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> “two friends are talking about recent trips to Japan, and soon after one gets hawked cheap flights there” — that have led users to erroneously conclude that t

> “two friends are talking about recent trips to Japan, and soon after one gets hawked cheap flights there” — that have led users to erroneously conclude that their phones are listening in on their conversations. Has this not been shown to happen?

sthgrau 8y ago
I think this covers the current state of the art. No audio capturing adware found, but other privacy problems: https://recon.meddle.mobi/panoptispy/ https://recon.meddle.mobi/panoptispy/
kilo_bravo_3 8y ago
What scenario is more likely: 1. While in Japan, or during the planning of the trip to Japan, the persons visited websites that indicated a preference towards visiting Japan, and sometime later an ad network connected the cookie with their past behavior and served an ad for a flight, or 2. Someone has created a hitherto unknown stealth malware designed to circumvent the "microphone on" notification on smartphones and exfiltrate audio from a user's device, deployed the infrastructure to store and process the audio, and then done everything already needed in scenario 1 to serve ads for a flight. Any moderately-skilled network engineer or security professional would be able to instantly tell if a device was sending audio to a remote server if told to look. And highly-skilled people are actually looking.
xkcd-sucks 8y ago
My Firefox Mobile on Android often asks permission to record audio/video on ad-heavy websites like Vice Media, and installing an ad blocker made the permission requests go away. Why?
autoexec 8y ago
We know that apps are constantly listening for audio beacons ( ultrasonic cross-device tracking) which are used to link different devices to the same person (your phone and your laptop for example) so that they can associate data collected on either device to you and that they use them to log when/where you watch certain content (such as TV ads). Mics are active and listening. I think it would take a large security breech to see what companies are actually doing with what they collect vs what they'll publicly admit they are doing.

sthgrau 8y ago

I think this covers the current state of the art. No audio capturing adware found, but other privacy problems: https://recon.meddle.mobi/panoptispy/ https://recon.meddle.mobi/panoptispy/

kilo_bravo_3 8y ago

What scenario is more likely: 1. While in Japan, or during the planning of the trip to Japan, the persons visited websites that indicated a preference towards visiting Japan, and sometime later an ad network connected the cookie with their past behavior and served an ad for a flight, or 2. Someone has created a hitherto unknown stealth malware designed to circumvent the "microphone on" notification on smartphones and exfiltrate audio from a user's device, deployed the infrastructure to store and process the audio, and then done everything already needed in scenario 1 to serve ads for a flight. Any moderately-skilled network engineer or security professional would be able to instantly tell if a device was sending audio to a remote server if told to look. And highly-skilled people are actually looking.

xkcd-sucks 8y ago

My Firefox Mobile on Android often asks permission to record audio/video on ad-heavy websites like Vice Media, and installing an ad blocker made the permission requests go away. Why?

autoexec 8y ago

We know that apps are constantly listening for audio beacons ( ultrasonic cross-device tracking) which are used to link different devices to the same person (your phone and your laptop for example) so that they can associate data collected on either device to you and that they use them to log when/where you watch certain content (such as TV ads). Mics are active and listening. I think it would take a large security breech to see what companies are actually doing with what they collect vs what they'll publicly admit they are doing.