It's true. Your devices are listening to you
cmglocalsolutions.com
cmglocalsolutions.com
Two comments:
1) I would not be using the singular, even if there is just one mic that you can turn on-off. From an audio perspective it makes perfect sense with extra microphones to measure ambient noise levels in order to improve quality in the consumer-operated mics and speakers. Also, in case the phone has some voice-enabled "assistant" feature that you can just speak to by name, like, eh, Google/Siri?
2) I would not blindly assume that you, as a user, can dictate which of these microphones are turned on/off, or when.
I’m guessing here that this link is just exaggerated metaphor or using something like background sounds from people triggering in-app voice assistant search or something really low-quality like that.
facepalm
I can't imagine this targeting is possible for all devices but I've been surprised deep diving into apple dev specs to find out there is always a workaround..
Apple notifications allow device location tracking for example (yes even if location services turned off).
How?
https://medium.com/@jonathan2457/location-triggered-notifica...
"Because the system actually monitors the regions, you don’t need to request always permissions for your app"
In any case, this is quite visible to the user. I’d definitely be suspicious about apps showing me this kind of notification without asking for it.
> CLAIM YOUR TERRITORY NOW, THEY ARE GOING FAST!
Wow.
People/society is like that, people do this for $$$
Probably, for $$, or even for $.
But other people sell it then for $$$.
Their salary is getting paid. Decent chance these days most of them work in India.
> To PMs/leaders who push to include these listening SDKs in your apps: do you ever worry about vigilante justice?
That smells like almost a flaggable threat. Very "won't someone rid me of this meddlesome priest" kinda vibes.
Also, haven't we figured out that we need to stop making societal problems a question of individual average-person morals? We're never going to recycle our way out of global warming, and we can't rely on all the software engineers in the world to down tools to prevent these kinds of business models. We need to start passing laws against this kind of shit (and, yes, we need hold the individuals that we elect to power to higher moral standards).
E.g., suppose person A is carrying a smart phone, and has an apparently private conversation with person B.
Is person A civilly and/or criminally liable for allowing his cell phone to record the conversation?
And, for example, if Cox Media Group made commercial use of that secret recording, could they be liable because they had no good reason to believe all parties consented to the recording?
I don't think the law cares whether the recording is used for commercial purposes or not. It's the act of recording itself that would be illegal.
The OS-level “an app is using your microphone right now” indicator seems like the right trade off in most scenarios.
"Hey, we know that you are the head of marketing of xyz, and we overheard that you are just discussing budget. We have a great idea for you..."
No doubt this will work well.
While it's interesting (and ominous) if there's anything substantial behind their claims, without any technical details or real substance this is a bad fit for an HN submission, and I've flagged it as such.
While it might be an honest mistake, I smell an angle / fake site.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporation_Service_Company
An insecure enough sensor implementation can pick up sound from the gyroscope though.
That's probably where all the 'listening' is happening.
But if not, the EU will solve this, I hope