Not my title! I do think we are being listened to. And location tracked. And it’s being passed on to advertisers. Is it apple though? Probably not is my take away from this article, but I don’t trust plenty of others, and apple still does
Literally the news story that this author cites as motivation for writing this article in the preamble to the article.
The comments here show the real problem, adverts dont have to say why they’ve been selected.
All online ads should have to say which filters they matched to advertise to you. The advertising in most cases now is centralised into Google or Facebook, this is absolutely technically possible.
All online ads should have to say which filters they matched to advertise to you.
According to the Signal foundation, the reverse is true. They claim they got banned for revealing that info.
https://signal.org/blog/the-instagram-ads-you-will-never-see/
Sharing data with the plebs is the true crime.
Wow.
This gives me that gut uneasy feeling. Those grabs are hyper specific examples.
People always talk about getting served ads after they talk about something. I think it’s the other way around. The ads put the thought into your brain and then you start talking about it and notice after you’ve already been thinking about it for a while.
While I do suspect they listen, I have pretty solid (anecdotal) evidence they scan text messages. When I bought my house I had no solicitor, I text my buddy to see who he used and he texted me a response.
Started to type into Google to get a number and it was the top suggested search after 2 chars. Nowhere else did I mention this solicitor, hadn’t heard of them before this, have no other searches for this solicitor. It’s not a big firm, it’s not even in my city - only explanation I have is they scanned the messages.
Ads aren’t why you should be concerned about apps w/ microphone access…
Where exactly are you getting the idea that this belief is widespread?
Not my title, as I already said. But anecdata backs this up ime. Go ask your parents for a giggle, see what they say
I’ve heard many folks suspect it. It’s a widespread, if weakly substantiated concern.
I have heard it repeated several times. It’s based on how virtual assistants are allowed to listen over your mic for keywords, applications like Facebook requesting full microphone access, and people with stories of getting ads for things after having a conversation about the same.
The third could be a form of recency bias; I just learned about this, and now I see it everywhere. Also, it’s easy to know who is in your circle, and items you recently searched could be advertised to your friends. I saw this by getting sudden ads for handguns after getting an Amazon link from my gun crazy friend.
Like people allowing google Gemini to always listen for permanent background Shazaam functionality and and having surprised Pikachu faces lol.
I saw it happen about 3 years ago. I mentioned Omega watches to my buddy who had somehow lived to 50 w/o ever hearing the name. Later that same day there was a Facebook ad for Omega on his Samsung phone.
Yep me too. Wife was adamant her phone was spying on her so we decided to test it by talking about Lexus cars (having chosen cars because at the time she was getting no car ads anywhere, had no interest in cars, and she had never heard of the brand before so certainly hadn’t searched for it). A few hours later, her Facebook feed was full of Lexus ads. 100%.
Apps listening to your mic to give you targeted ads is an urban legend. There’s tools to see which apps listen to you and there isn’t any evidence that any of the popular stuff ever open the microphone (unless you’re in a call or something). If you’re too worried about it, you can always turn off the mic permission for the app.
The ads are actually coming from other ways of tracking you like browser fingerprinting to follow what things you browse and build a profile on what you like/are interested in.
See also EFF’s article on it: https://www.digitalrightsbytes.org/topics/is-my-phone-listening-to-me
Jfc, finally some sanity in this thread. Thank you. You’d think a bunch of supposed computer nerds would have done a fucking experiment before going off on some anecdotal bullshit.
agreed. online tracking is so good it just seems like they’re listening to you.
The ones serving up the ads aren’t even the ones listening. They’re buying collated data from many different sources, then their algorithm matches your interests with one of the products they’re contracted to sell. Next thing you know you’re looking at a Rolex ad because you zoomed in on someone’s watch on their Instagram post.
I’m not so sure. When my partner and I were on a road trip we had android auto connected and were singing along to songs we listened to via Spotify. At some point though, when I tried to fiddle with some settings the connection between the car and the smartphone bugged out and while trying to fix it we suddenly heard his voice being played back on the speakers “whispering” some lyrics he had sung 30 to 60 minutes earlier.
I put whispered in quotes because he certainly didn’t whisper those lyrics and I recalled the moment he sang them quite clearly. Beside his singing and the music playing there were no other sounds at that time.
My best guess is that he was actually recorded while singing and something was stripping all the background noises and music to make his speech more clear for speech to text analysis. It was creepy as fuck.
We both work in IT and I truly have no other idea what this could have been given the circumstances. He said there is actually a company that provides a framework that listens to, records and analyses whatever is spoken near smartphone microphones and all the big tech players like Google are using it. I don’t remember the name though. Would have to ask him.
That’s the most unlikely story I’ve heard in a minute… Even assuming there’re some deep rooted kernel level shenanigans, which no one has found yet, how would you fiddling with some settings expose that?
Probably just got a dropped call, and it resumed the playlist in shuffle, I’ve had it happen where the music comes out as if in a phone call (messes up frequencies) for a few seconds before it goes back to normal. Occam’s razor and all
Believe what you want, I don’t really care. The whole connection bugged out and the car’s infotainment system including android auto became unresponsive. There was no call, it wasn’t shuffle and it was definitely his voice, not the music playing. Especially since there was only the whispered singing. No other instruments at all.
I believe it was sunspots that caused bit flips on the phone CPU and regurgitated data from the L5 cache. /s
Why wouldn’t you think this? There is no system in place for monitoring those companies, nor is there any type of punishment for if they were to be proven to be doing so. While on the other hand, there are piles of money to be made from advertisers for allowing exactly that to happen.
I’ve personally had things come up as being advertised to me after being NEAR people talking about those items, and I have seen several videos where people show this effect in action.
Frequency illusion is real, but is not reliable enough to repeat over and over, back to back, unlike the advertising.
When, ever, have the capitalist companies prioritized morality over money? Never.
While there is no system for monitoring the companies, experts can reverse engineer the apps and debug the devices. Thusfar, experts who have done this have found no evidence of these types of activities. All the evidence is anecdotal. I believe if this was a widespread practice, evidence would have been uncovered by now and we would have been reported on widely.
The implication here is really scarier than if they were listening to our conversations. It means they do not need to listen to our conversations. The telemetry they already have is so good that in many cases they know what you will say with such high degrees of accuracy that people assumed that they had to be spying on their conversations.
Either way, we need to demand an end to this unprecedented mass surveillance.
battery life would fall through the floor if they did spy
That was once true, but I am now very skeptical of that with on-device processing that can log key words and send them without using much data or power.
and how are key words decided?
AdSense
That’s a ton of words
Yes this is how algorithms work
I don’t know what you mean. Every ad campaign has its own keywords. They add up to a ton.
Gemini is on every pixel 7-9
A phone reacting to “ok Google” or the equivalent for the other assistants already requires to listen to what you’re saying - doesn’t seem to affect battery life all that much.
Passively waiting until a specific pattern of pressure waves impacts a sensor takes way less power than recording and transmitting the voice data
Yeah, there’s just more effective methods to get essentially the same data.
Yes Apple.
Apple is the one who got caught so far
If you think Google, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Samsung et al aren’t doing this, I’ve got a bridge to sell you.
Ok? I didn’t say differently. OP said
Is it apple though? Probably not is my take away from this article, but I don’t trust plenty of others, and apple still does
I’ll buy-t. What did Apple get caught doing that these other companies haven’t got caught doing?
Edit: Oh, the Siri settlement. The article linked argues against the claim of it being used for advertising, though.
Did yall read the article?
Instagram showed me an ad for a medical condition I only discussed out loud, in person, in my doctors office.
Instagram was immediately uninstalled that day.
I hate to add to the conspiracy, but I know my eye doctor uses a 3rd party which has sections of their hipaa privacy acceptance which allows them to use your info to sell you ads if you don’t decline. Phreesia, is the 3rd party company. Now add the other apps that track your location… time spent there…
and I know my grocery store does the same when you use the discounts. and worse, they have facial recognition so I can’t even opt out (kroger).
Your issue was likely a combo of that.
Can’t be facial-recognized if you always wear an N95 mask in stores ;)
Sorry, but facial recognition software has basically caught up. I would not rely on a mask to prevent me being recognised today:
https://privacyinternational.org/news-analysis/4511/can-covid-19-face-mask-protect-you-facial-recognition-technology-too https://www.ft.com/content/42415608-340c-4c0a-8c93-f22cdd4cc2d6 https://www.techtimes.com/articles/304431/20240508/new-software-shows-promise-facial-recognition-underneath-mask.htm
It must be very situational on when it works, because the FBI has specifically cited a face mask as a reason that it still hasn’t caught whoever left a bunch of bombs laying around on Jan 6.
A random person recognized Luigi in just a couple days, and he was wearing a mask in all the video footage released.
Modern recognition systems can scan footage a lot faster than humans. Many modern systems don’t just use facial recognition but other factors like general height, walking gait, stride length, etc. to make more accurate recognitions.
Wasn’t his face revealed in cab footage where he’d taken his mask off within like, a day?
I think there is also probably a difference of scope in what is leveraged when Kroger is trying to get your facial pattern while you’re in the store to track where you go and get more data to sell advertisers vs like, the lengths gone to by the state in order to catch someone who shot a rich person dead in the street.
Other methods of data collection can be scarily effective. Stores have identified people were pregnant before they knew.
Very likely they identified you as someone that could have that condition, and you noticing the ads after talking to your doctor is a form of recency bias.
You can collect almost all the same data from traditional surveillance methods. Collecting and processing mocrophone data just isn’t effective enough to make up for the massively increased costs from processing it.
As much as I logically know this to be the case, especially now that Android and iOS indicate when things like the mic are active… My brain still wants to reject it because it is just too coincidental.
I do not trust mic switches however, unless someone can provide proof that it physically disconnects the circuit to that microphone, it can be bypassed somewhere and there’s no reason to trust the manufacturer.
It displayed the ad before I could get home and research it. It had only been discussed out loud and in person.
Did you connect to the clinic’s WiFi?
Just being near their WiFi is enough.
Yes, I was on the wifi before the appointment.
This is why. Not because your phone is listening to you.
The wifi was not related to the medical issues, the symptoms, or the specific clinical term mentioned by the doctor.
But it’s reasonable to believe other people would have searched the same topic on that network
Edit: or even that they looked it up o their own network following connecting to the clinic’s.
There’s always other signs.
Your age group, sex, location, profession/industry, income estimation - you can assume they have this data.
That + a few data points that could be tracked by apps or websites:
- Searched online for symptoms
- Searched for doctors
- Called the clinic to schedule an appointment
- GPS to the clinic
- Connected to the clinic’s WiFi
- Doctor is a specialist in X
Cross some of that, personal info, and ads of treatments for conditions of X.
They don’t need to listen to your mic.
That said, if it’s a fairly common condition, it might be the case you were presented the ad before and never noticed it.
None of those data points apply. It was nothing I had searched for or spoken to anyone until I saw the doctor that day and the Instagram ad was present by the time I had driven home, specifically mentioning the clinical term mentioned by the doctor.
It wasn’t even the stated reason for my visit, it was an afterthought at the end of the appointment… “Oh yeah, as long as I’m here, what is this…?”
Believe it, don’t believe it, some people believe the earth is flat, and 5G gives you cancer
We live in an age where the voice can be processed locally on the phone (we’ve had on-device speech-to-text since the late 90s…), and it’s already listening for a wake word, meaning mic is always hot. It doesn’t need to be streamed and use bandwidth; it can fire off 4K of JSON every few hours and relay more than enough information.
Just program whole dictionary of key phrases and scan the wake word buffer like you are already doing. Easy, stealthy, encrypted. Every voice assistant from a major tech company could (and likely IS) doing this.
This also provides ample opportunity for domestic (or even foreign!) spying my state actors, too.
Two ways to process voice, on device or on server. Device-based solutions either are very basic and just detect differences between words or need training data based on your voice or they need lots of processing power for more generalized voice recognition. So is your battery draining and phone is often hot because an app is keeping the mic on and keeping the phone from slowing the processor? Other option is to stream the data to the server. This would also increase battery usage as the phone can’t sleep, but might not be as noticeable, but more evident would be your phone using a lot more bandwidth than is reasonable while you aren’t actively using it.
Forgive me if this is here already but this is how your post showed to me.
I don’t either hut the alternative is much worst in my opinion. It would mean the algorithms are so advanced they are predicting conversations instead of listening to them.
Aw jeez not this again.
ITT:
People saying “They already use every other bit of data they can access, why do you naive optimists think they wouldn’t use the most obvious one?”
vs.
People saying “They already use every other bit of data they can access, why do you naive optimists think they would need to use the most expensive one?”
it’s effective, timely, accurate, and profitable.
ofc they’re gonna use the audio, too; where and when possible.
