Like, we all know they’re listening , but can we provide proof?
My friend was complaining about all the new super surveillance that will be government required in cars after 2027, and I said to him dude you have a stock android, you use every AI slop feature, you use a smart TV on your unsecured network, and uses x every day. They have everything they could possibly need on him. Oh and he posts questionable things to fb daily under his real name.
Mark Zuckerberg puts a sticker over his laptop camera and microphone.
He also gave his famous opinion about Facebook users. Deep down, he agrees with privacy advocates. The diff is that he’s a shitty enough person to take advantage of the less techy people out there even if his society will be damaged badly in the process. Most of us are not that shitty.
they trust me
dumb fucks
I think we can move beyond Facebook here. Trusting big tech with your data never works out well.
the biggest hypocrites are tech CEO’s limiting their children’s screen time and forbidding social media
Are drug lords who are not actively overdosing on their adulterated products also hypocrites?
I mean kind of yeah
You can get sound from any speaker by hacking the electrical signals generated in reverse.
Edit: instructions for the two idiots who don’t know a magnet moving through a coil generates electricity.
Turn ANY Speaker Into a Microphone in Just 2 Easy Steps. - Instructables https://share.google/MIRGTgGhJ59TIVsfC
This isn’t a proof of mass surveillance. He’s one of the most famous people on earth and he’s probably the target of many hackers.
The manufacturers tell you.
And they even make you click the “I have read and understood this” button under the document that explicitly states that they’re spying on you and selling all your data.
Here’s court cases lost by Google and Apple
Also, whenever monolithic megacorporations not recording you directly, virtually everyone is still buying any data about you they can get from actual malware distributing criminals.
Microphone hijacking is real and commonplace. (Edit: Fixed link thanks to some feedback.)
The malware vendors sell what they learn about us on black markets. And in net effect, everyone is buying from them.
They “Privacy Wash” the things they learn from the illegal recordings, by passing them from one disreputable broker to another. Each broker can keep poor quality records of exactly where they got their data. Pretty soon it’s just “part of your digital fingerprint” and “can’t be helped”.
Thanks for providing links but I don’t trust the ny post.
Here’s a story where people working for Apple got access to audio recorded during seemingly unwanted times like during sex.
But I imagine these people were enabling voice recording in the first place. I trust my phone not to record if I disable those features (though sometimes they make this difficult).
I think Apple is generally better about this stuff then other companies though? Since they actually went to court to protect e2e encryption.
Lastly, if youre someone of interest to powerfull people, there are otherways they can use your phone against you like with pegasus:
I don’t trust my smartdevices farther than I can throw them. Hence, I run GrapheneOS.
One’s a settlement with a blanket denial of guilt for Siri and Google Assistant. At least mild circumstantial evidence, because there’s a real mechanism (accidental activation and recording) is identified, but no proof, and certainly no proof of an ongoing intentional data broker style program. But at least enough of a pain that they won a settlement. So that counts as a trace of meaningful circumstantial evidence.
But the second one is just a link to sell you a product that doesn’t provide any evidence whatsoever and doesn’t even pretend to, it discusses the possibility in vague generalities as something hackable and tries to sell you a product. I’m baffled as to why you think that counts as a source.
I’m baffled as to why you think that counts as a source.
I mean, just Google it. Microphone hacking is a thing. (Edit: You know what, Let me Google that for you.)
I only felt obligated to grab a link grabbed because folks keep repeating the misinformation that “no one is hacking your phone microphone, or it would be in the news”. It’s just not news anymore.
Android and iOS malware will try to grab stuff off of your microphone.
It’s not a conspiracy theory. It’s not news.
Malware actors do malware things, and sell whatever they can harvest.
Hello? Is this thing on? I sometimes worry that it’s impossible to get anyone in a thread like this to stay focused on a train of thought for even five seconds. You posted an article that you thought was a good source, but it wasn’t. Then instead of addressing any of that whatsoever, you say “just google it.” What we just witnessed was a breakdown in your ability to tie sources to claims, not to mention your ability to keep attention focused on one point before jumping to the next one. You need to fix that before you recommend any more sources.
And I have googled it. The closest thing to a smoking gun is Cox Media Group claiming it as a capability, inspiring uproar and then walking back the claim that they could do it. That’s the best media report on it. And this has been directly studied in an academic setting, finding basically no evidence of secret listening. It doesn’t mean there’s no incentive or that they aren’t bad actors, but you can’t use a vague feeling that “it’s proven” that to justify a breakdown in your ability to think critically or actually look at evidence.
Hacks can and do happen, we already knew this from camera hacks of yesteryear. What we don’t know is that major social media platforms or tech companies are doing this, either at all or at scale. And yes, it’s important to distinguish those two things, because that’s also part of critical thinking.
You don’t need a microphone, any speaker can be a microphone.
https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/154343/can-a-speaker-be-used-as-a-microphone
Regarding TVs, WikiLeaks’ Vault 7 publication in 2017 included “Weeping Angel”, CIA malware for Samsung TVs which streams audio from them while they’re in “fake off” mode.
https://mashable.com/article/cia-samsung-tv-hack-weeping-angel
Samsung TV’s have an ai assistant: https://news.samsung.com/global/samsung-redefines-ai-search-on-smart-tvs-with-a-smarter-bixby-voice-assistant
Samsung Ai assistant privacy policy: https://d264isyiyrfhr3.cloudfront.net/storage/tos/usa/2.1.3/1765237389944/eng/usa_eng_pp.html
Other Samsung Scandals if the above wasn’t enough: https://cybernews.com/privacy/samsung-settles-lawsuit-collecting-texans-tv-data/
My Samsung TV is not on the WiFi and I have AdGuard running network-wide because of shit like this.
https://www.howtogeek.com/you-can-still-buy-a-dumb-tv-but-should-you/ This article outlines the situation really well. your two options to not be spied on out of the box are to buy a terrible TV or to buy a commercial one. They dont make “dumb tvs” anymore. I wonder if theres a way to implement one’s own firmware n all that to turn a nice samsung into something more private.
I heard older versions of Android running on older smart TVs can be overwritten with Linux but once it’s updated past a certain 2023 threshold that option is closed.
don’t need any such “proof”. the whole industry has lost any and all benefit-of-doubt privileges, for ever. they don’t get an opportunity to gain a foothold in mi casa and possibly be in a position to do harm.
I don’t get the idea that after all the shit they pulled someone’s like “well maybe this new thing’s nice”.
those are immoral people with zero compunctions about doing anything that hurts you, your community, and humanity as a whole. we are in an adversarial position and you’d do well to remind yourself of that constantly.
I don’t get the idea that after all the shit they pulled someone’s like “well maybe this new thing’s nice”.
I look at my friends who do this even though I advize them not to. For them, data is invisible and out of sight, out of mind. Their TV is a consumer device like IDK a toaster or washing machien. They put it online with no real thought to data or privacy. From their perspective this is normal. Their neighbors all do it with their TVs. Their friends all do it! I am the only one who makes a warning to them. Everyone else they know does it. Who wouldn’t want a “smart” TV???
They don’t understand tech very well and they feel like what they see most people doing must be good. They are not thinking about the eroding effect on their whole society from normalizing dragnet surveillance and total privacy loss. It’s too abstract, and the allure of the shiny is too much.
Same here. im the crazy one because I dont want zucc listening to me in my home. I can’t stand normies dude. Brainwashed.
don’t need any such “proof”
I’m gonna stop you there. I’m okay with no benefit of the doubt in terms of them being bad actors, but your worldview still has to be built at the bones and joints out of things known to be true otherwise there’s no stopping you from believing every conspiracy with no guard rails.
I don’t think there’s yet a specific smoking gun on this front, but I think once there is, then it is okay to presume it likely happening in other instances. But no smoking gun just yet.
you’re ignoring the important part - who that’s coming from.
analyzing a new shit-sandwich from the shit-sandwich-shop to determine “does this one have shit in it” is a valid academic endeavor, but hardly something you’d spend one second of your life pondering.
I don’t think I’m ignoring that. The same standards for evidence that stop us from slipping into conspiracy thinking apply here, just the same as they apply to bigfoot, UFOs, etc.
What we have is people not liking McDonalds and calling it a shit sandwich over and over and assuming that somewhere along the way it was proven without actually checking, and then saying “well you know what’s in those burgers!”.
Puedo yo poner in foothold en tu casa?
the English would be un pie, and you can drop the yo :)
Oh, no the preocupes, el uso de foothold aquí fue una elección artística
For example there was this one time where videos from robot vacuums leaked, including people shitting. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11562599/Robot-vacuum-cleaner-took-photos-woman-toilet-images-ended-Facebook.html
Tesla employees watched videos.
Tesla workers shared sensitive images recorded by customer cars | Reuters https://share.google/MJUtuy8pySKKhu8FW
They shared a video of a child getting hit because they found it amusing.
Fuck that tabloid, the Daily Mail… but there was the guy who was attempting to mod his robovac so he could control it with a PlayStation controller. The AI he was using to help ended up giving him keys that let him remotely access thousands of robovacs, including their cameras and mics.
Link for the event f4 is talking about:
and this is why I made sure to get a model without a camera D:
That is what I did too for the first one. My current vacuum uses valetudo as alternative firmware.
The very notion of proof implies that you can reproduce it. So I would suggest you forget what anybody here or elsewhere said. Instead, you :
- get a cheap phone (so typically Android)
- reset/format/flash it to a blank state
- make a new testing account on it
- use for random browsing, using app, etc and you log your history, namely what did you actually do AND what ads you actually see
- test for something outside of your new habits with a search query, then log and compare again, seeing the threshold to change
- repeat the last step for something said using e.g. a voice assistant, log&compare
- repeat WITHOUT explicit search, log&compare
Yes this takes a of time but that will help you make YOUR own opinion on the matter if you genuinely care.
How has no one done exactly this???
Or try this. Start saying something nefarious involving government near your phone every day and see how long it takes you to fall out a 12th story window.
You can try.
FWIW I imagine security and privacy researchers have done that already but my point precisely is that anybody can do so. Even if some researchers might have done it showing results you agree, or disagree, with you should still be able to replicate. It’s just a process.
It’s still never been proven despite countless very smart people looking for this exact behaviour for well over a decade now. The first person to actually prove this whole mass spying via microphone to sell ads thing is actually happening, would be world-famous overnight.
For instance on an android phone, it’s not really possible for an app to do something that a determined enough security researcher couldn’t ultimately detect if they were looking for it. When you can build your own version of the operating system and decompile the application easily, there’s not really any other places to hide that won’t give something away.
If you feel like your phone is acting off of a conversation you had without interacting with it, it’s nearly always one of these three:
- The vast majority of people are super predictable most of the time.
- You are not accounting for other people in the conversation, who may well have just googled the thing. These companies know who you spend time with, they don’t need a microphone for that.
- Baader meinhof phenomenon
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve thought surely something fishy was going on plenty of times, but the reality is, until someone can actually prove it (which is entirely possible to do if it’s happening), it’s gotta just be the above. We’re being tracked a crazy amount, but it’s not passively by microphones in our pockets
Note: none of this applies if you’re actually being specifically individually targeted (i.e. by a hostile government). All bets are off in that instance
The first person to actually prove this whole mass spying via microphone to sell ads thing is actually happening, would be world-famous overnight.
The first person that proves that Google, Microsoft, Amazon or Meta are directly doing it, using their hardware vendors privilege - would be famous overnight.
But that won’t happen, because they don’t have to.
(Okay, it might still happen with Meta. I’m not sure those jackasses have any self respect.)
In general, the big vendors don’t need to listen to anyone’s microphone, because the average user installs a free flappy bird clone that runs the microphone continuously, and then sells that to absolutely every single limited liability corporation, coffee shop, or data broker - to correlate for advertising.
Saying “they’re not using the microphone” is splitting hairs to death.
Yes, a few of the biggest players can’t be arsed to directly use the microphone.
Instead they buy the result of malware microphone use indirectly from the malware pushers who do absolutely use the microphone.
Absolutely every tech company, employer and three letter agency is buying the content of your voice recordings through a form of Privacy Washing. They didn’t collect it themselves, and they didn’t look to closely at how it was collected, so it’s okay, right?
For the average user, whose kid installed some stupid little free games, yes, someone is almost certainly “listening” right now, and all the time.
But they’re not using it to decide who to arrest, who to deport, or who to hire or fire (for saying “union”), or whether you really need the salary you requested…unless they are.
And yes, finding out some of that would absolutely make the news, but those are harder to find out, and could go for decades undiscovered.
Yeah, but that malware flappy bird clone does need to ask for the microphone permission, and the clueless user does need to click agree, that yes they want Free Flappy Bird 100% Legit Pro to have access to their microphone. Yes it happens. But that’s not what people mean they say that you should use a flip phone and get the battery out when you are not using it otherwise it’s listening to you. No it’s not listening to you unless you explicitly gave an app permission to listen to you.
No it’s not listening to you unless you explicitly gave an app permission to listen to you.
Is worth highlighting. Good point.
Oh Baader Meinhof phenomenon, I’ve been seeing that everywhere recently!
AFAIK this is the only evidence: a claim by a marketing company that they’re actually doing it. However, they have some reason to lie about this, bc it makes them sound all-knowing and powerful to their clients.
https://www.404media.co/cmg-cox-media-actually-listening-to-phones-smartspeakers-for-ads-marketing/
It is not the only evidence, as you say, but it is particularly good evidence.
paywall?
Anecdotal, but I was on a Boy Scout trip as a chaperone where us parents were talking to each other in person about where we’d take our first break en route to the campsite. We decided on a Burger King at one of the towns along the route (it being a small town, the only one there). My phone was in my pocket at the time, powered on but black screen idle.
I got back into my car and pulled up Google Maps. As I typed in the words Burger King, it auto completed with the one we were just talking about that was half a state away in that town. It didn’t pull up the closest one to me, which I would have expected it to do.
Freaked me out.
That one could be attributed to shitty programming. Still.
Every device made to receive voice commands (Smart TVs, Amazon Echo) WILL listen to everything you say.
And if they provide a button or setting to turn that off you are relying on trusting them to comply with it (I don’t think they do and even if they are found doing it they will probably pay a minuscule fine for it)
Think of something you’ve never mentioned or discussed before, then out of nowhere, start having a conversation with a friend about it, how much you like it and are thinking about getting it, taking lessons etc then see what happens over the next week on either your or your friend’s ads (turn off ad blocker if you use one).
I recommend something completely unusual for most people like an instrument (didgeridoo or cowbell)
Okay, so here is my story:
I was on holiday with my friends and we were playing a TTRPG. In the RPG our group needed charol tablets. I have never in my life googled or needed something like that.
After the session, I opened up Amazon to buy something I forget to pack and voilà: Amazon suggested me to buy charol tablets.
My smartphone must have listened in and given that data to Amazon.
No Alexa or similar products were in the vacation home.
Who in your group didn’t know what charol tablets were and looked them up?
I and everyone I know have similar stories. They are listening
Just think about the scale of the surveillance: every smartphone user is being monitored 24/7 in hope to find something to sell them.
If you hate AI because it wastes so much energy, think about the cost for the this: Energy, water, battery life, bandwidth, … And in contrast to AI the ‘users’ don’t get anything in return.
Just another reason they want to build even more data centers!
I worry that you’re making AI out as the good option, but really they are both awful, AI is simply less mature. There hasn’t yet been time to inject ads into generated responses (but it’s coming), and the users don’t yet feel the surveillance of each of their prompts.
And are you saying users don’t get any functionality from their smartphones? I find my smartphone more helpful than an LLM that spits out statistically likely responses while destroying our water, air, and electricity prices; stealing intellectual property from small artists who can’t fight back; and removing the humanity in peoples’ interactions.
AI capacity isn’t being built to serve users. It’s being used to profile their histories, to unmask their anonymity online so their profiles can be made more accurate.
Why do you think they want everything stored in the cloud? For convenience?
No, I am not a AI fanboy. I just compared bad to worse.
Of course users get something from their smartphones, but not from the spyware on it. The spyware is not an integral function of a smartphone.
There’s no need for uploading a constant audio feed or transcript (something that would be easy for researchers to detect in the network logs) to show you an advertisement like that.
Your phone knows all the things you wrote in the post, namely: your location, that you are physically with those friends, the wifi network, the search history of everyone there. Because of all that metadata, advertisers probably know you were playing a TTRPG, maybe even the specific one
I normally have GPS and Bluetooth disabled, so my position would have to be guessed based on cell towers. We were not even on the same WLAN (because the WLAN was down in the vacation home, much to our dissatisfaction).
While I can’t rule out somebody in our group stealthily googling the tablets, phones while playing is generally frowned upon.
So yeah, being on the same cell tower as someone I know who might have searched for it might be the only other explanation.
The adventure itself didn’t have anything to do with the tablets, that was just our group doing strange stuff, like always.
