Could you please mark this as NSFW and tag it?
NSFW: NSFW content is permitted but it must be tagged and have content warnings. Anything that doesn’t adhere to this will be removed. Content warnings should be added like: [penis], [explicit description of sex]. Non-sexualized breasts of any gender are not considered inappropriate and therefore do not need to be blurred/tagged.
This is actually not a thing. There is no evidence that smartphones constantly listen to people.
https://news.northeastern.edu/2018/07/06/is-your-smartphone-spying-on-you/
Also, this person is, well, for a lack of a better term, a porn actress. So this tweet might be a mix of bias, leading to the belief their phone is listening, but maybe also a bit of advertisement - which, don’t get me wrong, is great. She did some stuff with Owen Gray, good stuff. Check them out, support their work.
That being said, it is certainly technically feasible. I’m sure there have been several, individual cases, and we will probably see new, “innovative” ways of companies spying on us.
You’re full of shit and must work for ad companies. Because they damn sure are listening. I seen proof. Especially when you phone calls out, “I didn’t get that” when your not even using the phone.
Also I get ads just by having a conversation about a subject they me and my wife discussed but never looked up. They do turn on those mics and use what they hear.
yeah it’s not an Alexa
Not accessing the microphone doesn’t necessarily mean you aren’t listening in.
I read an article at one point about how the gyrometer can be used as a microphone as well. Not as good and not all phones but.
Yeah while absence of evidence is not evidence of absence and I too sometimes think that a phone must have been listening in… idk. Might just be the frequency illusion. Especially if she’s a porn actress, I can imagine a billion things in her interactions on the phone without it listening in would also probably lead to similar adverts.
I happen to work in machine learning. You are most likely referring to the Stanford Gyrophone paper. Given that the sampling frequency of the gyroscope sensor on typical smartphones is extremely limited, you can only get very low frequency content (Nyquist).
It wouldn’t be possible for any human to process or understand the recorded signals, so the researchers trained a machine learning model on the recorded samples, with a very limited vocabulary consisting of only the digits from 0 to 9 and “oh”.
If the model was not trained on the particular speaker (requiring annotated training data for that particular speaker, which would be almost impossible to get in the assumed scenario), the recognition rate was 26%. For a vocabulary of 11 words.
It’s a nice proof of concept, and doubly so if tge CIA considers you a target, but otherwise it’s not happening.
Dude, there’s more, but this is the first one that came up.
A leaked pitch deck from CMG Local Solutions, a subsidiary of Cox Media Group (CMG), details a method it calls “active listening.” This method uses AI to combine voice data with online behavioral data to deliver hyper-targeted advertising.
The deck, obtained by 404 Media, states, “Advertisers can pair this voice-data with behavioral data to target in-market consumers.” It goes on to say that the technology can identify “ready-to-buy” consumers and create ad lists based on their spoken intentions.
https://www.newsweek.com/phone-voice-assistants-active-listening-consent-targeted-ads-1949251
As I said, I’m sure companies will try. But what you’re looking at there is a pitch deck presented to someone so they’d cough up money. That does in no way imply that this has been widely deployed without requiring user consent and therefore there are apps out there en masse, listening to smartphone users in a form of clandestine operation. It’s basically the same thing as the patent for the old greentext Mountain Dew commercial meme at this point:
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/sony-patent-mcdonalds/
In fact, the article clearly states that the data Cox Media Group uses comes from apps where users have agreed to grant the application permission to use their voice data, and that Cox Media Group was subsequently removed from the Google Ads program (a precaution for Google to save face).
I used to think they didn’t listen, and I’d cite the same sort of studies. But honestly…I’ve had a few times in the last several months where a conversation I had with my GF triggered ads on our phones, when neither of us had done an internet search of that particular subject or any that were tangential. A couple times, now, I’ve been spooked. Could be some other data we put out there, or something we clicked, but I racked my brain and couldn’t think of any.
Maybe our phones aren’t listening to us all the time. But it’s already pretty fucking bad when lived experience makes us wonder whether they really are.
There is this recently settled lawsuit:
[The] lawsuit that alleged Apple was infringing on its users’ privacy by capturing conversations overheard by its Siri voice assistant without consent, passing the recordings to third-party quality control contractors. Apple offered a formal apology and pledged it would no longer retain user recordings, but pushed back against additional allegations that it allowed advertisers to target consumers based on Siri recording data. In January 2025, the company agreed to pay $95 million out to impacted users to settle the case.
So apple was doing this and apologized for it.
As an aside, if you have a voice activated assistant like Siri enabled, it is constantly listening for the voice activation command.
And why did you cite some pretty old studies?
Occom’s rasor: BF is googling plan B and birth control after he raw dog’s her, and the ads are linked to devices on that home network.
Yeah. If the “Phone is listening in” thing was real, like 100 youtubers would have already bought a dozen burner phones and run a test. It’s somehow a conspiracy that everyone accepts despite how trivially easy it is to prove wrong.
Or!
She only gets horny enough for this at a particular time of month and it’s a false correlation.
On that line of thinking, she uses a menstruation cycle app that is selling that data and advertisers know when she is likely to be having sex
This is it. People are worried that their phones are listening in but then click or tap through privacy policies accepting all uses of their data across the board without batting an eye!
Oh yeah. They should do like you that hires a lawyer to read t&C for every app installed and site visited, and in the end clicks accept because that’s the only choice.
Or she’s putting on a playlist for sexy time. I honestly think this is the most likely.
It is really weird that we have these big companies behaving like this with so little public outcry.
If an individual tracked your location, all of your spending, your web history, your communication and in-person meetings and built a profile on you containing all that information we’d label that person a stalker. But if Facebook does it, well that’s just business.
Probably helps that it’s the fucking iPhone rather than the doing taxes iPhone. It is comparatively less likely (though not impossible) to become pregnant as a result of doing taxes.
In any case, I’m conflicted on this one. I’m not a fan of ads that are intrusive in their targeting or display methods but that may be a lesser evil compared to OOP reproducing.
This isn’t sattire, it’s hell that we’ve normalized. The constant surveillance is way more thorough and insidious than anyone wants to know, and it’s so difficult to avoid that nobody wants to find out because it’s effectively hopeless.
That being said, the attained hopelessness around having privacy is so widespread I don’t feel like we’ll ever even try to stop it.
It’s actually not. There is no evidence that smartphones listening to users is a widespread phenomenon.
Yes there is. I track all data on my home network and on my phone. I can see exactly how many times every app on my own phone tries to access my microphone and camera, and how much data is being sent from my friends devices when supposedly not in use, and even supposedly turned off.
Anecdotally , on the rare occasion I use a computer without my general ad defenses, the only ads I see relate to the most recent conversations I’ve had with one particular friend in person.
So you are saying that apps on your phone can access your microphone without your permission? Wouldn’t you want to report that to Google or Apple or whoever made your phone’s OS?
Also, how did your individual phone become relevant for the assumption that this is a widespread phenomenon?
Finally, it’s great that you log your app activity, but you are aware that the scientist in the study I cited examined 17620 apps and found not a single instance of the app turning on audio and sending the data?
I’m saying they try to. My specific version of e/os traps apps in a box and lies to their data requests if they pretend they need a permission I won’t give them.
Even without a specific app having mic access, it has RAM access, so if any other app does have mic access, the data can be skimmed as it’s passing through.
Facebook has been, and is currently being fined for ignoring privacy laws, and is known to have profiles on people who don’t use their services. How do they build those profiles if you never gave them permission?
I still find it crazy. I was watching a show with a friend that displayed where people were from and one guy was from Canada, specifically Alberta. Being Canadian myself, I had the legal requirement to point out another Canadian and said “Hey, that guy’s from Alberta!” To which my friend said “I’ve been to Alberta.” I replied “I haven’t.” That was that. A few minutes later he’s scrolling through social media and tells me he’s getting a bunch of tourism ads for travelling to Alberta. He thought it was funny but honestly that just creeps me out.
What if we had said something we didn’t want everyone to know? What if we were from a country where being gay was illegal, and we mentioned something gay in the presence of a phone, and now we’re flagged as gay by these companies. The government then demands consumer information from them and now they have a list of gay people. It sounds paranoid, but the current US government really shows how quickly things can go from being socially acceptable to criteria for being sent to a concentration camp.
Any of the people in here saying there’s no proof that apps access your microphone don’t understand that you don’t need microphone access to listen in. Something on your phone has mic access, so all an app needs is access to your RAM. If not your phone, your tv. Or any voice activated device nearby. Microphones are not ears, they can be significantly more sensitive.
Or an even simpler possibility, the companies are lying because there is no consequence.
