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Comment by askvictor | Hacker News Reader

Here's a the same story via the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/may/14/australia...

A quote contained within both stories: > The software company Oracle revealed Google could be harvesting a gigabyte of data from Android devices each month

Given that my data plan is 1.5 GB/month, I would notice if a gigabyte magically disappeared every month (it doesn't). Hopefully the ACCC has enough skepticism and technical knowledge to see through Oracle's FUD. OTOH what's in it for Oracle here? Purely trying to damage Google's brand? I suppose the media have run with it and it's working.

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Since the submitted story (https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/technology/smartphones/acc...) has an autoplay video, we might as well switch to the other one. (I'm assuming they're roughly equally informative.) Thanks!

Actually I thought the originally submitted article had a more informative title: "ACCC investigating Oracle research showing Google users Android phone plan data to spy." The article content is approximately equivalent; though of low value in both cases

You're right, that's not so bad. IIRC I was referring to that use of 'spy'. But will edit the accusation of clickbait out of my comment.

I'd assume that not all that information would require real-time feeding of data back to Google.

So quite a lot I'd assume would be buffered and sent back while you're on a wifi connection.

The article states:

> The experts, from computer and software corporation Oracle, claim Google is draining roughly one gigabyte of mobile data monthly from Android phone users’ accounts as it snoops in the background, collecting information to help advertisers.

Then goes on to give a cost breakdown of how much this hypothetical data download is costing Australian's via their mobile data connections.

It's Oracle. You must ask yourself, what's in it for them? And is it actually true?

It's Google. you must ask yourself, what aren't they collecting?

It's Google they are very good at data analysis them needing to use 1gb of data to know about you are doing on your phone is an idiotic assumption. They could probably do it 5 mb only. My bet is they are counting Google photo uploads to get the 1 gb figure.

Maybe you should ask yourself "how much data is 1gb times the number of android users?" and "how big is Google's datacenter?" (hint: the first number is bigger by a factor of 5)

If Charles Manson said that the sun rises from the East...wouldn't it be true, regardless of the source? What Oracle said can easily be checked by a lot of independent companies.

On many, many Australian ADSL connections you'd notice anything sending that amount per month purely because how slow the connection would become.

When you look at a page that has 5k of text you want to read and 5Mb of JS, that’s what this is

Unknown English text compresses ~1:6 if I remember correctly. Known can be compressed better. There's also ways to send incremental updates where you say "previous 0.999GB hasn't changed".

I'm not saying that's what they do, but you can have many scenarios when you get 1gb of information without transferring 1gb of data.

But that's not what the article is claiming. They are saying Google is using 1GB worth of data, though with very little evidence to backup their claim.

What are you basing your claim they have "very little evidence" on? Do you have access to the full contents of what they presented to the ACCC? Presumably this brief news article doesn't contain all of the information on the matter.

Right, I should've been clearer. There's no evidence provided to us public readers. To be throwing such a bold claim out there though is often intentionally reckless. They are either baiting views or trying to chip at Google's image. Until we get the specifics, there is nothing here to discuss really.

Given that it's Oracle 'providing' the story, and News Ltd originally reporting it (both who have beef with Google), they are definitely trying to chip at Google's image.

It could mean data transfer, but it also could mean other things. They write:

> could be harvesting a gigabyte of data from devices each month

Which is unlikely to be true in the literal sense of pure bytes transferred simply because: a) people would notice that very soon, b) people consume gigabytes but don't produce nearly as much - all of my monthly activity would likely fit in a few MB, c) processing that much is a pain - at the scale of millions of users they'd optimise that.

I think data transfer is a big issue. Even at Google's scale, 10 petabytes a month (10 million android users) probably creates more costs than it's worth for them. It's much easier to compress data on the device and only send new information, with that you can easily get a month of location history <10mb even for people who move a lot.

I used to be paranoid about companies using my microphone and camera to spy on me until I realized the data costs associated with the spying would be so great, that I'd notice. That single argument has ended my paranoia on the matter. I hope others can be at ease. That said, I still put tape on my laptop and refuse all tracking and ad requests.

That's assuming they're listening/watching all the time. Google Assistant (and all the other assistants) wake up on a certain magic word; who's to say that other apps/companies aren't doing the same? Well, probably your battery life might be terrible and your phone running unusually hot, but Assistant and co get away with minimal battery usage...

Quite often while talking about a restaurant, opening google maps will have it highlighted. I think this shows that not only does google not require a magic word to start recording, it actively processes the input it gets. I'm highly considering switching to lineage os.

Try making a controlled experiment. Humans are notoriously good at seeing patterns that aren't there.

The patterns are there. But often the connection is meaningful, not causal.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronicity

The pattern in this case is the connection between surreptitious listening and the suggestion.

The brain is still seeing a pattern though it is one of correlated meanings/abstractions, not concrete causes.

Someone conducted a simple experiment to see if the facebook app was listening to their conversations. Spoiler: it's listening to your every word.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0SOxb_Lfps

Yeah, that's not a controlled experiment. I can think of at least three benign explanations that is consistent with not listening.

The experiment, the real, controlled (replicable!) one, isn't hard to do. You just need a couple of spare phones.

They don’t have to send back all of the raw data, just analyses like ‘person X’s face detected, is in a noisy place’ or ‘conversation included these 5 keywords’. The processing and data transfer could also be deferred until the phone is idle or on WiFi.

It's just as farfetched to think they're doing constant image/voice recognition with your phone's processor without you knowing. Those models are big and take a lot of computing power

It doesn’t need to be constant or continual. I don’t talk continually near my phone, for one.

Siri and other voice rec is able to get words from my audio without appearing to affect my phone function or slow it down. There are plenty of times my phone is idle that it could be doing that.

Same with photos. When you give many apps access to your photos, as we know, they will analyze and/or transit the metadata of all photos on the device. It’s not hard to imagine going farther than that, and as noted, processing or data transfer could be deferred.

Siri listens for a hotword, which is tremendously easier than running general speech detection models all the time.

Seems like you have to do at least minimal analysis of all sounds to be listening for a hot word.

Exactly, that's why "OK Google" isn't a thing.

There's an enormous difference in model complexity between key phrase detection and (general) automatic speech recognition + natural language processing. There's a reason nearly everything Google Assistant does except "OK Google" is done on Google's hardware.

> They don’t have to send back all of the raw data, just analyses like ‘person X’s face detected, is in a noisy place’ or ‘conversation included these 5 keywords’.

Not without making a noticeable drain on the user's battery.

When you fire up an app like Instagram, it does many things that create various drains on the battery. It opens the camera repeatedly when I don’t intend to use it, for instance. When you click stories, it opens the camera, often facing you. Who’s to say it doesn’t send that pic or some analysis of it to FB? I don’t think that would use any significantly higher battery or network anything especially since the processing and data transfer could be deferred.

Phones are so full of back-doors at every level that you wouln't notice if it's sending information. This is why we can't have open phone firmware. I don't think Google is secretly transmitting data, but it wouldn't surprise me if they do. Only way to stop it is to make it illegal to collect any kind of data without user consent. If you read the user agreement it probably already say what information is collected.

> the data costs associated with the spying would be so great

I've just checked my monthly Discord traffic and it's mere 251MiB in/73MiB out. For roughly an 1-2 hours of gaming every other evening, and some longer weekend sessions.

Power usage, on the other hand, is a different story. When I've experimented with an app that'd continuously record everything around me, battery ran out in just a few hours.

Dont be silly. Companies and institutions can just pay or coerce the data operator for transmission, o do it when your on wifi.

In Sao Paulo Brazil, the mexican-based operator Claro offers free bandwidth for facebook and whatsapp access.

I imagine it would be possible to process media locally into actionable and highly compressed data. For instance use the google text-to-speech toolset on media while the phone is on sleep and even run it though a sentiment analyzer and wordlist. eye tracking and activity correlates are even more compressible.

Earlier in the year the police were monitoring activity on public wifi hotspots and using the info to target people labelled as undesirable in the quickly gentrifying city center.

Since I am a a)foreigner that b)transverses a diverse array of classes, groups, and political affiliations on a daily basis, i go ahead and always assume that i'm being constantly monitored.

> Given that my data plan is 1.5 GB/month, I would notice if a gigabyte magically disappeared every month

Is that so? We're already used to updates, videos and even simple websites needing an enormous amount of data. I could easily imagine a gigabyte vanishing that you'd attribute to other things.

Also note that this is probably an average value, not an absolute.

I read "they" in the phrase "... but they are also reportedly paying their telco providers to send the data." to mean Google were paying, so it wouldn't appear in the metered usage for which the end user is billed. This makes sense, as it seems the data apparently can be transferred when "... they do not have a Sim card or apps installed."

What would bother me, though, is if they were purposefully not exposing that data transfer in the data metering on the device. That seems shady.

Paying to every mobile carrier in every country out there to keep silent and hide traffic from customers?

That's way beyond unrealistic.

But they could fetch metadata from our phone and generate data on their side.

Like photos we saved from internet, or search history, google drive backups, watched videos, liked photos, location maps. Even though you have 1.5gb/month plan, you are creating enough meta data that google can use for profiling.

They legit even store how you download a picture, via sharing, saving or dragging on desktop.

The article could easily make the false presumption that wi-fi isn’t used to transmit the data. You seem awfully keen to dismiss this.

Geee i guess because you stated under oath your device doesnt drain 1gb of data then we can all quietly go to sleep now.

If i were still at Google, and given this project, it would be obvious to tap into mobile brands feed and only use mobile data plans of those who wouldnt notice that 79% of their data disappear. Google knows precisely what plan you have and what data use and still have for the month period through reading your IMEI and many other tricks.

No surprises here. Guardian(Rupert Murdoch) + Oracle = Smear Google

Rupert Murdoch does not own the Guardian. That is laughable. It's owned by The Scott Trust Limited, which was formerly a charitable trust and is dedicated to keeping the Guardian's editorial independence.

The original posted news story was by a Murdoch-owned newspaper; has since been changed to the Guardian (possibly while OP was writing this equation?). So the equation kind of holds, just drop the Guardian but.

Of course Oracle published this to damage Google, that's obvious. But that doesn't mean the claims are untrue. It's likely that there's something to it, even if the amount of data is incorrect.

You are confusing the Guardian with something else. The Guardian is left-leaning, independent, and not associated with Rupert Murdoch.

Murdoch's company owns The Sun and The Times (London) among others, not The Guardian.

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