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Two different things. The popular conspiracy theory is that the phone listens to and presumably transcribes your conversations, sending them to a third party. T
by afavour 3y ago
Two different things. The popular conspiracy theory is that the phone listens to and presumably transcribes your conversations, sending them to a third party. The example the OP gave is specifically listening for TV content: they’ll have hashes of known ads/shows/whatever to compare against rather than do something like live transcription.
Don’t get me wrong it’s shitty and gross. But they are different things.
- tjoff 3y agoThe only reason they don't do that is because our devices aren't powerful enough to do it all the time.
- afavour 3y agoI don’t disagree with you but the fact remains: they aren’t doing it.
- ikekkdcjkfke 3y agoA dedicated chip?
- tjoff 3y agoYes? I'm just glad we are not there yet.
- ehsankia 3y agoBoth iOS and Android show when your microphone is active so the whole conspiracy theory about it always listening to you and sending it back is pretty bullshit. And no one has yet found evidence of such network traffic either.
- SketchySeaBeast 3y agoTrue, but the theory is far older than the indicators. So maybe Facebook stopped being sneaky once those controls came in? Not saying I believe them, but there's still room for doubt there.
- ummonk 3y agoFacebook doesn't have to be the one doing it - a 3rd party that controls an app on users' phones could be selling transcribed data to companies that want to run individually tailored ads on Facebook.
- AlInGaP_Diode 3y agoexcept it's always listening for you to say "siri" or "google assisstent". Some androids also show what music is playing nearby. You can thankfully opt-out but the ability to is still there.
- ta988 3y agoThey do that with local processing. For the music thing it calculates a hash locally and send it to their servers.
- roetlich 3y agoThat still requires the microphone to be active, right?
- AlbertRosen 3y agoYes, but it doesn't record anything. It calculates a hash locally and sends that hash to their servers, where it is then identified.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- traverseda 3y agoCouldn't you do the same with tv shows and ads?
- comex 3y agoAt least on iOS, not without hacking the operating system. Siri’s ability to listen for a wakeword without an microphone indicator requires privileges that normal apps don’t get. On Android, as far as I can tell, the same is true, except that some phones ship with preinstalled third-party apps which can then get extra privileges.
- salawat 3y ago...They don't even need to hash content. Advertisers can just add ultrasound beacons to the audio track. Imperceptible to human hearing, but readily picked up by a listening mic. In fact, there are static analysis tools for picking out apps that access such API's in FDroid, along with taking measures to feed said apps dummy data. At least for Android anyway.