15 ms·

Your phone isn't secretly listening to you, but the truth is more disturbing

369 points by zeech 1y ago

simonw 1y ago
> As far as anyone could understand, the proposed CMG system wasn't listening through a phone's microphone 24/7, instead it was using those small slivers of voice data that are recorded and uploaded to the cloud in the moments after you activate your voice assistant with a "Hey Google" or "Hey Siri" command. That's not quite accurate. The CMG thing was very clearly a case of advertising sales people getting over-excited and thinking they could sell vaporware to customers who had bought into the common "your phone listens to you and serves you ads" conspiracy theory. They cut that out the moment it started attracting attention from outside of their potential marks. Here's a rant about that I originally posted as a series of comments elsewhere: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Sep/2/facebook-cmg/ https://simonwillison.net/2024/Sep/2/facebook-cmg/ The "Hey Google" / "Hey Siri" thing is a slightly different story. Apple settled a case out of court for $95m where the accusation was that snippets of text around the "Hey Siri" wake word had been recorded on their servers and may have been listened to by employees (or contractors) who were debugging and improving Siri's performance: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/apple-agrees-to-pay-95m-delete-private-conversations-siri-recorded/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/apple-agrees-to-... The problem with that lawsuit is that the original argument included anecdotal notes about "eerily accurate targeted ads that appeared after they had just been talking about specific items". By settling, Apple gave even more fuel to those conspiracy theories. I wrote about this a few months ago: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jan/2/they-spy-on-you-but-not-like-that/ https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jan/2/they-spy-on-you-but-not... - including a note about that general conspiracy theory and how "Convincing people of this is basically impossible. It doesn’t matter how good your argument is, if someone has ever seen an ad that relates to their previous voice conversation they are likely convinced and there’s nothing you can do to talk them out of it." ... all of that said, I 100% agree with the general message of this article - the "truth is more disturbing" bit. Facebook can target you ads spookily well because they have a vast amount of data about you collected by correlating your activity across multiple sources. If they have your email address or phone number they can use that to match up your behaviour from all sorts of other sources. THAT's the creepy thing that people need to understand is happening.
- nickpsecurity 1y ago
  "Convincing people of this is basically impossible. It doesn’t matter how good your argument is, if someone has ever seen an ad that relates to their previous voice conversation they are likely convinced and there’s nothing you can do to talk them out of it." It sounds more like we have evidence of what we believe, you think we should toss the evidence for your counter-theory, and people won't do that. We also have an effect where tons of people experienced this. You want us to toss that, too. "You don’t notice the hundreds of times a day you say something and don’t see a relevant advert a short time later. You see thousands of ads a day, can you remember what any of them are?" On Facebook, during one period this happened, they were only showing me adds for Hotworx and a massage place every time. Trying to stay pure minded following Jesus Christ means I avoid such ads. So, it was strange that it's all they showed me. Then, strange the only break from the pattern was showing unlikely topics we just talked about in person. So, I'm going to stick with the theory that they were listening since it best fit the evidence. I don't know why they'd do it. Prior reports long ago said they used to use ML (computer vision) to profile people outside of the platform who showed up in your pics. I'll note another explanation. Instead of always listening, they could have done it to a random segment of people who were rarely clicking ads. Just occasionally, too. We wouldn't see the capability in use all the time. A feature tested or used on a subset of users. Also, these companies keep saying on us in increasingly creative and dishonest ways. If anyone is to be blamed, it's them.
  - simonw 1y ago
    Thank you for illustrating my point so perfectly.
diggernet 1y ago
> "Apps were automatically taking screenshots of themselves and sending them to third parties. In one case, the app took video of the screen activity and sent that information to a third party.” > Out of over 17,000 Android apps examined, more than 9,000 had potential permissions to take screenshots. And a number of apps were found to actively be doing so, taking screenshots and sending them to third-party sources. Which permission is that, and how do you detect which apps are doing that and stop them?
- maxlybbert 1y ago
  I doubt there's a specific "ability to send surreptitious screen shots to developer" permission. It must be a combination of permissions: one for making network connections, another for capturing the screen without making it obvious to the user, etc.
  - fzzzy 1y ago
    For apps that want to send their own screens to third parties, there's no permission needed or possible. The app is drawing the content to the screen. It knows what the content is.
    - jeroenhd 1y ago
      If you're trying to track user information (notifications, actual timezone/language, battery level, VPN usage, etc) you can use screenshots of the current screen and open keyboard. You can also see stuff from other apps if the user is using split screen modes or has chat bubbles open. Apps can otherwise only access the data they render. The research talks about thousands of apps but I do wonder how many of these are apps people use every day and how many are Chinese clones of freemium games and other shitware with a fraction of daily users. All we know from public app store data is the number of "downloads" and even that is distributed as a range. I doubt these 19000 apps were found by doing a survey on what people actually had on their phones.
      - badc0ffee 1y ago
wrs 1y ago
BTW, "smart" TVs send screenshots too. [0] [0] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3646547.3689013 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3646547.3689013
- microflash 1y ago
  We’ve reached the state where you can safely presume anything “smart” is violating your privacy.
  - Spivak 1y ago
    Anything network connected.
    - pixl97 1y ago
      Everyday we seem to step closer and closer to the 'network connected smart dust' as written in some science fiction.
  - EasyMark 1y ago
    yeah, I liked the simplicity of having things on my tv, but I gave up and got an apple tv box. I was getting way too many "I was just talking about that!" ads on some of the "free" services i was watching old tv shows and movies on. I'm a pretty frugal guy for the most part but buying a separate box that doesn't sell everything you do and say to advertisers is worth it.
    - wrs 1y ago
      According to the paper, your TV may send snapshots even when it’s in a “dumb” HDMI input mode. So make sure it’s not on the network at all.
      - EasyMark 1y ago
        yeah, to be on my home network you need a password. there are no "guest" networks. good point though
anenefan 1y ago
My younger bro is convinced phones are eavesdropping on conversations and got particularly paranoid (I thought) a year or so back in regard to talking in earshot of his phone. His evidence is empirical - Apparently he gets pretty high with friends and shit talks - but when when the search started to suggest some pretty way out things along the same lines, he landed that their conversations weren't private any more. So I have an understanding of how much tracking is going on so I pressed him on that. But he assured me it was stuff he would not even bother to look up in a clearer mindset and of course smoking recreationally for a very long time knows not to go near some tools that could land himself trouble or awkward explanations. That's probably true he says a lot of stuff that a half decent search would put him straight. In the end I just figured loose permissions of one of the many apps he's installed and that's how they (the app) make their money, selling illegally obtained data to more legal sources. Permissions are the problem with android phones - there needs to be a specific install route for users, one that the app starts asking for things it should not need have access to, the installer refuses to install and suggests the user look for something better. Camera apps for example really don't need access to communication channels, if it's updates it's need, it can ask - one time access.
- JadeNB 1y ago
  > Permissions are the problem with android phones - there needs to be a specific install route for users, one that the app starts asking for things it should not need have access to, the installer refuses to install and suggests the user look for something better. Camera apps for example really don't need access to communication channels, if it's updates it's need, it can ask - one time access. I definitely don't want my phone making those decisions for me; I want my phone enabling me to make decisions. The app asks for permissions, I say no, and, rather than ratting me out to the app, my phone does its best to pretend to the app that it (the app) has the permission it wants, say by giving an empty contact book or whatever. (I know rooted phones can do this, but it shouldn't have to be something I have to fight my phone for.)
- bigyabai 1y ago
  He is right, all modern phone brands are surveillance devices furnished to provide the OEM with identifying data: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/12/apple-admits-to-secretly-giving-governments-push-notification-data/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/12/apple-admits-to-...
wiseowise 1y ago
> There is no easy way to close this privacy opening Sure there is. Hide screenshot taking behind permission and slap down hard apps that refuse to operate without them.
- o11c 1y ago
  It says "screenshots of themselves". The application is responsible for rendering the screen in the first place so it fundamentally doesn't need a permission. Now, what could reasonably be a permission is "access the internet", but our overlords don't approve of that thought. (Contrast this to web pages, which do not render themselves and thus can sensibly be blocked from screenshotting)
  - gretch 1y ago
    I mean yeah technically the website can’t screenshot, but it can do many functionally equivalent things. For example, it can capture the entire DOM and send it off, including the contents of input fields that have not been submitted. That DOM capture can be replayed on a browser to show what the user sees. So what’s the difference?
    - Thorrez 1y ago
      Well, blocking javascript would stop that. Noscript is a thing that some people use.
      - danaris 1y ago
        For an increasing plurality (possibly even majority at this point) of sites where the purpose is not purely to read text, this is effectively equivalent to saying "you can just not use the site."
      - beeburrt 1y ago
        Ublock origin also has that ability
  - 1y ago
Am4TIfIsER0ppos 1y ago
I seem to recall that state of the art audio encoding can compress voice to 8kbit/s which is a single packet per second, insignificant compared to how chatty your device is. Trivial to buffer and send during a period of activity. It sums to 1.7MB over the 30 minute window in the article graphs which should be visible if it is actually counted. Why would apple or google actually make it count though? They want to spy on you either for their own benefit or because the government forces them to. You say you found it taking screenshots and phoning them home. Of course! It is a surveillance device. Is it worse? Maybe. You should consider it sends everything home. Every keystroke, every touch of the screen, every sample of the accelerometers, every sample of audio. Perhaps only the sheer quantity of data in video prevents them from sending it all. Might be "remedied" with 5G bandwidth.
- sampullman 1y ago
  Audio, screenshots, and some of the other stuff I can believe, but I think batteries need a big upgrade before the data snatchers can get away with streaming video, even at a low bitrate. I'm also not sure how easy keylogging is these days, is there even a permission that allows it? I supposed there's ways to do it with custom keyboards. Google/Apple doing it themselves would be a pretty big deal.
  - Am4TIfIsER0ppos 1y ago
    I think everyone acknowledges that chrome sends every keystroke in the address bar home. I don't keep up with the spyware so perhaps it is now every keystroke in the rest of the browser. It isn't much of a leap further that their operating system does the same.
- adolph 1y ago
  If that were true why are cell phone voice calls still so terrible?
  - daneel_w 1y ago
    Because cellular carriers keep the same pace as a snail on vacation.
alganet 1y ago
There's a nation proud of overspinning enrichment turbines with a complicated computer virus that can even work offline. No conspiracy, that's just StuxNet. So, when you start learning about tech, you get paranoid. If you're not, it's even weirder. The fact that someone can target you, individually, is undisputable. Whether it will or not, that's another question. What I can recommend if you think you are being observed, is to avoid the common pitfalls: Don't go full isolationist living without technology. That is a trap. There is nowhere to hide anyway. Strange new friends who are super into what you do? Trap. You were never good with girls but one is seemingly into you, despite you being an ugly ass dirty computer nerd? That is a trap. Specially online but not limited to it. Go ahead, be paranoid. When an article comes to probe how paranoid you are, go ahead and explain exactly how paranoid you have become. But live a normal life nonetheless, unaffected by those things. Allow yourself to laugh, and be cool with it. Hundreds of clone accounts doxxing me? Well, thanks for the free decoys. Constant surveillance? Well, thank you for uploading my soul free of charge to super protected servers. Dodgy counter arguments in everything in care to discuss? Sounds like training. The paranoid optimist is quite an underrated character. I don't see many of those around.
- ivape 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - alganet 1y ago
    There is a list of things I keep under profound consideration always. Information that travels backwards in time is one of them. I have a pretty good idea on how it could be possible and who would have the resources to do it. God is also another. However, I am a very unorthodox student of religion. I deeply respect anyone that uses it to foster a good behavior. Whoever uses it to trick others, I tend to see more as an act of hostility towards innocent believers. Like, if someone tries to put me into a religion mindset just to fuck with me, it's a dick move. What I know for sure is that God would not make mistakes. Whatever monitors me, does. It did so many times. I know it embarrasses them. It's delightful in that sense. So, yeah. God might exist, but I ain't talking about it when I describe paranoia. Another thing that is quite recent in my studies is psychology and how we are all so vulnerable to it. I started to despise it a little bit. How come it never solved so many issues? How come it seems to put them to evidence but not fix them, and by putting them to evidence, make them worse? Anyway. Do you want even more paranoia? If you like it, I should be supposed to charge for it, you know.
ivape 1y ago
Doesn't it have to listen to everything to capture the wake word "hey siri"? How else is it done?
- simonw 1y ago
  The iPhone has dedicated low-power on-device hardware that is trained to pick up "Hey Siri" exclusively. It only wakes up the rest of the device and captures additional audio after that wake word has been triggered. https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/voice-trigger https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/voice-trigger https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/hey-siri https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/hey-siri
  - akimbostrawman 1y ago
    >pick up "Hey Siri" exclusively until it isn't. anything apple is proprietary and any feature could silently change at any time even for only specific devices/user. https://web.archive.org/web/20250415140321/https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jan/03/apple-siri-privacy-lawsuit-settlement https://web.archive.org/web/20250415140321/https://www.thegu...
benlivengood 1y ago
The thing is, it's not even people doing the correlations. Just like transformers can learn most of human knowledge just by trying to predict tokens, I would not be surprised if the ad-serving machine learning systems have learned about people in similar detail. State of the art about 10 years ago was 4 9s of accuracy predicting click-through rates from the available context (features for user profile, current website, keywords, etc.), which I interpreted as requiring a fairly accurate learned model of human behavior. I got out of that industry so I don't know what current SOTA is for adtech, but I can only imagine it is better. The models were trained on automatically labelled data (GB/s of it) based on actual recent click-through rates so the amount of training data was roughly comparable to small LLMs. Recent anecdote; three of us were sitting around the kitchen table with our phones out chatting about an obscure new thing that had come up; it appeared in one of our FB ad streams pretty quickly. My top guesses about how this is possible today; 1) Apps routinely link many third-party data gathering and advertising libraries. Any of these libraries could be gathering enough contextual data and reselling it to make a correlation possible. It's not just obscure thing A that triggers an ad, it's highly correlated mixtures of normal things X, Y and Z that can imply A. 2) other friends may have talked about the obscure thing recently and social network links implied we would be aware of it through them. Distant 3) the models are actually good enough to infer speech from weird side-channels like the accelerometer when people wave their hands when they talk, etc. Accelerometer sample rate is < 1KHz but over 100Hz which may be enough, especially when you throw giant models at it.
- jancsika 1y ago
  > an obscure new thing that had come up Since you've provided no explicit counter-evidence, I'm gonna go ahead and say I have four nines of accuracy in predicting that your smartphone was squarely in the dependency chain of any "obscure new thing" you could have imagined discussing. Edit: wording
  - ajb92 1y ago
    Kind of a weirdly sad, uncharitable assumption to make
- 1y ago
fmajid 1y ago
At one of my previous companies we made a moderately popular mobile app SDK that app developers would embed in their apps. We were approached by a company that claimed they had a MIT developed (or was it Bell Labs?) audio recognition technology similar to Shazam, but orders of magnitude more efficient, that would be used to recognize audio from ads and record when a user was exposed to a TV or radio ad for tracking purposes. I don’t remember the name, that was at least 10 years ago before Apple started enforcing permissions on microphone access and showing an orange dot, but they wanted to do a revenue-share deal in exchange for us quietly bundling their SDK inside ours. Needless to say we turned them down so we never learned more or tested the veracity of their claims, but there are some really sleazy companies out there. Modern smartphones have sufficient horsepower to do the audio processing on-device so the argument that this would show up in network traffic does not hold.
- pixl97 1y ago
  Probably something along these lines https://www.pcworld.com/article/424417/ad-tracking-tech-uses-high-frequency-audio-to-communicate-between-devices.html https://www.pcworld.com/article/424417/ad-tracking-tech-uses...
- blurbleblurble 1y ago
  Was it Alphonso?
- gblargg 1y ago
  They can also store things for later upload. A phone in airplane mode still isn't safe.
- blurbleblurble 1y ago
  I guess hackernews has an aversion to this topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43809203 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43809203
segezdino 1y ago
[dead]
Ichthypresbyter 1y ago
>Not only does the system know exactly where you are at every moment, it knows who your friends are, what they are interested in, and who you are spending time with This actually makes sense of an anecdote a colleague uses to say that he thinks his phone is listening to him. I am a keen skier. He used to ski a lot, but hasn't been for several years. Around the start of ski season this year, we talked about my plans to go skiing that weekend, and later that day he started seeing skiing-related ads. He thinks it's because his phone listened into the conversation, but it could just as easily have been that it was spending more time near my phone (I had only recently started at that job) on which I regularly search for skiing-related things like conditions reports and directions to ski areas.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 1y ago
  > but it could just as easily have been that it was spending more time near my phone (I had only recently started at that job) on which I regularly search for skiing-related things like conditions reports and directions to ski areas Bingo! This is most certainly what happened. I’ve spent time trying to convince my friends that their phone’s microphone is not constantly listening and running sounds through voice recognition software to isolate their voice (so the individual who owns the phone can be advertised to), then through sentiment analysis software (to inform advertisement bids), all without meaningfully affecting battery life. That is usually an uphill battle but explaining location services and the fact they don’t know what I’ve searched gets the point across better. (It is actually creepier.)
- fsmv 1y ago
  Or just ski ads go out when ski season starts and he only noticed that he saw one because you had the conversation.
- trollied 1y ago
  You were probably in the same place using the same IP address, and both browsed - doesn’t matter which sites you both visited, the trackers have you. You might have shown him where you were going. Ad trackers thought “I’ll serve ski ads to people that were on that IP address because somebody else looked at xyz”.
polskibus 1y ago
Do iOS apps also take screenshots of activity in other apps without consent? Does the platform allow it to, if yes then is there a way to block it?
- trollied 1y ago
  They cannot.
NemoNobody 1y ago
That was a stupid study. Phones know if they are being used - the phones for 3 days around ads is meaningless. Tracking isn't all the time - that would be tough. They do record stuff when you doing certain things tho... It's not impossible at all, actually it's rather easy if you have access to their actual online activity too.
- xg15 1y ago
  I think it would be interesting to try to do a "constructive debunking" - try to build a system yourself that uses a tampered phone and constantly records and transcribes all audio around it, without being obviously detectable by battery drain, CPU usage or network traffic. Variants/difficulty levels could be about: capture everything, or just keywords? What if you have a million keywords? Transcribe on-device or in the cloud? Can you do it just inside an app or do you need OS support/root access? Etc etc. Would be interesting to see what can be done at all and how easy or difficult it would be to detect.
  - jeroenhd 1y ago
    Comparing a small project like that with the vast cyberstalking industry we call advertising today isn't going to yield similar results if the conspiracy theory is true. I can make a full tracker that drains the battery like crazy but that doesn't mean the smartypants who know when women are pregnant weeks before they do themselves can't come up with a system that's more efficient with acceptable data granularity. Worst case scenario you succeed, and you've built yourself the torment nexus. If you publish your results, you'll have to publish the torment nexus to prove you don't have anything up your sleeve, making the world slightly worse for everyone else now that there's an accessible torment nexus ready to go. If you don't publish your torment nexus, nobody will believe you. Hell, if you succeed, you might've actually invented the thing! At best, the result of your success is knowing for sure you _could_ be spied upon any time, anywhere. There's probably a much easier method to know for sure: work for advertising companies and learn their secrets.
    - xg15 1y ago
washadjeffmad 1y ago
Does anyone recall the national discussions surrounding what constituted metadata following 9/11 when ThinThread and Trailblazer were brought to public attention? I also recall reading about members of the TIA "Total Information Awareness" program leaving to join advisory boards for rising social media platforms, Facebook most notably. These weren't tinfoil opeds in fringe outlets, but regular reporting by journalists published in trusted local newspapers. Are there any outlets left who aren't part of consolidated media groups that can or do still track and report on movements like this? I've having trouble finding original articles that haven't been "revised for historical accuracy" or hidden behind paywalls of the few entities that remain. Edit: For context, I was looking for the earliest articles about Google citing legal justification for scanning the contents of emails under a favorable interpretation of metadata that allowed for tokenization by an automated process (ie- the contents were not read by a human or made personally identifiable, which met the letter of the law). It follows that the same justification is not limited to any source or data type, but I couldn't recall any more recent reporting or statements from companies over the last 10-15 years, or, the "don't break Google" era.
ThinkBeat 1y ago
At the time I am typing this, the title on the page is: ""Your phone isn’t secretly listening to you, but the truth is more disturbing"" Which is presently also the title on this post. Then as I read it becomes clear that it is merely focusing on Facebook. However the confusion that may stem from "Your phone isn’t secretly listening to you" The blog post never attempts to establish that your phone is not listening to you, just that some companies may not be going it. The truth is that your phone may well be listening to you . There is plenty of malware / spywear that uses exploits to achieve it. Like the NSO group¹. Tools to do so can be bouught on the malware market from other sources as well and we must assume that Mossad, NSA, and other major intellitence agencies have tools that exceed what you can buy on the open market. You phone may aboslutely be listening to you. but probably it is not. ¹ https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-01-24/nso-group-s-pegasus-spyware-focus-of-us-eu-investigations https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-01-24/nso-group... https://www.britannica.com/topic/Pegasus-spyware https://www.britannica.com/topic/Pegasus-spyware https://citizenlab.ca/2016/08/million-dollar-dissident-iphone-zero-day-nso-group-uae/ https://citizenlab.ca/2016/08/million-dollar-dissident-iphon... https://newatlas.com/computers/smartphone-listening-conversations-ads-facebook/ https://newatlas.com/computers/smartphone-listening-conversa... https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-01-24/nso-group-s-pegasus-spyware-focus-of-us-eu-investigations https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-01-24/nso-group...
- Etheryte 1y ago
  In aggregate, your phone is not listening to you, but if you are of great interest to a powerful adversary, it very well might be. But at that point, I would wager that's one of the smaller things on your plate.
- dist-epoch 1y ago
  Phones today show in the status bar if the camera/microphone is active.
  - 9dev 1y ago
    If you can’t trust the software, why would you trust the software? Am I supposed to rely on the hope that an attacker can take over some part of the OS, but not the one rendering a tiny blob in the status bar?
nonameiguess 1y ago
Television, not phone, but YouTube sure intrigued me at minimum yesterday. First, it revealed pretty clearly that even with history turned off, it will use the history of other accounts accessed from the same IP to serve recommendations anyway. Without history, it turns off the home page recommendations, but when I ran a search, it showed me completely unrelated videos from a rock climbing channel my wife had watched on another account. I have never watched any rock climbing content on this account. The second incident was the "listening to you thing," though. Not on the phone, but on a smart television. Exterminator was there to do the quarterly spray of my house and I was showing him scars from when I fell off a skateboard trying to bomb a hill I couldn't handle late last year, talking about what happened, and not five minutes later I turn on the television, open YouTube, and the very first recommendation on my wife's account is a video of a guy falling off his longboard at 50 MPH. Not like it's some kind of secret that we both skate and I watch a lot of downhill videos on this account, but I have never once specifically searched for, watched, or even been recommended a video of a crash, until they decide to do so five minutes after I was talking about it in front of that television.
kevinsync 1y ago
I get all the proximity-based aggregation, and creating graphs of relationships to leak content between personal "algorithms" (dislike that wording but that's the colloquial usage), and tracking between sites + social networks, and all the basic stuff ... but can somebody explain how I immediately get served ads relevant to text typed into (presumably-encrypted) iMessage conversations? I also have a couple distinct memories of getting served ads for products I've never searched for or never bought before, after I either bought it in a store or, even weirder, literally just picked it up, looked at it, and put it back on the shelf in a store? I can craft some kind of super-surveillance-state theory as to how you could achieve that, but it feels very unlikely to be deployed at a small CVS lol Anyways, these might just be coincidences but still perplexing to understand how it's done.
- viraptor 1y ago
  > how I immediately get served ads relevant to text typed into (presumably-encrypted) iMessage conversations? Are you using a third party keyboard? Or any apps you don't 100% trust if you sent the message from a Mac?
  - kevinsync 1y ago
    Nope, regular iOS/macOS on all ends. Literally just stock Apple Messages on devices. I just notice sometimes topics will come up (what appears to me to be randomly) and then relevant ads and/or content will appear on Instagram or web. I guess it's possible that, to me, it appears "organic" (ex. somebody just mentions Taco Bell or whatever) but they had actually been searching on their device, and since our digital proximities are known, the next thing you know I'm Living Más lol
    - viraptor 1y ago
      If you have specific situations where it's reproducible, you can record your DNS and connections on local network and try again. You can only prove/disprove that with enough experiments.
- HWR_14 1y ago
mindcrash 1y ago
Way back then I exposed massive data collection from Twitter by Google which made it possible to plot locations at which you used Twitter in Google Maps by simply putting your Twitter handle into the search field. Somehow they knew about these locations even when you opted out of sharing location data with Twitter (I checked) -- so this was only possible by Twitter privately providing this information to Google. This "experiment" has since then been shut down, but exposing this and many other other forms of activism permanently has cost me my Twitter account, to the point that asking to reinstate it several times because I was permanently suspended for no valid reason led to X Support directly rerouting every attempt to appeal this decision into the digital trash can. Let's say nothing surprises me anymore.
- immibis 1y ago
  Doesn't every site route every support request for every reason into the digital trash can? You're supposed to just make a new account, using as many mechanisms as possible to make sure the site can't link it to your old account.
  - TheDong 1y ago
    I too sell my phone and buy a new one and also get a new phone number each time I get banned
  - mindcrash 1y ago
    Someone from X Support replied, basically told me to fuck off and that this would happen after my second or third appeal... so no.
  - torben-friis 1y ago
    I’m not even sure that’s possible for some sites. A few years ago I tried to create a separate digital footprint from scratch (just an experiment out of boredom when my isp offered a second number for free). I used an ultra cheap never before used android phone and set it up outside my home. Google went nuts. All sorts of captchas, security checks and attempts to link me to other information popping up on every step. Eventually it wouldn’t let me use the phone unless I provided a credit card number.
danielrhodes 1y ago
People seem to ignore the cost and accuracy aspects of a phone listening to you 24/7. At least with today’s constraints, it is highly unlikely to be happening. First, the cost to transcribe audio is not free. It is computationally expensive. Any ad network or at scale service would not be able to afford it, especially in orgs where they are concerned about unit economics. Secondly, the accuracy would be horrible. Most of the time, your phone is in your pocket and would pick up almost nothing. More over, it’s not like you are talking about anything of value to advertisers in most cases. Google is a money printing machine because people search with an intent to buy. The SNR of normal conversation is much much much lower. That makes the unit economics of doing this gets much worse. Third, it would be pretty hard to not notice this was happening. Your phone would get hot, your battery would deplete very quickly, and you’d be using a lot of data. Moreover on iOS you could see the mic is being used and the OS would likely kill the app if it was using too many resources in the background. So until we find an example of this actually happening, it’s not worth worrying about.
- scrose 1y ago
  These are all points that were brought up in the article as to why voice recording is less useful than all of the other tracking mechanisms advertisers have available
- derefr 1y ago
  For all of these reasons, audio snooping is much more likely to be something done by wired, stationary devices that maybe have a decent amount of RAM + a fair bit of usually-idle processing capacity (to run the transcription model locally and just push the resulting text), and which are expected to draw a decent amount of power and use the Internet at vaguely-arbitrary times. Like a smart TV, for example.
  - sroussey 1y ago
    First thing I do is disable that feature on every TV I buy. Second thing I do is block the TV access to internet after I do one firmware update.
limbero 1y ago
This article reminds me of this excellent tongue-in-cheek piece of writing by Jonathan Zeller in McSweeney's: Calm Down—Your Phone Isn’t Listening to Your Conversations. It’s Just Tracking Everything You Type, Every App You Use, Every Website You Visit, and Everywhere You Go in the Physical World https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/calm-down-your-phone-isnt-listening-to-your-conversations-its-just-tracking-everything-you-type-every-app-you-use-every-website-you-visit-and-everywhere-you-go-in-the-physical-world https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/calm-down-your-phone-isn...
- Paddywack 1y ago
  Reminds me of something that a Telco exec once said in jest - “A bank can track which hotel you stayed at last night, the Telco knows who you slept with”
- Spooky23 1y ago
  There is so much time spent “debunking” audio recordings being shared with various entities it makes me more suspicious. Just like Facebook’s “we never sell your data (we just stalk you and sell ads using your data)”. I’m sure there’s a similar weasel excuse… “we never listen to your audio (but we do analyze it to improve quality assurance)”
  - LgWoodenBadger 1y ago
    It’s similar with the TSA facial recognition photos. “We delete your photo immediately” but what they don’t say is that they don’t delete the biometrics from that photo.
    - bsimpson 1y ago
      It's a crime that were compelled to concede our 4th Amendment rights in order to travel.
      - spunker540 1y ago
        Same with drivers licenses and passports having a photo requirement too
ACV001 1y ago
bs article paid for by those big corporations.
- karaterobot 1y ago
  I'm not going to ask if you actually read the article. My recommendation is to read the second half of the headline.
intended 1y ago
What rot. Here’s a simple experiment I ran and still works. Back in the day there was a truly ghastly add for ear wax removal that showed up on YouTube in the UK. In an experiment, and prank, I told two of my close friends about this, and how this horrid advert would kill my appetite when it came up. And then I made it a point to repeat “ear wax removal” loudly several times. Sure enough. A day later my dear friend messaged me with something on the lines of “I hate you” Their phones were Android and iOS. I believe it was the Android user suffered.
- paulcole 1y ago
  This is why “my phone is listening and I can prove it” is such a good shibboleth for lack of critical thinking skills. Can you not see all the biases and fallacies in your own comment?
- jeroenhd 1y ago
  If what you're talking about is the source of the ad, why did you see the ad yourself? Were you shouting about ear wax removal at your phone? There are millions of ways the adware running on your phones could've correlated your profile and spread the "infection" to your friend. Basic location access being the most important one, but sharing an IP address (your friends' WiFi?), being near the same Bluetooth beacons, having the same stored SSIDs, or mere coincidence that your friend saw the same ad targeting a wide demographic are much more probable than "my phone is listening 24/7".
  - intended 1y ago
    Sure. But its fun, and we can always replicate, just need a terrible ad. Do note, this was tested in a park, so no shared WiFi, no Bluetooth beacons/devices. Also, this ad doesn’t/didn’t show up for others, ever.
    - paulcole 1y ago
      I’m assuming like most friends you and your friends have nothing in common like interests, demographics, etc.? And I’m assuming you also made them aware of other ads you’d seen recently so they could see if those showed up as well?
blurbleblurble 1y ago
The phone is listening. Services like Shazam and Alphonso are constantly fingerprinting audio from the mics and sending these fingerprints up for "matching". What are they matching against? Against key "content". To check if the fingerprints from your phone mic match the "content" they have to do some kind of nearest neighbor search. What if the fingerprints aren't super close but they're somewhat close? To "content" related to certain products? Should we send the ad? What if employees at Alphonso and Shazam _know_ that the fingerprints from your phone aren't quite close enough to have been generated from key monetizable samples of the "content", but also know that they are close enough to be effective? At targeting potential buyers? Who decides how close is close enough? What's the ethical threshold here? And what's the most profitable threshold?
- perching_aix 1y ago
  > The phone is listening. Services like Shazam and Alphonso are constantly fingerprinting audio from the mics and sending these fingerprints up for "matching". Could you please provide a source for this? Just on the outset this sounds pretty wild if true. In the settings I do not see any permissions associated with Shazam, and only when I open it do I see the usual microphone indicator light up. I will say though, it is weird that it doesn't have associated permissions listed, because clearly it can access the mic at least when it's open. Edit: nevermind, found it, was just super hidden. But yeah, says it can only access it when the app is "in use". Now can it auto launch? Apparently also yes, after boot. Otherwise idk. It's further interesting I cannot tweak any of these permissions. Edit #2: now it says that notifications are enabled for it, but then i check, and they aren't. i exercise the toggle, now it doesn't say that anymore, and the mic permissions are no longer hidden? Samsung please... No amount of years in tech will rid me of tech pains it seems.
  - blurbleblurble 1y ago
    Pixel phones have a built in background audio fingerprinting service called "Now Playing" which can operate constantly. Shazam has an "auto shazam" feature you can enable for constant background listening, since 2016 at least! But look into Alphonso. That's like Shazam but explicitly for covert "content recognition" listening in microphone enabled apps. And it's old. People who say it's too expensive or impractical to do bulk listening for ad-tech just aren't paying attention.
udev4096 1y ago
> User permissions for a large number of apps were all enabled This says it all. Privacy is not by default, because of souless mega corporations, including HN which has an extremely invasive privacy policy. If you don't actively take steps to improve your privacy, they will continue to exploit it. Use GrapheneOS, it is the most private and secure mobile operating system. Nothing happens without your explicit permission, the way it should have been from the beginning
- rahen 1y ago
  These discussions seem to come up frequently lately. Both /e/OS and Lineage with microG provide good enough privacy for those who can't afford high-end smartphones like the Google Pixels. The ranking would probably be: - Pixel on GrapheneOS - Any Android smartphone on Lineage or /e/OS - iPhone on recent iOS (the best choice for technically illiterate people) People concerned with privacy should avoid stock Android phones. Additionally, software only goes so far in protecting privacy. Some hygiene is also required, especially with iOS, where everything is sent to iCloud by default and E2E encryption is either not enabled by default or not available at all in some countries. When it comes to hardware, nothing really compares to the Titan and T2 chips found in Pixels and iPhones though.
  - gruez 1y ago
    >- Pixel on GrapheneOS >- Any Android smartphone on Lineage or /e/OS None of those operating systems does anything for tracking/advertising SDKs in apps, which is most of where the data leaks are coming from, not google/apple. Moreover unless you're willing to go no proprietary apps (ie. most apps people actually use), you'll need google play services, which means google can still collect data on you.
    - rahen 1y ago
      Those distributions either use neutered Google Play Services through a stub reimplementation (microG), or rely on sandboxing (GOS). Either way, Google can only collect limited data on those distributions, and you have control over them. Concerning tracking applications, yes, some hygiene and good practices are necessary, the OS can only go so far.
titaphraz 1y ago
Pretty much every time I add a new contact to my phone I start to get really strange ads online. I figured it out when I added a guy who's retiring for the army. I started getting retirement ads for soldiers. Then, I add a guy I loosely know and what do I start seeing? Cocaine rehab ads. I shit you not. It's not hard to argue that this is more than a minor privacy violation.
littlestymaar 1y ago
It is in fact listening to you, at least if you have an iPhone: https://www.lemonde.fr/en/pixels/article/2025/02/14/apple-targeted-by-french-complaint-over-siri-recording-private-data_6738155_13.html https://www.lemonde.fr/en/pixels/article/2025/02/14/apple-ta...
quijoteuniv 1y ago
« The article posits that the uncanny relevance of some ads is due to sophisticated data collection methods. Companies analyze user behavior, online activity, and social interactions to predict interests, making it seem as though devices are listening. In essence, while smartphones may not be actively eavesdropping, the depth and breadth of data analytics employed by tech companies can create the illusion of such practices.»
- kjkjadksj 1y ago
  There has definitely been cases where I have not looked up an idea at all on my devices, only mentioned it in speech at home, and the highly targeted at shows up on mobile the next day or even that day. I would take the correlation theory if I actually left data to correlate.
  - wormius 1y ago
    This... I have had on at least 2 occasions explicitly where I know for a fact I hadn't searched or looked up this topic on any system, and I brought up a topic and talked to my roommate and within the next 12 hours FB served me ads or content relating to the topic. I get the idea that an "always on" monitoring system would be problematic (even if you discarded the data itself and only retained/filtered relevant bits for a short period of time). But ... I have no other way to explain events like this. I suppose some weird correlation of user has x,y,z and they searched for a,b,c in the past, and other users search for D, then we show D at exactly the 12 hour time they searched for it. Yes I am aware of recency bias, and how perhaps it was shown other times without recognizing it. But it's... hard to shake that feeling, and I am (well less so now) a skeptic... If it's anything it's like AI that's eerily creepy like "intelligence" but not it, just like this is "like listening" but isn't. Both use statistical models to do creepy ass shit.
    - BenjiWiebe 1y ago
      Did the roommate use the same WiFi network as you, and your roommate used the WiFi to research it?
leumon 1y ago
> Even though these ad algorithms are not nearly perfect (try to pay attention to how often you are served ads that are entirely irrelevant to your interests), the simple fact that they are so eerily correct even some of the time is the real conspiracy here. This could be intentional. Having too many accurate ads is having a bad effect, because you then enter the uncanny valley of noticing what the data collectors all know about you.
- tiltowait 1y ago
  Amazon often tries to show me a dress store. I’m a guy, and I’ve never bought women’s clothing. On the surface, the ad makes no sense and is irrelevant—but what if I end up wanting to buy a dress for someone else? Then I might remember that Amazon dress shop. This (or simple error) seems more likely to me than a conspiracy to appear less creepy, though I suppose all three could be in play.
keybored 1y ago
iPhone will tell me that I have a 25m drive to get to work. Literally why? I know where I work and how long it takes. I have done it enough times for it to learn what I do at 07:30 in the morning. Is it just flexing repeapetedly that it did a simple inference?
- huntsman 1y ago
  Some places, including the Bay Area where this feature was probably created, have significant variance in commute times depending on the traffic of the day so this can be a useful feature. The commute time from SF to Cupertino is certainly not constant.
  - keybored 1y ago
    As a mere hick I’m sometimes oblivious to the lived experience of the ~~~~ SC crowd.
kjkjadksj 1y ago
Keep thinking its merely correlation while the US military bans phones from the SCIF…
weare138 1y ago
This fact is important, because if an app were accessing a microphone and sending the audio to a cloud server for analysis there would be detectable traces of data consumption. Because that's not how it works and companies like Meta know this when misleading it's users about their privacy. Speech-to-text transcription is handled on your device. They never transmit the raw audio, there's no need to. A compressed text transcription of your conversation would only generate a few kilobytes of data. You would never notice it. And the mic needs to be active in order to receive legitimate voice commands. If it can respond to your voice, the microphone is on and listening. That's the only way it can work.
psyclobe 1y ago
Tl;dr it’s not the microphone… it’s screenshots.
bentt 1y ago
One time my wife and I had a random conversation, utterly random, about cat hamster wheels. Like, why doesn't that exist? I got an ad for it the next day (it exists). I don't believe that my phone is not listening to me and I challenge you to choose a random word out of the dictionary and say it 100 times in front of your phone.
- gruez 1y ago
  >I don't believe that my phone is not listening to me and I challenge you to choose a random word out of the dictionary and say it 100 times in front of your phone. The person making the claim should be responsible for furnishing the proof. If it's really so simple to prove, why hasn't anyone done a carefully controlled experiment proving this once and for all? At the very least, it'd move us beyond vague anecdotes on social media.
  - latexr 1y ago
    > If it's really so simple to prove, why hasn't anyone done a carefully controlled experiment proving this once and for all? They did, and found no listening being done. It’s in the article under “The data doesn't add up”.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
- latexr 1y ago
  > I challenge you to choose a random word out of the dictionary and say it 100 times in front of your phone. That test has been done. It is explained at length in the article under the heading “The data doesn't add up”.
- sroussey 1y ago
  It’s too easy to check on your phone if such a thing were happening. Your TV though… that IS listening and the TV even has options to disable it. It’s on every TV shipped in at least the last 5 years, maybe 10.
wsintra2022 1y ago
I’ve said it before and will reinforce it cause once again no one brings it up in the comments. People report the phone is listening to them because they talked about <insert> and now they are seeing ads for it. What they may not realise is they are talking about <insert> because subliminally the ad worked they just never noticed it. Now they have. The ad was there first like a little virus worming in your brain and then you bring it up with friends thinking it an original thought.
- MobileVet 1y ago
  Definitely possible… but Apple was successfully sued for unintentionally’ listening. They didn’t admit guilt but settled. https://www.reuters.com/legal/apple-pay-95-million-settle-siri-privacy-lawsuit-2025-01-02/ https://www.reuters.com/legal/apple-pay-95-million-settle-si...
MobileVet 1y ago
Apple settled a lawsuit about Siri ‘unintentionally’ listening. [1] So, yes, they also can likely predict what you want based on all they do openly track… but we can no longer claim that they aren’t listening. Based on the lawsuit and other sources, my guess is the phones build a word cloud that is then used for targeted advertising. Apple at el aren’t recording and selling the actual audio… but they are listening. (1) https://www.reuters.com/legal/apple-pay-95-million-settle-siri-privacy-lawsuit-2025-01-02/ https://www.reuters.com/legal/apple-pay-95-million-settle-si...
dalf 1y ago
This partly explains why the recommendations I receive don't feel like mine. Multiple times, it's been obvious that the suggestions were pulled from other profiles and I could even tell whose. My hypothesis * The algorithms have linked my account to some others. * They then serve me the embeddings extracted from those profiles. The near-real-time nature of this has crossed my mind more than once. It's really unsettling, and afterwards I feel uneasy about any recommendations (all Google services, Netflix seems problematic too, not Amazon). YouTube seems to have some hidden knobs for tuning this behaviour: after multiple negative feedbacks, the problematic content disappeared from my front page. However, the recommendations on the right-hand side of individual videos remain problematic, and the automatic playlists of YouTube Music are still strangely disturbing (even after multiple negative feedbacks).
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
zghst 1y ago
Never trust these people, always know that something is going on somewhere.
cbogie 1y ago
it’s just ai llm snooping amd doing big ol compute just like we have access to now. but advertisers had it years ago cuz they paid and at large, ads sold. became so prevalent no differentiable value so the algos etc sought new omg human public users. magic baby. but just hungry ip sw gobbling up new worlds. maybe. just thinking outloud.
7373737373 1y ago
If our popular phone operating systems were worth anything and actually acted as an agent for the user that owned them, they'd allow anyone to easily track and prevent this.
on_the_train 1y ago
Yes my phone is listening. To almost every word, and using that information to serve me ads. I would bet my entire net worth on that, as I'm 100% certain.
AStonesThrow 1y ago
A few years ago, I was fairly convinced that Google Voice was listening and punishing me for hitting "political third rail" keywords during phone calls. On more than one occasion, I would be in a conversation with a friend of mine and things would turn political, and if I spouted just the right combination of anti-left rhetoric/keywords, our connection would drop right away -- boom. Now why would Voice do this when other Google properties don't? I mean, they don't filter Gmail or Docs or Photos looking for subversive content and censoring it. YouTube comments, maybe. But I figured that if they wanted, it was completely possible. Because they have proven and deployed live-transcription, and they're best at English. Not to mention, Voice is sort of a deprecated product that they don't really support. So why not throw a little havoc in there for miscreants? The reason I was using Voice was to place phone calls from a SIM-less tablet. It seems that Voice insists on using my real phone now for routing any sort of call. So I haven't had opportunity to test the boundaries for years now. Nevertheless, I was not sorry about the possibility of censorship, I was duly chastened, and sorry I've been so brainwashed to lapse into mindless talking-point rhetoric.
1vuio0pswjnm7 1y ago
If "the truth is more disturbing", then why do people seem to care about "secretly listening" but not about "the truth" (data collection). Perhaps because the US has state and federal laws against wiretapping. Perhaps the difference is consent. Arguably so-called "tech" companies have obtained consent to collect data ("the truth"). But have they obtained consent to "secretly listen" to private conversations.

369 points by zeech 1y ago

> As far as anyone could understand, the proposed CMG system wasn't listening through a phone's microphone 24/7, instead it was using those small slivers of voice data that are recorded and uploaded to the cloud in the moments after you activate your voice assistant with a "Hey Google" or "Hey Siri" command. That's not quite accurate. The CMG thing was very clearly a case of advertising sales people getting over-excited and thinking they could sell vaporware to customers who had bought into the common "your phone listens to you and serves you ads" conspiracy theory. They cut that out the moment it started attracting attention from outside of their potential marks. Here's a rant about that I originally posted as a series of comments elsewhere: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Sep/2/facebook-cmg/ https://simonwillison.net/2024/Sep/2/facebook-cmg/ The "Hey Google" / "Hey Siri" thing is a slightly different story. Apple settled a case out of court for $95m where the accusation was that snippets of text around the "Hey Siri" wake word had been recorded on their servers and may have been listened to by employees (or contractors) who were debugging and improving Siri's performance: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/apple-agrees-to-pay-95m-delete-private-conversations-siri-recorded/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/apple-agrees-to-... The problem with that lawsuit is that the original argument included anecdotal notes about "eerily accurate targeted ads that appeared after they had just been talking about specific items". By settling, Apple gave even more fuel to those conspiracy theories. I wrote about this a few months ago: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jan/2/they-spy-on-you-but-not-like-that/ https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jan/2/they-spy-on-you-but-not... - including a note about that general conspiracy theory and how "Convincing people of this is basically impossible. It doesn’t matter how good your argument is, if someone has ever seen an ad that relates to their previous voice conversation they are likely convinced and there’s nothing you can do to talk them out of it." ... all of that said, I 100% agree with the general message of this article - the "truth is more disturbing" bit. Facebook can target you ads spookily well because they have a vast amount of data about you collected by correlating your activity across multiple sources. If they have your email address or phone number they can use that to match up your behaviour from all sorts of other sources. THAT's the creepy thing that people need to understand is happening.

nickpsecurity 1y ago
"Convincing people of this is basically impossible. It doesn’t matter how good your argument is, if someone has ever seen an ad that relates to their previous voice conversation they are likely convinced and there’s nothing you can do to talk them out of it." It sounds more like we have evidence of what we believe, you think we should toss the evidence for your counter-theory, and people won't do that. We also have an effect where tons of people experienced this. You want us to toss that, too. "You don’t notice the hundreds of times a day you say something and don’t see a relevant advert a short time later. You see thousands of ads a day, can you remember what any of them are?" On Facebook, during one period this happened, they were only showing me adds for Hotworx and a massage place every time. Trying to stay pure minded following Jesus Christ means I avoid such ads. So, it was strange that it's all they showed me. Then, strange the only break from the pattern was showing unlikely topics we just talked about in person. So, I'm going to stick with the theory that they were listening since it best fit the evidence. I don't know why they'd do it. Prior reports long ago said they used to use ML (computer vision) to profile people outside of the platform who showed up in your pics. I'll note another explanation. Instead of always listening, they could have done it to a random segment of people who were rarely clicking ads. Just occasionally, too. We wouldn't see the capability in use all the time. A feature tested or used on a subset of users. Also, these companies keep saying on us in increasingly creative and dishonest ways. If anyone is to be blamed, it's them.
- simonw 1y ago
  Thank you for illustrating my point so perfectly.

diggernet 1y ago

> "Apps were automatically taking screenshots of themselves and sending them to third parties. In one case, the app took video of the screen activity and sent that information to a third party.” > Out of over 17,000 Android apps examined, more than 9,000 had potential permissions to take screenshots. And a number of apps were found to actively be doing so, taking screenshots and sending them to third-party sources. Which permission is that, and how do you detect which apps are doing that and stop them?

maxlybbert 1y ago
I doubt there's a specific "ability to send surreptitious screen shots to developer" permission. It must be a combination of permissions: one for making network connections, another for capturing the screen without making it obvious to the user, etc.
- fzzzy 1y ago
  For apps that want to send their own screens to third parties, there's no permission needed or possible. The app is drawing the content to the screen. It knows what the content is.
  - jeroenhd 1y ago
    If you're trying to track user information (notifications, actual timezone/language, battery level, VPN usage, etc) you can use screenshots of the current screen and open keyboard. You can also see stuff from other apps if the user is using split screen modes or has chat bubbles open. Apps can otherwise only access the data they render. The research talks about thousands of apps but I do wonder how many of these are apps people use every day and how many are Chinese clones of freemium games and other shitware with a fraction of daily users. All we know from public app store data is the number of "downloads" and even that is distributed as a range. I doubt these 19000 apps were found by doing a survey on what people actually had on their phones.
    - badc0ffee 1y ago

wrs 1y ago

BTW, "smart" TVs send screenshots too. [0] [0] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3646547.3689013 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3646547.3689013

microflash 1y ago
We’ve reached the state where you can safely presume anything “smart” is violating your privacy.
- Spivak 1y ago
  Anything network connected.
  - pixl97 1y ago
    Everyday we seem to step closer and closer to the 'network connected smart dust' as written in some science fiction.
- EasyMark 1y ago
  yeah, I liked the simplicity of having things on my tv, but I gave up and got an apple tv box. I was getting way too many "I was just talking about that!" ads on some of the "free" services i was watching old tv shows and movies on. I'm a pretty frugal guy for the most part but buying a separate box that doesn't sell everything you do and say to advertisers is worth it.
  - wrs 1y ago
    According to the paper, your TV may send snapshots even when it’s in a “dumb” HDMI input mode. So make sure it’s not on the network at all.
    - EasyMark 1y ago
      yeah, to be on my home network you need a password. there are no "guest" networks. good point though

anenefan 1y ago

My younger bro is convinced phones are eavesdropping on conversations and got particularly paranoid (I thought) a year or so back in regard to talking in earshot of his phone. His evidence is empirical - Apparently he gets pretty high with friends and shit talks - but when when the search started to suggest some pretty way out things along the same lines, he landed that their conversations weren't private any more. So I have an understanding of how much tracking is going on so I pressed him on that. But he assured me it was stuff he would not even bother to look up in a clearer mindset and of course smoking recreationally for a very long time knows not to go near some tools that could land himself trouble or awkward explanations. That's probably true he says a lot of stuff that a half decent search would put him straight. In the end I just figured loose permissions of one of the many apps he's installed and that's how they (the app) make their money, selling illegally obtained data to more legal sources. Permissions are the problem with android phones - there needs to be a specific install route for users, one that the app starts asking for things it should not need have access to, the installer refuses to install and suggests the user look for something better. Camera apps for example really don't need access to communication channels, if it's updates it's need, it can ask - one time access.

JadeNB 1y ago
> Permissions are the problem with android phones - there needs to be a specific install route for users, one that the app starts asking for things it should not need have access to, the installer refuses to install and suggests the user look for something better. Camera apps for example really don't need access to communication channels, if it's updates it's need, it can ask - one time access. I definitely don't want my phone making those decisions for me; I want my phone enabling me to make decisions. The app asks for permissions, I say no, and, rather than ratting me out to the app, my phone does its best to pretend to the app that it (the app) has the permission it wants, say by giving an empty contact book or whatever. (I know rooted phones can do this, but it shouldn't have to be something I have to fight my phone for.)
bigyabai 1y ago
He is right, all modern phone brands are surveillance devices furnished to provide the OEM with identifying data: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/12/apple-admits-to-secretly-giving-governments-push-notification-data/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/12/apple-admits-to-...

wiseowise 1y ago

> There is no easy way to close this privacy opening Sure there is. Hide screenshot taking behind permission and slap down hard apps that refuse to operate without them.

o11c 1y ago
It says "screenshots of themselves". The application is responsible for rendering the screen in the first place so it fundamentally doesn't need a permission. Now, what could reasonably be a permission is "access the internet", but our overlords don't approve of that thought. (Contrast this to web pages, which do not render themselves and thus can sensibly be blocked from screenshotting)
- gretch 1y ago
  I mean yeah technically the website can’t screenshot, but it can do many functionally equivalent things. For example, it can capture the entire DOM and send it off, including the contents of input fields that have not been submitted. That DOM capture can be replayed on a browser to show what the user sees. So what’s the difference?
  - Thorrez 1y ago
    Well, blocking javascript would stop that. Noscript is a thing that some people use.
    - danaris 1y ago
      For an increasing plurality (possibly even majority at this point) of sites where the purpose is not purely to read text, this is effectively equivalent to saying "you can just not use the site."
    - beeburrt 1y ago
      Ublock origin also has that ability
- 1y ago

Am4TIfIsER0ppos 1y ago

I seem to recall that state of the art audio encoding can compress voice to 8kbit/s which is a single packet per second, insignificant compared to how chatty your device is. Trivial to buffer and send during a period of activity. It sums to 1.7MB over the 30 minute window in the article graphs which should be visible if it is actually counted. Why would apple or google actually make it count though? They want to spy on you either for their own benefit or because the government forces them to. You say you found it taking screenshots and phoning them home. Of course! It is a surveillance device. Is it worse? Maybe. You should consider it sends everything home. Every keystroke, every touch of the screen, every sample of the accelerometers, every sample of audio. Perhaps only the sheer quantity of data in video prevents them from sending it all. Might be "remedied" with 5G bandwidth.

sampullman 1y ago
Audio, screenshots, and some of the other stuff I can believe, but I think batteries need a big upgrade before the data snatchers can get away with streaming video, even at a low bitrate. I'm also not sure how easy keylogging is these days, is there even a permission that allows it? I supposed there's ways to do it with custom keyboards. Google/Apple doing it themselves would be a pretty big deal.
- Am4TIfIsER0ppos 1y ago
  I think everyone acknowledges that chrome sends every keystroke in the address bar home. I don't keep up with the spyware so perhaps it is now every keystroke in the rest of the browser. It isn't much of a leap further that their operating system does the same.
adolph 1y ago
If that were true why are cell phone voice calls still so terrible?
- daneel_w 1y ago
  Because cellular carriers keep the same pace as a snail on vacation.

alganet 1y ago

There's a nation proud of overspinning enrichment turbines with a complicated computer virus that can even work offline. No conspiracy, that's just StuxNet. So, when you start learning about tech, you get paranoid. If you're not, it's even weirder. The fact that someone can target you, individually, is undisputable. Whether it will or not, that's another question. What I can recommend if you think you are being observed, is to avoid the common pitfalls: Don't go full isolationist living without technology. That is a trap. There is nowhere to hide anyway. Strange new friends who are super into what you do? Trap. You were never good with girls but one is seemingly into you, despite you being an ugly ass dirty computer nerd? That is a trap. Specially online but not limited to it. Go ahead, be paranoid. When an article comes to probe how paranoid you are, go ahead and explain exactly how paranoid you have become. But live a normal life nonetheless, unaffected by those things. Allow yourself to laugh, and be cool with it. Hundreds of clone accounts doxxing me? Well, thanks for the free decoys. Constant surveillance? Well, thank you for uploading my soul free of charge to super protected servers. Dodgy counter arguments in everything in care to discuss? Sounds like training. The paranoid optimist is quite an underrated character. I don't see many of those around.

ivape 1y ago
[flagged]
- alganet 1y ago
  There is a list of things I keep under profound consideration always. Information that travels backwards in time is one of them. I have a pretty good idea on how it could be possible and who would have the resources to do it. God is also another. However, I am a very unorthodox student of religion. I deeply respect anyone that uses it to foster a good behavior. Whoever uses it to trick others, I tend to see more as an act of hostility towards innocent believers. Like, if someone tries to put me into a religion mindset just to fuck with me, it's a dick move. What I know for sure is that God would not make mistakes. Whatever monitors me, does. It did so many times. I know it embarrasses them. It's delightful in that sense. So, yeah. God might exist, but I ain't talking about it when I describe paranoia. Another thing that is quite recent in my studies is psychology and how we are all so vulnerable to it. I started to despise it a little bit. How come it never solved so many issues? How come it seems to put them to evidence but not fix them, and by putting them to evidence, make them worse? Anyway. Do you want even more paranoia? If you like it, I should be supposed to charge for it, you know.

ivape 1y ago

Doesn't it have to listen to everything to capture the wake word "hey siri"? How else is it done?

simonw 1y ago
The iPhone has dedicated low-power on-device hardware that is trained to pick up "Hey Siri" exclusively. It only wakes up the rest of the device and captures additional audio after that wake word has been triggered. https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/voice-trigger https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/voice-trigger https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/hey-siri https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/hey-siri
- akimbostrawman 1y ago
  >pick up "Hey Siri" exclusively until it isn't. anything apple is proprietary and any feature could silently change at any time even for only specific devices/user. https://web.archive.org/web/20250415140321/https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jan/03/apple-siri-privacy-lawsuit-settlement https://web.archive.org/web/20250415140321/https://www.thegu...

benlivengood 1y ago

The thing is, it's not even people doing the correlations. Just like transformers can learn most of human knowledge just by trying to predict tokens, I would not be surprised if the ad-serving machine learning systems have learned about people in similar detail. State of the art about 10 years ago was 4 9s of accuracy predicting click-through rates from the available context (features for user profile, current website, keywords, etc.), which I interpreted as requiring a fairly accurate learned model of human behavior. I got out of that industry so I don't know what current SOTA is for adtech, but I can only imagine it is better. The models were trained on automatically labelled data (GB/s of it) based on actual recent click-through rates so the amount of training data was roughly comparable to small LLMs. Recent anecdote; three of us were sitting around the kitchen table with our phones out chatting about an obscure new thing that had come up; it appeared in one of our FB ad streams pretty quickly. My top guesses about how this is possible today; 1) Apps routinely link many third-party data gathering and advertising libraries. Any of these libraries could be gathering enough contextual data and reselling it to make a correlation possible. It's not just obscure thing A that triggers an ad, it's highly correlated mixtures of normal things X, Y and Z that can imply A. 2) other friends may have talked about the obscure thing recently and social network links implied we would be aware of it through them. Distant 3) the models are actually good enough to infer speech from weird side-channels like the accelerometer when people wave their hands when they talk, etc. Accelerometer sample rate is < 1KHz but over 100Hz which may be enough, especially when you throw giant models at it.

jancsika 1y ago
> an obscure new thing that had come up Since you've provided no explicit counter-evidence, I'm gonna go ahead and say I have four nines of accuracy in predicting that your smartphone was squarely in the dependency chain of any "obscure new thing" you could have imagined discussing. Edit: wording
- ajb92 1y ago
  Kind of a weirdly sad, uncharitable assumption to make
1y ago

fmajid 1y ago

At one of my previous companies we made a moderately popular mobile app SDK that app developers would embed in their apps. We were approached by a company that claimed they had a MIT developed (or was it Bell Labs?) audio recognition technology similar to Shazam, but orders of magnitude more efficient, that would be used to recognize audio from ads and record when a user was exposed to a TV or radio ad for tracking purposes. I don’t remember the name, that was at least 10 years ago before Apple started enforcing permissions on microphone access and showing an orange dot, but they wanted to do a revenue-share deal in exchange for us quietly bundling their SDK inside ours. Needless to say we turned them down so we never learned more or tested the veracity of their claims, but there are some really sleazy companies out there. Modern smartphones have sufficient horsepower to do the audio processing on-device so the argument that this would show up in network traffic does not hold.

pixl97 1y ago
Probably something along these lines https://www.pcworld.com/article/424417/ad-tracking-tech-uses-high-frequency-audio-to-communicate-between-devices.html https://www.pcworld.com/article/424417/ad-tracking-tech-uses...
blurbleblurble 1y ago
Was it Alphonso?
gblargg 1y ago
They can also store things for later upload. A phone in airplane mode still isn't safe.
blurbleblurble 1y ago
I guess hackernews has an aversion to this topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43809203 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43809203

segezdino 1y ago

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Ichthypresbyter 1y ago

>Not only does the system know exactly where you are at every moment, it knows who your friends are, what they are interested in, and who you are spending time with This actually makes sense of an anecdote a colleague uses to say that he thinks his phone is listening to him. I am a keen skier. He used to ski a lot, but hasn't been for several years. Around the start of ski season this year, we talked about my plans to go skiing that weekend, and later that day he started seeing skiing-related ads. He thinks it's because his phone listened into the conversation, but it could just as easily have been that it was spending more time near my phone (I had only recently started at that job) on which I regularly search for skiing-related things like conditions reports and directions to ski areas.

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 1y ago
> but it could just as easily have been that it was spending more time near my phone (I had only recently started at that job) on which I regularly search for skiing-related things like conditions reports and directions to ski areas Bingo! This is most certainly what happened. I’ve spent time trying to convince my friends that their phone’s microphone is not constantly listening and running sounds through voice recognition software to isolate their voice (so the individual who owns the phone can be advertised to), then through sentiment analysis software (to inform advertisement bids), all without meaningfully affecting battery life. That is usually an uphill battle but explaining location services and the fact they don’t know what I’ve searched gets the point across better. (It is actually creepier.)
fsmv 1y ago
Or just ski ads go out when ski season starts and he only noticed that he saw one because you had the conversation.
trollied 1y ago
You were probably in the same place using the same IP address, and both browsed - doesn’t matter which sites you both visited, the trackers have you. You might have shown him where you were going. Ad trackers thought “I’ll serve ski ads to people that were on that IP address because somebody else looked at xyz”.

polskibus 1y ago

Do iOS apps also take screenshots of activity in other apps without consent? Does the platform allow it to, if yes then is there a way to block it?

trollied 1y ago
They cannot.

NemoNobody 1y ago

That was a stupid study. Phones know if they are being used - the phones for 3 days around ads is meaningless. Tracking isn't all the time - that would be tough. They do record stuff when you doing certain things tho... It's not impossible at all, actually it's rather easy if you have access to their actual online activity too.

xg15 1y ago
I think it would be interesting to try to do a "constructive debunking" - try to build a system yourself that uses a tampered phone and constantly records and transcribes all audio around it, without being obviously detectable by battery drain, CPU usage or network traffic. Variants/difficulty levels could be about: capture everything, or just keywords? What if you have a million keywords? Transcribe on-device or in the cloud? Can you do it just inside an app or do you need OS support/root access? Etc etc. Would be interesting to see what can be done at all and how easy or difficult it would be to detect.
- jeroenhd 1y ago
  Comparing a small project like that with the vast cyberstalking industry we call advertising today isn't going to yield similar results if the conspiracy theory is true. I can make a full tracker that drains the battery like crazy but that doesn't mean the smartypants who know when women are pregnant weeks before they do themselves can't come up with a system that's more efficient with acceptable data granularity. Worst case scenario you succeed, and you've built yourself the torment nexus. If you publish your results, you'll have to publish the torment nexus to prove you don't have anything up your sleeve, making the world slightly worse for everyone else now that there's an accessible torment nexus ready to go. If you don't publish your torment nexus, nobody will believe you. Hell, if you succeed, you might've actually invented the thing! At best, the result of your success is knowing for sure you _could_ be spied upon any time, anywhere. There's probably a much easier method to know for sure: work for advertising companies and learn their secrets.
  - xg15 1y ago

washadjeffmad 1y ago

Does anyone recall the national discussions surrounding what constituted metadata following 9/11 when ThinThread and Trailblazer were brought to public attention? I also recall reading about members of the TIA "Total Information Awareness" program leaving to join advisory boards for rising social media platforms, Facebook most notably. These weren't tinfoil opeds in fringe outlets, but regular reporting by journalists published in trusted local newspapers. Are there any outlets left who aren't part of consolidated media groups that can or do still track and report on movements like this? I've having trouble finding original articles that haven't been "revised for historical accuracy" or hidden behind paywalls of the few entities that remain. Edit: For context, I was looking for the earliest articles about Google citing legal justification for scanning the contents of emails under a favorable interpretation of metadata that allowed for tokenization by an automated process (ie- the contents were not read by a human or made personally identifiable, which met the letter of the law). It follows that the same justification is not limited to any source or data type, but I couldn't recall any more recent reporting or statements from companies over the last 10-15 years, or, the "don't break Google" era.

ThinkBeat 1y ago

At the time I am typing this, the title on the page is: ""Your phone isn’t secretly listening to you, but the truth is more disturbing"" Which is presently also the title on this post. Then as I read it becomes clear that it is merely focusing on Facebook. However the confusion that may stem from "Your phone isn’t secretly listening to you" The blog post never attempts to establish that your phone is not listening to you, just that some companies may not be going it. The truth is that your phone may well be listening to you . There is plenty of malware / spywear that uses exploits to achieve it. Like the NSO group¹. Tools to do so can be bouught on the malware market from other sources as well and we must assume that Mossad, NSA, and other major intellitence agencies have tools that exceed what you can buy on the open market. You phone may aboslutely be listening to you. but probably it is not. ¹ https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-01-24/nso-group-s-pegasus-spyware-focus-of-us-eu-investigations https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-01-24/nso-group... https://www.britannica.com/topic/Pegasus-spyware https://www.britannica.com/topic/Pegasus-spyware https://citizenlab.ca/2016/08/million-dollar-dissident-iphone-zero-day-nso-group-uae/ https://citizenlab.ca/2016/08/million-dollar-dissident-iphon... https://newatlas.com/computers/smartphone-listening-conversations-ads-facebook/ https://newatlas.com/computers/smartphone-listening-conversa... https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-01-24/nso-group-s-pegasus-spyware-focus-of-us-eu-investigations https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-01-24/nso-group...

Etheryte 1y ago
In aggregate, your phone is not listening to you, but if you are of great interest to a powerful adversary, it very well might be. But at that point, I would wager that's one of the smaller things on your plate.
dist-epoch 1y ago
Phones today show in the status bar if the camera/microphone is active.
- 9dev 1y ago
  If you can’t trust the software, why would you trust the software? Am I supposed to rely on the hope that an attacker can take over some part of the OS, but not the one rendering a tiny blob in the status bar?

nonameiguess 1y ago

Television, not phone, but YouTube sure intrigued me at minimum yesterday. First, it revealed pretty clearly that even with history turned off, it will use the history of other accounts accessed from the same IP to serve recommendations anyway. Without history, it turns off the home page recommendations, but when I ran a search, it showed me completely unrelated videos from a rock climbing channel my wife had watched on another account. I have never watched any rock climbing content on this account. The second incident was the "listening to you thing," though. Not on the phone, but on a smart television. Exterminator was there to do the quarterly spray of my house and I was showing him scars from when I fell off a skateboard trying to bomb a hill I couldn't handle late last year, talking about what happened, and not five minutes later I turn on the television, open YouTube, and the very first recommendation on my wife's account is a video of a guy falling off his longboard at 50 MPH. Not like it's some kind of secret that we both skate and I watch a lot of downhill videos on this account, but I have never once specifically searched for, watched, or even been recommended a video of a crash, until they decide to do so five minutes after I was talking about it in front of that television.

kevinsync 1y ago

I get all the proximity-based aggregation, and creating graphs of relationships to leak content between personal "algorithms" (dislike that wording but that's the colloquial usage), and tracking between sites + social networks, and all the basic stuff ... but can somebody explain how I immediately get served ads relevant to text typed into (presumably-encrypted) iMessage conversations? I also have a couple distinct memories of getting served ads for products I've never searched for or never bought before, after I either bought it in a store or, even weirder, literally just picked it up, looked at it, and put it back on the shelf in a store? I can craft some kind of super-surveillance-state theory as to how you could achieve that, but it feels very unlikely to be deployed at a small CVS lol Anyways, these might just be coincidences but still perplexing to understand how it's done.

viraptor 1y ago
> how I immediately get served ads relevant to text typed into (presumably-encrypted) iMessage conversations? Are you using a third party keyboard? Or any apps you don't 100% trust if you sent the message from a Mac?
- kevinsync 1y ago
  Nope, regular iOS/macOS on all ends. Literally just stock Apple Messages on devices. I just notice sometimes topics will come up (what appears to me to be randomly) and then relevant ads and/or content will appear on Instagram or web. I guess it's possible that, to me, it appears "organic" (ex. somebody just mentions Taco Bell or whatever) but they had actually been searching on their device, and since our digital proximities are known, the next thing you know I'm Living Más lol
  - viraptor 1y ago
    If you have specific situations where it's reproducible, you can record your DNS and connections on local network and try again. You can only prove/disprove that with enough experiments.
HWR_14 1y ago

mindcrash 1y ago

Way back then I exposed massive data collection from Twitter by Google which made it possible to plot locations at which you used Twitter in Google Maps by simply putting your Twitter handle into the search field. Somehow they knew about these locations even when you opted out of sharing location data with Twitter (I checked) -- so this was only possible by Twitter privately providing this information to Google. This "experiment" has since then been shut down, but exposing this and many other other forms of activism permanently has cost me my Twitter account, to the point that asking to reinstate it several times because I was permanently suspended for no valid reason led to X Support directly rerouting every attempt to appeal this decision into the digital trash can. Let's say nothing surprises me anymore.

immibis 1y ago
Doesn't every site route every support request for every reason into the digital trash can? You're supposed to just make a new account, using as many mechanisms as possible to make sure the site can't link it to your old account.
- TheDong 1y ago
  I too sell my phone and buy a new one and also get a new phone number each time I get banned
- mindcrash 1y ago
  Someone from X Support replied, basically told me to fuck off and that this would happen after my second or third appeal... so no.
- torben-friis 1y ago
  I’m not even sure that’s possible for some sites. A few years ago I tried to create a separate digital footprint from scratch (just an experiment out of boredom when my isp offered a second number for free). I used an ultra cheap never before used android phone and set it up outside my home. Google went nuts. All sorts of captchas, security checks and attempts to link me to other information popping up on every step. Eventually it wouldn’t let me use the phone unless I provided a credit card number.

danielrhodes 1y ago

People seem to ignore the cost and accuracy aspects of a phone listening to you 24/7. At least with today’s constraints, it is highly unlikely to be happening. First, the cost to transcribe audio is not free. It is computationally expensive. Any ad network or at scale service would not be able to afford it, especially in orgs where they are concerned about unit economics. Secondly, the accuracy would be horrible. Most of the time, your phone is in your pocket and would pick up almost nothing. More over, it’s not like you are talking about anything of value to advertisers in most cases. Google is a money printing machine because people search with an intent to buy. The SNR of normal conversation is much much much lower. That makes the unit economics of doing this gets much worse. Third, it would be pretty hard to not notice this was happening. Your phone would get hot, your battery would deplete very quickly, and you’d be using a lot of data. Moreover on iOS you could see the mic is being used and the OS would likely kill the app if it was using too many resources in the background. So until we find an example of this actually happening, it’s not worth worrying about.

scrose 1y ago
These are all points that were brought up in the article as to why voice recording is less useful than all of the other tracking mechanisms advertisers have available
derefr 1y ago
For all of these reasons, audio snooping is much more likely to be something done by wired, stationary devices that maybe have a decent amount of RAM + a fair bit of usually-idle processing capacity (to run the transcription model locally and just push the resulting text), and which are expected to draw a decent amount of power and use the Internet at vaguely-arbitrary times. Like a smart TV, for example.
- sroussey 1y ago
  First thing I do is disable that feature on every TV I buy. Second thing I do is block the TV access to internet after I do one firmware update.

limbero 1y ago

This article reminds me of this excellent tongue-in-cheek piece of writing by Jonathan Zeller in McSweeney's: Calm Down—Your Phone Isn’t Listening to Your Conversations. It’s Just Tracking Everything You Type, Every App You Use, Every Website You Visit, and Everywhere You Go in the Physical World https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/calm-down-your-phone-isnt-listening-to-your-conversations-its-just-tracking-everything-you-type-every-app-you-use-every-website-you-visit-and-everywhere-you-go-in-the-physical-world https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/calm-down-your-phone-isn...

Paddywack 1y ago
Reminds me of something that a Telco exec once said in jest - “A bank can track which hotel you stayed at last night, the Telco knows who you slept with”
Spooky23 1y ago
There is so much time spent “debunking” audio recordings being shared with various entities it makes me more suspicious. Just like Facebook’s “we never sell your data (we just stalk you and sell ads using your data)”. I’m sure there’s a similar weasel excuse… “we never listen to your audio (but we do analyze it to improve quality assurance)”
- LgWoodenBadger 1y ago
  It’s similar with the TSA facial recognition photos. “We delete your photo immediately” but what they don’t say is that they don’t delete the biometrics from that photo.
  - bsimpson 1y ago
    It's a crime that were compelled to concede our 4th Amendment rights in order to travel.
    - spunker540 1y ago
      Same with drivers licenses and passports having a photo requirement too

ACV001 1y ago

bs article paid for by those big corporations.

karaterobot 1y ago
I'm not going to ask if you actually read the article. My recommendation is to read the second half of the headline.

intended 1y ago

What rot. Here’s a simple experiment I ran and still works. Back in the day there was a truly ghastly add for ear wax removal that showed up on YouTube in the UK. In an experiment, and prank, I told two of my close friends about this, and how this horrid advert would kill my appetite when it came up. And then I made it a point to repeat “ear wax removal” loudly several times. Sure enough. A day later my dear friend messaged me with something on the lines of “I hate you” Their phones were Android and iOS. I believe it was the Android user suffered.

paulcole 1y ago
This is why “my phone is listening and I can prove it” is such a good shibboleth for lack of critical thinking skills. Can you not see all the biases and fallacies in your own comment?
jeroenhd 1y ago
If what you're talking about is the source of the ad, why did you see the ad yourself? Were you shouting about ear wax removal at your phone? There are millions of ways the adware running on your phones could've correlated your profile and spread the "infection" to your friend. Basic location access being the most important one, but sharing an IP address (your friends' WiFi?), being near the same Bluetooth beacons, having the same stored SSIDs, or mere coincidence that your friend saw the same ad targeting a wide demographic are much more probable than "my phone is listening 24/7".
- intended 1y ago
  Sure. But its fun, and we can always replicate, just need a terrible ad. Do note, this was tested in a park, so no shared WiFi, no Bluetooth beacons/devices. Also, this ad doesn’t/didn’t show up for others, ever.
  - paulcole 1y ago
    I’m assuming like most friends you and your friends have nothing in common like interests, demographics, etc.? And I’m assuming you also made them aware of other ads you’d seen recently so they could see if those showed up as well?

blurbleblurble 1y ago

The phone is listening. Services like Shazam and Alphonso are constantly fingerprinting audio from the mics and sending these fingerprints up for "matching". What are they matching against? Against key "content". To check if the fingerprints from your phone mic match the "content" they have to do some kind of nearest neighbor search. What if the fingerprints aren't super close but they're somewhat close? To "content" related to certain products? Should we send the ad? What if employees at Alphonso and Shazam _know_ that the fingerprints from your phone aren't quite close enough to have been generated from key monetizable samples of the "content", but also know that they are close enough to be effective? At targeting potential buyers? Who decides how close is close enough? What's the ethical threshold here? And what's the most profitable threshold?

perching_aix 1y ago
> The phone is listening. Services like Shazam and Alphonso are constantly fingerprinting audio from the mics and sending these fingerprints up for "matching". Could you please provide a source for this? Just on the outset this sounds pretty wild if true. In the settings I do not see any permissions associated with Shazam, and only when I open it do I see the usual microphone indicator light up. I will say though, it is weird that it doesn't have associated permissions listed, because clearly it can access the mic at least when it's open. Edit: nevermind, found it, was just super hidden. But yeah, says it can only access it when the app is "in use". Now can it auto launch? Apparently also yes, after boot. Otherwise idk. It's further interesting I cannot tweak any of these permissions. Edit #2: now it says that notifications are enabled for it, but then i check, and they aren't. i exercise the toggle, now it doesn't say that anymore, and the mic permissions are no longer hidden? Samsung please... No amount of years in tech will rid me of tech pains it seems.
- blurbleblurble 1y ago
  Pixel phones have a built in background audio fingerprinting service called "Now Playing" which can operate constantly. Shazam has an "auto shazam" feature you can enable for constant background listening, since 2016 at least! But look into Alphonso. That's like Shazam but explicitly for covert "content recognition" listening in microphone enabled apps. And it's old. People who say it's too expensive or impractical to do bulk listening for ad-tech just aren't paying attention.

udev4096 1y ago

> User permissions for a large number of apps were all enabled This says it all. Privacy is not by default, because of souless mega corporations, including HN which has an extremely invasive privacy policy. If you don't actively take steps to improve your privacy, they will continue to exploit it. Use GrapheneOS, it is the most private and secure mobile operating system. Nothing happens without your explicit permission, the way it should have been from the beginning

rahen 1y ago
These discussions seem to come up frequently lately. Both /e/OS and Lineage with microG provide good enough privacy for those who can't afford high-end smartphones like the Google Pixels. The ranking would probably be: - Pixel on GrapheneOS - Any Android smartphone on Lineage or /e/OS - iPhone on recent iOS (the best choice for technically illiterate people) People concerned with privacy should avoid stock Android phones. Additionally, software only goes so far in protecting privacy. Some hygiene is also required, especially with iOS, where everything is sent to iCloud by default and E2E encryption is either not enabled by default or not available at all in some countries. When it comes to hardware, nothing really compares to the Titan and T2 chips found in Pixels and iPhones though.
- gruez 1y ago
  >- Pixel on GrapheneOS >- Any Android smartphone on Lineage or /e/OS None of those operating systems does anything for tracking/advertising SDKs in apps, which is most of where the data leaks are coming from, not google/apple. Moreover unless you're willing to go no proprietary apps (ie. most apps people actually use), you'll need google play services, which means google can still collect data on you.
  - rahen 1y ago
    Those distributions either use neutered Google Play Services through a stub reimplementation (microG), or rely on sandboxing (GOS). Either way, Google can only collect limited data on those distributions, and you have control over them. Concerning tracking applications, yes, some hygiene and good practices are necessary, the OS can only go so far.

titaphraz 1y ago

Pretty much every time I add a new contact to my phone I start to get really strange ads online. I figured it out when I added a guy who's retiring for the army. I started getting retirement ads for soldiers. Then, I add a guy I loosely know and what do I start seeing? Cocaine rehab ads. I shit you not. It's not hard to argue that this is more than a minor privacy violation.

littlestymaar 1y ago

It is in fact listening to you, at least if you have an iPhone: https://www.lemonde.fr/en/pixels/article/2025/02/14/apple-targeted-by-french-complaint-over-siri-recording-private-data_6738155_13.html https://www.lemonde.fr/en/pixels/article/2025/02/14/apple-ta...

quijoteuniv 1y ago

« The article posits that the uncanny relevance of some ads is due to sophisticated data collection methods. Companies analyze user behavior, online activity, and social interactions to predict interests, making it seem as though devices are listening. In essence, while smartphones may not be actively eavesdropping, the depth and breadth of data analytics employed by tech companies can create the illusion of such practices.»

kjkjadksj 1y ago
There has definitely been cases where I have not looked up an idea at all on my devices, only mentioned it in speech at home, and the highly targeted at shows up on mobile the next day or even that day. I would take the correlation theory if I actually left data to correlate.
- wormius 1y ago
  This... I have had on at least 2 occasions explicitly where I know for a fact I hadn't searched or looked up this topic on any system, and I brought up a topic and talked to my roommate and within the next 12 hours FB served me ads or content relating to the topic. I get the idea that an "always on" monitoring system would be problematic (even if you discarded the data itself and only retained/filtered relevant bits for a short period of time). But ... I have no other way to explain events like this. I suppose some weird correlation of user has x,y,z and they searched for a,b,c in the past, and other users search for D, then we show D at exactly the 12 hour time they searched for it. Yes I am aware of recency bias, and how perhaps it was shown other times without recognizing it. But it's... hard to shake that feeling, and I am (well less so now) a skeptic... If it's anything it's like AI that's eerily creepy like "intelligence" but not it, just like this is "like listening" but isn't. Both use statistical models to do creepy ass shit.
  - BenjiWiebe 1y ago
    Did the roommate use the same WiFi network as you, and your roommate used the WiFi to research it?

leumon 1y ago

> Even though these ad algorithms are not nearly perfect (try to pay attention to how often you are served ads that are entirely irrelevant to your interests), the simple fact that they are so eerily correct even some of the time is the real conspiracy here. This could be intentional. Having too many accurate ads is having a bad effect, because you then enter the uncanny valley of noticing what the data collectors all know about you.

tiltowait 1y ago
Amazon often tries to show me a dress store. I’m a guy, and I’ve never bought women’s clothing. On the surface, the ad makes no sense and is irrelevant—but what if I end up wanting to buy a dress for someone else? Then I might remember that Amazon dress shop. This (or simple error) seems more likely to me than a conspiracy to appear less creepy, though I suppose all three could be in play.

keybored 1y ago

iPhone will tell me that I have a 25m drive to get to work. Literally why? I know where I work and how long it takes. I have done it enough times for it to learn what I do at 07:30 in the morning. Is it just flexing repeapetedly that it did a simple inference?

huntsman 1y ago
Some places, including the Bay Area where this feature was probably created, have significant variance in commute times depending on the traffic of the day so this can be a useful feature. The commute time from SF to Cupertino is certainly not constant.
- keybored 1y ago
  As a mere hick I’m sometimes oblivious to the lived experience of the ~~~~ SC crowd.

kjkjadksj 1y ago

Keep thinking its merely correlation while the US military bans phones from the SCIF…

weare138 1y ago

This fact is important, because if an app were accessing a microphone and sending the audio to a cloud server for analysis there would be detectable traces of data consumption. Because that's not how it works and companies like Meta know this when misleading it's users about their privacy. Speech-to-text transcription is handled on your device. They never transmit the raw audio, there's no need to. A compressed text transcription of your conversation would only generate a few kilobytes of data. You would never notice it. And the mic needs to be active in order to receive legitimate voice commands. If it can respond to your voice, the microphone is on and listening. That's the only way it can work.

psyclobe 1y ago

Tl;dr it’s not the microphone… it’s screenshots.

bentt 1y ago

One time my wife and I had a random conversation, utterly random, about cat hamster wheels. Like, why doesn't that exist? I got an ad for it the next day (it exists). I don't believe that my phone is not listening to me and I challenge you to choose a random word out of the dictionary and say it 100 times in front of your phone.

gruez 1y ago
>I don't believe that my phone is not listening to me and I challenge you to choose a random word out of the dictionary and say it 100 times in front of your phone. The person making the claim should be responsible for furnishing the proof. If it's really so simple to prove, why hasn't anyone done a carefully controlled experiment proving this once and for all? At the very least, it'd move us beyond vague anecdotes on social media.
- latexr 1y ago
  > If it's really so simple to prove, why hasn't anyone done a carefully controlled experiment proving this once and for all? They did, and found no listening being done. It’s in the article under “The data doesn't add up”.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
latexr 1y ago
> I challenge you to choose a random word out of the dictionary and say it 100 times in front of your phone. That test has been done. It is explained at length in the article under the heading “The data doesn't add up”.
sroussey 1y ago
It’s too easy to check on your phone if such a thing were happening. Your TV though… that IS listening and the TV even has options to disable it. It’s on every TV shipped in at least the last 5 years, maybe 10.

wsintra2022 1y ago

I’ve said it before and will reinforce it cause once again no one brings it up in the comments. People report the phone is listening to them because they talked about <insert> and now they are seeing ads for it. What they may not realise is they are talking about <insert> because subliminally the ad worked they just never noticed it. Now they have. The ad was there first like a little virus worming in your brain and then you bring it up with friends thinking it an original thought.

MobileVet 1y ago
Definitely possible… but Apple was successfully sued for unintentionally’ listening. They didn’t admit guilt but settled. https://www.reuters.com/legal/apple-pay-95-million-settle-siri-privacy-lawsuit-2025-01-02/ https://www.reuters.com/legal/apple-pay-95-million-settle-si...

MobileVet 1y ago

Apple settled a lawsuit about Siri ‘unintentionally’ listening. [1] So, yes, they also can likely predict what you want based on all they do openly track… but we can no longer claim that they aren’t listening. Based on the lawsuit and other sources, my guess is the phones build a word cloud that is then used for targeted advertising. Apple at el aren’t recording and selling the actual audio… but they are listening. (1) https://www.reuters.com/legal/apple-pay-95-million-settle-siri-privacy-lawsuit-2025-01-02/ https://www.reuters.com/legal/apple-pay-95-million-settle-si...

dalf 1y ago

This partly explains why the recommendations I receive don't feel like mine. Multiple times, it's been obvious that the suggestions were pulled from other profiles and I could even tell whose. My hypothesis * The algorithms have linked my account to some others. * They then serve me the embeddings extracted from those profiles. The near-real-time nature of this has crossed my mind more than once. It's really unsettling, and afterwards I feel uneasy about any recommendations (all Google services, Netflix seems problematic too, not Amazon). YouTube seems to have some hidden knobs for tuning this behaviour: after multiple negative feedbacks, the problematic content disappeared from my front page. However, the recommendations on the right-hand side of individual videos remain problematic, and the automatic playlists of YouTube Music are still strangely disturbing (even after multiple negative feedbacks).

deleted 1y ago
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zghst 1y ago

Never trust these people, always know that something is going on somewhere.

cbogie 1y ago

it’s just ai llm snooping amd doing big ol compute just like we have access to now. but advertisers had it years ago cuz they paid and at large, ads sold. became so prevalent no differentiable value so the algos etc sought new omg human public users. magic baby. but just hungry ip sw gobbling up new worlds. maybe. just thinking outloud.

7373737373 1y ago

If our popular phone operating systems were worth anything and actually acted as an agent for the user that owned them, they'd allow anyone to easily track and prevent this.

on_the_train 1y ago

Yes my phone is listening. To almost every word, and using that information to serve me ads. I would bet my entire net worth on that, as I'm 100% certain.

AStonesThrow 1y ago

A few years ago, I was fairly convinced that Google Voice was listening and punishing me for hitting "political third rail" keywords during phone calls. On more than one occasion, I would be in a conversation with a friend of mine and things would turn political, and if I spouted just the right combination of anti-left rhetoric/keywords, our connection would drop right away -- boom. Now why would Voice do this when other Google properties don't? I mean, they don't filter Gmail or Docs or Photos looking for subversive content and censoring it. YouTube comments, maybe. But I figured that if they wanted, it was completely possible. Because they have proven and deployed live-transcription, and they're best at English. Not to mention, Voice is sort of a deprecated product that they don't really support. So why not throw a little havoc in there for miscreants? The reason I was using Voice was to place phone calls from a SIM-less tablet. It seems that Voice insists on using my real phone now for routing any sort of call. So I haven't had opportunity to test the boundaries for years now. Nevertheless, I was not sorry about the possibility of censorship, I was duly chastened, and sorry I've been so brainwashed to lapse into mindless talking-point rhetoric.

1vuio0pswjnm7 1y ago

If "the truth is more disturbing", then why do people seem to care about "secretly listening" but not about "the truth" (data collection). Perhaps because the US has state and federal laws against wiretapping. Perhaps the difference is consent. Arguably so-called "tech" companies have obtained consent to collect data ("the truth"). But have they obtained consent to "secretly listen" to private conversations.