high priority log for the last twenty nouns used near verbs like purchase, buy or get. Then send those lists to the ad provider as context. All the hard work is done on the client device and the same backend used for ad context on web pages can be used for this as well.
Then hide it encrypted in an image upload or some other packet. Listen for ‘buy a <something>’ encrypt its text version, wait for something to cargo it with in a data transmission so people looking at data transmissions aren’t any the wiser, hide it in some obscure way that would look normal otherwise, it’s intercepted, sends off to advertisers. Adtech is cyber terrorism.
You don’t think security experts know about stereonography techniques? It’s like the first thing you learn about in uni for it. Like the first week.
Except Facebook never used it this was a 3rd party trying to hype up investors. Many audits have been run on these apps and there is no way they use your microphone. It’s way cheaper to just look at your search history.
This is why I don’t like the push of everything needing an app. I sure do wish people in congress cared about this type of privacy issues the way they did Tiktok.
