4 ms·

Cell phones, even now, can't be doing that much background processing unknownst to us, because they are connected to a battery, battery life is a big deal in a

by jerf 7y ago

Cell phones, even now, can't be doing that much background processing unknownst to us, because they are connected to a battery, battery life is a big deal in a highly competitive industry, and we'd all notice if they drained very quickly. ISTR there are documented instances of law enforcement and/or intelligence doing that sort of thing to phones, and the battery drain causing it to get noticed. Hooking it up to an outlet is a legit different thing. If battery tech or power reduction tech progresses sufficiently, including just by continuing on its current curve (most power reduction rather than battery tech), cell phones will rise to the same level of concerning. (Cell phones of course leak location data full time, and some similar things like that. I'm not saying the current cell situation is awesome either. Only that there is a legit reason to be more concerned about gear hooked up to actual power lines than portable gear.)

mikeash 7y ago
I don’t think battery life is a problem. I think the examples you mention were from much older phones with limited local storage, so they were basically just in a call the whole time, and burning power operating the radio. A modern phone can save the data to local storage and upload it opportunistically. We know that modern phones fan constantly listen to the microphone with minimal power impact, since that’s what these voice assistants are doing. That’s specialized hardware, but adding a little something to save the data wouldn’t be hard. Even if we take it as a given that it can’t be done on batter power, phones get connected to outlets pretty regularly. Have you ever heard someone refuse to charge their phone in their house because it’s creepy?
tialaramex 7y ago
Counterpoint: Google's actual smartphone line (Pixel) ships with passive song recognition, default disabled. I enabled it because I was curious and it sips so little power that I left it on, but to function it has to be listening to the audio all the time so that it can say to itself "Hey, that is Sabotage by the Beastie Boys". It doesn't use the network, or the screen (unless you power the screen on to find out what you're listening to) but it passively remembers every recognisable song it heard, essentially forever. So that means it is _listening_ it just doesn't tell anybody about it.
- jerf 7y ago
  That's part of why I left my caveat in there about the future. We've had chips to detect wakeup words for a while now. From what I know about song detection, that's likely to be doing yet more stuff, but still nowhere near enough for full voice transcription yet. But it is only a matter of time before your phone can be doing full voice transcription, with good guesses as to who the speaker is, full time. Squirting a full day's transcript of your speech up would be very easy to hide in all the chatter a phone already has, and squirting up just selected "suspicious" speech could easily be hidden in just the metadata network traffic of a phone. We have not historically been there, which informs people's about cell phones, and we are not quite there yet. 4 or 5 years maybe. (Although I have some interesting thoughts on how to deal with that. It would be fun to take one of these "transcribing phones" into a movie theatre, then fire the MPAA at Google for copyright infringement.)
  - cameronbrown 7y ago
    Isn't a transcript transformative content and therefore fair use? There are still hundreds of variations for every piece of content.
    - jerf 7y ago
      I wouldn't think so. It's basically the script of the movie, minus the stage directions, and I don't think the MPAA is going to agree that's not copyrightable. There's no "transformation" there in the copyright sense that I can see, it's just a copy.
- andromeduck 7y ago
  Doesn't your phone have to be awake a few seconds for that?
  - tialaramex 7y ago
    What does "awake" mean here? If you mean do I need to explicitly wake it, then definitely no, to test this I just left it on a desk while I played Pulp's "Do you remember the first time?" and read a magazine, after a few minutes I'd read several pages and the song had stopped, I opened the phone and it told me I had listened to "Do you remember the first time?" by Pulp six minutes ago. Does it in some sense "wake up" to do this? Yes, I assume so.

by jerf 7y ago

mikeash 7y ago

I don’t think battery life is a problem. I think the examples you mention were from much older phones with limited local storage, so they were basically just in a call the whole time, and burning power operating the radio. A modern phone can save the data to local storage and upload it opportunistically. We know that modern phones fan constantly listen to the microphone with minimal power impact, since that’s what these voice assistants are doing. That’s specialized hardware, but adding a little something to save the data wouldn’t be hard. Even if we take it as a given that it can’t be done on batter power, phones get connected to outlets pretty regularly. Have you ever heard someone refuse to charge their phone in their house because it’s creepy?

tialaramex 7y ago

Counterpoint: Google's actual smartphone line (Pixel) ships with passive song recognition, default disabled. I enabled it because I was curious and it sips so little power that I left it on, but to function it has to be listening to the audio all the time so that it can say to itself "Hey, that is Sabotage by the Beastie Boys". It doesn't use the network, or the screen (unless you power the screen on to find out what you're listening to) but it passively remembers every recognisable song it heard, essentially forever. So that means it is _listening_ it just doesn't tell anybody about it.

jerf 7y ago
That's part of why I left my caveat in there about the future. We've had chips to detect wakeup words for a while now. From what I know about song detection, that's likely to be doing yet more stuff, but still nowhere near enough for full voice transcription yet. But it is only a matter of time before your phone can be doing full voice transcription, with good guesses as to who the speaker is, full time. Squirting a full day's transcript of your speech up would be very easy to hide in all the chatter a phone already has, and squirting up just selected "suspicious" speech could easily be hidden in just the metadata network traffic of a phone. We have not historically been there, which informs people's about cell phones, and we are not quite there yet. 4 or 5 years maybe. (Although I have some interesting thoughts on how to deal with that. It would be fun to take one of these "transcribing phones" into a movie theatre, then fire the MPAA at Google for copyright infringement.)
- cameronbrown 7y ago
  Isn't a transcript transformative content and therefore fair use? There are still hundreds of variations for every piece of content.
  - jerf 7y ago
    I wouldn't think so. It's basically the script of the movie, minus the stage directions, and I don't think the MPAA is going to agree that's not copyrightable. There's no "transformation" there in the copyright sense that I can see, it's just a copy.
andromeduck 7y ago
Doesn't your phone have to be awake a few seconds for that?
- tialaramex 7y ago
  What does "awake" mean here? If you mean do I need to explicitly wake it, then definitely no, to test this I just left it on a desk while I played Pulp's "Do you remember the first time?" and read a magazine, after a few minutes I'd read several pages and the song had stopped, I opened the phone and it told me I had listened to "Do you remember the first time?" by Pulp six minutes ago. Does it in some sense "wake up" to do this? Yes, I assume so.