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She was chatting with friends in a Lyft. Then someone texted her what they said
- mystraline 2y agoSo, the only defense is either "stfu", or make an ultrasonic transducer device to fill the area with ultrasonic static. Or, better, don't use lyft.
- blarg1 2y agoor use the cone of silence
- janice1999 2y agoOr have sane privacy laws that are actually enforced? You can't solve issues like this with technology on a local scale. Companies generally comply with legalisation. GDPR is far from perfect but EU companies adjusted since it is just the price of doing business.
- weinzierl 2y agoUltrasonic static is easy to filter out if it is even picked up by the microphone. You'd need something broad band but in the hearing range, like ... music.
- pm90 2y agoThis seems a bit of an overreaction. If im entering a gas station, I assume Im being recorded. Same should be true for a cab or rideshare.
- Bairfhionn 2y agoSorry, is this an American thing to just accept that? "It's just like that."
- A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 2y agoWhile 'no expectation of privacy in public spaces' is an American thing, people in general accept any number otherwise awful things as long as they are part of the status quo. I mean, I can go on, but one only has to look at the history of man to look for appropriate examples.
- like_any_other 2y agoThe devshirme and the stasi also used to be part of the status quo. There are plenty of examples going the other way as well.
- lotsofpulp 2y agoHow else can you adjudicate a he said she said scenario?
- righthand 2y agoIt's not he-said-she-said, they sent a txt message to her of her conversation.
- lotsofpulp 2y agoSuppose a driver complains to Lyft about a passenger, or a passenger complaints to Lyft about a driver. Then it would be useful for Lyft to have audio and video of the car ride to substantiate the claims.
- fazeirony 2y agoi'm an american and it is is exactly stuff like this that causes me to avoid using services like this like the plague if i can avoid them. despite living here, privacy to me is important. if i were this woman, i'd not let it go at all - don't give these scumbag companies agency to do what they want with impunity.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- mouse_ 2y agowhat a nightmare
- ghaff 2y agoRespectfully disagree. I’m not going to hold highly sensitive conversations anywhere that someone could hear. And I assume a lot of presentations people work on in planes are at least somewhat sensitive if the wrong person were to see. But I do assume some modicum of privacy.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- mirekrusin 2y agoBut there is driver you don't know that hears everything already, no?
- ghaff 2y agoAs I wrote, if it’s something genuinely sensitive I wouldn’t discuss it in a cab or bar or work on a presentation about it in a plane but there’s a difference between a driver overhearing something and being recorded.
- pzo 2y agoIf you are entering a gas station you are only for ~5 min. In a cab you are sometimes for half an hour - If somebody call you during a ride it's weird to tell "sorry I will call you later because I'm in a cab and being recorded honey" I'm not sure if this is in US but at least in EU you are only allowed to record video without audio with security cameras.
- belter 2y ago> EU you are only allowed to record video without audio with security cameras. Audio recording with security cameras is not prohibited everywhere in the EU, it is heavily regulated. Organizations must ensure compliance with GDPR.
- gruez 2y ago>If somebody call you during a ride it's weird to tell "sorry I will call you later because I'm in a cab and being recorded honey" But it's not weird to say "I'm in a bus full of people, and don't want to talk about my hemorrhoids "?
- pjc50 2y agoUK here: cabs and buses now come with little notifications of video recording (not sure whether audio is included, but presumably) for the usual reason, crime prevention. But there's slightly more protection offered by GDPR.
- janice1999 2y agoDo gas stations perform speech to text and associate it with a user profile with your contact and payment information (perfect for advertisers)?
- righthand 2y agoAbsolutely disgusting, collecting advertising data is out of control. I'm never taking a Lyft again.
- xzjis 2y agoSame. Even assuming there was human error (the driver), it is TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE that from a technical standpoint the recording of private conversations is possible. I can never trust Lyft again as long as they materially allow the recording of conversations.
- laborcontract 2y agoWith LLMs and the new transcription models it’s too easy for an individual to implement mass surveillance. You could easily plant listening devices around a cafe and pick up every conversation. I don’t think we’ve properly internalized this as a society. While I’m not saying to be paranoid everywhere you go, I do this there should be reasonable expectation of being tapped in higher value areas where people like to casually do business.
- cess11 2y agoThat could be done before, but now you could automatically flag and harass people based on the transcriptions and a lot of people would think it is a quite robust system, or will in the future when the only one they actually confide in is a chatbot.
- reaperducer 2y agoThe last Lyft I took had two big stickers on the rear passenger-side window warning that by getting into the car, I give consent to being videotaped and audio recorded. But what are you going to do? Not get in? Then you have to pay a no-show fee, and eventually get banned from the app.
- maxerickson 2y agoThat seems like the sort of narrowly scoped, 3 party situation where the surveillance is not particularly problematic.
- jansan 2y ago> But what are you going to do? Not get in? Not call a Lyft the next time.
- reaperducer 2y agoYou must not be aware that the ride hailing cars are not brand exclusive. One driver will simultaneously run Uber, Lyft, Uber Eats, Postmates, Amazon, and a half dozen other apps all at once in order to stay busy. Switching from Lyft to Uber doesn't change a thing.
- davweb 2y agoIt's easy to accidentally hit the microphone button that appears for any text field in almost all smartphone apps. The phone then transcribes any speech it hears and enters it into the field. I've done this. It's not hard to imagine a scenario where the driver had the message passenger view open in the Lyft app and accidentally recorded the conversation this way. This probably happens a lot but this time the driver also accidentally sent it rather than deleting it. This seems much more likely than a company recording someone without their consent but also texting them the transcription.
- TiredOfLife 2y agoNext you will tell me that Earth isn't flat and that people have beem to the Moon.
- HPsquared 2y agoThat actually makes perfect sense. It's a reminder that we are all now surrounded by microphones that may or may not be recording.
- smitty1e 2y agoWelcome to the Panopticon. In some sense, the "Dark Ages" preceding the Internet had an Edenic innocence about them.
- belter 2y ago> This seems much more likely than a company recording someone without their consent but also texting them the transcription. Where have we seen something similar before? Always assume the worst technical messups, instead of crediting corporations "Amazon's Alexa sent 1,700 recordings to the wrong person" - https://www.cbsnews.com/news/amazons-alexa-sent-1700-recordings-to-the-wrong-customer/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/amazons-alexa-sent-1700-recordi...
- suyash 2y agoOr it could be a feature in the Lyft app that they said it was not the case but who believes them...
- bhouston 2y agoI hope what is happening in the US right now, with people getting deported for writing Op-Eds criticizing US foreign policy, is a temporarily thing and not the direction we are heading into. But if it isn't temporarily, we should expect surveillance like discussed in this article to grow and our opinions to be monitored in a more pervasive fashion. It is a relatively trivial matter from a technology standpoint to feed in live feeds of opinions from FB, X, WhatsApp, BlueSky, as well as advertising data collections (from TVs, Taxi's etc) into a LLM powered summary of people's opinions and views and threat factors to the regime. I could see a scenario where companies like Palantir create such a system for domestic usage in the US, and we should be honest that the big cloud providers like AWS and GCP and Microsoft would jump at the chance to host those systems, lots and lots of $$$ for them in this. This is just applying the technology in the US that has been pre-tested by Israel against the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. It can definitely suppress dissidents and solidify state control. This is just extrapolating into trends as a thought experiment that I hope are just temporary blips in the US's commitment to free speech and right to disagree with the government.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- belter 2y ago> Could see a nightmare scenario where companies like Palantir create such a system for domestic usage in the US. I can guarantee you such a system already exists.
- bhouston 2y ago> I can guarantee you such a system already exists. There is a limited one the US has built just to deport pro-Palestinian students from the US on visas: https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/us-use-ai-revoke-visas-students-perceived-hamas-supporters-axios-reports-2025-03-06/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/u... The history of such "technology innovations" is that they generally do not stop at the initial scope, and likely will greatly expand its applicability to other groups, other opinions and for other purposes.
- micromacrofoot 2y ago> These ride-sharing apps are big companies and people have a lot of sensitive conversations within cabs and they feel like they're secure why would anyone think talking in a car driven by a stranger is secure!?
- tristor 2y agoThere's a difference between having a conversation with the expectation it will be casually overheard and having a conversation with the expectation it's permanently recorded and will be analyzed, possibly leaked in the future in a world where you can trivially create vocal deep fakes with a few samples.
- gruez 2y ago>recorded and will be analyzed, possibly leaked in the future in a world where you can trivially create vocal deep fakes with a few samples. If that's your threat model, you should be far more concerned about recorded zoom meetings or customer support calls, rather than a surveillance camera that in a likelihood isn't even networked.
- tristor 2y agoThat's a strange reply in a thread about being texted a (likely LLM generated) transcript of your conversation after getting out of a ride-share. How did that happen without being networked? I know when I am being recorded in a meeting and it's in a professional setting, not a casual one. Not comparable.
- gruez 2y ago>How did that happen without being networked? See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43680387 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43680387 >I know when I am being recorded in a meeting and it's in a professional setting, not a casual one. Not comparable. Irrelevant if you're trying to not get deepfaked. It's like complaining about Lyft recordings possibly used to train deepfakes or whatever, when you work as a podcaster. Sure, the recording might be bad because it was done without consent, but it's risible to object to it on the basis of "possibly leaked in the future in a world where you can trivially create vocal deep fakes with a few samples"
- ribcage 2y ago[dead]
- thomassmith65 2y agoSomewhere Travis Kalanick is kicking himself for not secretly paying Lyft drivers to do this when he was still in charge of Uber.
- hoherd 2y agoThe future feels more and more sci-fi every day. This gave me Molly Millions vibes: > “You know about that toxin shit, before?” he asked her, by the fountain. She shook her head. “You think it’s true?” > “Maybe, maybe not. Works either way.” > “You know any way I can find out?” > “No,” she said, her right hand coming up to form the jive for silence. “That kind of kink’s too subtle to show up on a scan.” Then her fingers moved again: wait. “And you don’t care that much anyway. I saw you stroking that Sendai; man, it was pornographic.” She laughed. > “So what’s he got on you? How’s he got the working girl kinked?” > “Professional pride, baby, that’s all.” And again the sign for silence. “We’re gonna get some breakfast, okay? Eggs, real bacon. Probably kill you, you been eating that rebuilt Chiba krill for so long. Yeah, come on, we’ll tube in to Manhattan and get us a real breakfast.” But then they go to a secure location where they can talk.
- shit_game 2y agoThis should have been something that everyone saw coming, but it can be hard to imagine what's happening before it does, particularly when you yourself aren't incentivised to - companies with access to your phone through an app (and the phones of the people around you) are going to spy on you, and that data will (almost assuredly) not be secure. It's probably going to be abused. It's absolutely going to be sold. I just went to delete my Lyft account (which I haven't used in several years), but I'm unable to do so without first accepting their new terms of service, which I don't/won't. There doesn't seem to be any means of contacting Lyft outside of their app or website, both of which require that I agree to those afore mentioned terms before contacting them. This seems illegal in at least some US jurisdictions, but This seems foreboding of some very dangerous situations for marginalized or targeted groups in the future.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- underseacables 2y agoAlright then, deleting my Lyft account. We've always heard stories that your phone is listening to you, well, it is.