It's true – your devices are listening to you | Hacker News Reader

It's true – your devices are listening to you

mastodon.social

38 pointsgvurrdon38 comments

Seriously, just download Guild of Heroes, I have guys in a chat room on a mobile game repeating everything they capture on natural language processing for 3 years now.

I'd love to understand what you are trying to say.

He is saying some randos in some game chatroom are claiming to work somewhere that is processing audio to text for some purpose and are saying everything they overhear i think.

When Zuck and big tech issues a denial you will notice they always say "we're not recording you" --- yeah cuz they are using on-device transcription to send back keywords!

I'm sure this is true but I have been wondering, how did they find a way without microphone permission?

That sounds a lot of computing power to record and use language detection on everything the device hears, not to mention storage and bandwidth, that many actions should leave a trail somewhere.

Not if it’s just passively listening device side and sending keywords as they come. Doesn’t necessarily have to record 24/7 and process

It doesn't have to be true, to make for a good sales pitch.

Am I mistaken? People selling target digital ad services like this are noted for their integrity and never scam their clients at all?

To be clear: I suspect that our devices do use audio samples in their observation of our lives, where possible; but i don't think its as simple as "they're listening to us and reporting back".

     I suspect that our devices do use audio samples in their observation of our lives, where possible; but i don't think its as simple as "they're listening to us and reporting back"

<they're the same picture meme . gif>

They are not. If I have the TV on in the background while I’m on a Facebook Messenger voice chat and it logs details about what show was on, that’s markedly different than a scenario where Messenger is recording me when the app is not opened in the foreground and doing something obviously related to audio recording. I’m not claiming Messenger is or is not passively recording people, but I do want to note that the distinction above is what the original comment seems to be about.

...according to an ad (now deleted) by CMG Local Solutions, reported in this Mastodon thread.

CMG, or Cox Media Group, runs a fair amount of radio and TV stations across the country. It doesn't particularly surprise me that they seemingly didn't think through the legal or PR aspects of this. (Knowing the industry, I suspect there is some amount of "the nerds will figure this out for us.")

Initially I thought it was mostly about listening time metrics, as in how long someone is listening to a radio station (which is something they absolutely think about a lot) but the screenshots of the page are... specific.

I was approached once by a company that claimed to have an MIT-developed (or perhaps Bell Labs, it was a decade ago) fingerprinting technology that could recognize music or ad jingles in a fraction of the CPU required by Shazam. They wanted us to embed their mobile SDK into ours so they could track what people listen to what ads. Needless to say, we told them to take a hike, but I'm sure there are others that accepted the pitch. The apps embedding this may not even know. Fortunately microphone access now requires explicit permission.

I worked for a company that used a pattern matching algorithm and further licensed a fingerprint algorithm to do ID Ads and songs. (all pre-shazam) I can confirm we had a footprint in the wild with broadcast radio before 2002 doing the above.

What cool smarthphone did you have in 2002 to track the broadcasts? Iphone -5?

No seriously, how was tracking done? I dont remember may cpu powered devices back then with internet access.

If this continues, we might ponder for a moment the next phases:

    1. this app listening for its triggers
    2. multiple apps on your phone, each listening for their own triggers
    3. resource impact
    4. phone vendor implements the whole listen-for-marketers stack as an API on their hardware tensor units
    5. overuse and abuse
    6. surge in "dumb phone" sales

On point 6, i think the assumption that people will regress against intrusive and abused tech by using older "abuse proof" tech - at least en massse - has been debunked.

as previously discussed, with archive link https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38255425#38256256

Thanks for the link. I looked, but missed it.

Why was that flagged?

It's real. The Internet Archive captured this page.[1] First seen September 16, 2023, and archived several times.

This isn't some tiny company. CMG is the Cox Media Group, a major owner of TV stations, radio stations, and newspapers. They also do direct mail. Their innovation was to combine all their media into a unified marketing machine, which began in 2009.[2]

Their pitch:

Active Listening can make that happen for you! We know this sounds like something from the future, but we are there! We can customize your campaign to listen for any keywords/targets relevant to your business. Here is how we do it:

Create Personas: We create buyer personas by uploading past client data into the platform.

Identify Keywords: We identify top performing keywords relative to the type of customer you are looking for.

Tracking: We set up tracking via pixel placed on your site, so we can track your ROI in real time.

Listening: Active Listening begins and is analyzed via AI to detect pertinent conversations via smartphones, smart tvs and other devices.

Analysis: As qualified consumers are detected, a 360 analysis via AI on past behaviors of each potential customer occurs.

Create a List: With the audience information gathered, an encrypted evergreen audience list is created.

Re-targeting: We use the list to target your advertising via many different platforms ...

This needs more publicity.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20230927000839/https://www.cmglo...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cox_Media_Group

It's like a list of almost everything that makes that industry evil.

This is via partnerships with TV makers (not cellphones). I turned this off on my LG OLED. Then I blocked its internet access just to be sure!

What setting on the TV controls this?

Settings / All Settings / General / Additional settings

Turn Live Plus off (This should turn off the advertising settings below, and should disable the listening mode)

Turn on: Do Not Sell My Personal Information

These are all at the very end of very deep settings menus.

Reminds me of how roku advertises that they record multiple screenshots per second of whatever is being shown on your TV and send that data back to be analyzed so they can figure out what you're into.

[dupe]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38255425

Unfortunately so - sorry about that.

I think this is worth talking about, but I have to flag the post because the title can be misinterpreted as a positive statement rather than a quote from some ad copy. It would be cool if people just wrote titles that didn't need to be rewritten by the moderator.

Duhh, I'm guessing the paperback book sized terms and conditions of every phone OS and app provider has this buried somewhere in there. Even Apple would be silly not to do it internally to train its AI models.

The enshittification of everything connected to the internet seems a given at this point.

OT. finally a mastodon link not about mastodon, X or Elon Musk. Made me happy

I've tooted plenty on topics other than those - not that anyone seems to be remotely interested.

To be clear I did not aim anything at you or your posts otherwise. Last I was on Mastodon, it was too much about taking a piss at Elon Musk and Twitter, and not a whole lot else going on. This is why this post got me meta-excited.

No problem. There does seem to be quite a bit of good stuff these days, though it's not easy to get much engagement (I'm probably too dull).

Mate. You’re front page HN

Mastodon or Twitter links don't make for good HN posts anyway, except for a few rare cases when the comment itself has some bearing on current events.

I just wish that the message being linked to was also quoted in the description as well.

Finally? If I look at the last N mastodon.social links that have >= 15 points on HN besides this one, they are:

  Porting games to Linux pays for itself
  People go to Stack Overflow because the docs and error messages are garbage 
  Hallucineted CVE against Curl: someone asked Bard to find a vulnerability
  Curl on track for non-experimental HTTP/3 support 
  Jeff Johnson: "Passkeys are a lie and contradiction." 
  Swift was not given the chance to prove itself as a language 
  The only planet where 100% of Linux systems have working audio is Mars 
  Bevy Needs Sponsorship

That's the entire first page of results. On page 2, we have:

  Things that didn't age well 
  Google Maps is a critical dependency for nutrition facts on mcdonalds.com 
  Google Search Is Over
  Downloading a video should be “fair use” as recording a song from the radio 
  A list of recent hostile moves by Google's Chrome team 
  One thing that has changed in the professional game industry is that 
  SunOS 4.1.4 says it can't possibly be the year 2023 
  Mozilla should call for the removal of Google from W3C because of WEI 
  How Stuff Works replaced writers with GPT-generated content and laid off editors 
  A fun new feature we are working on in systemd: userspace-only reboot 
  Mastodon's active user base has increased by 110K over the last day 
  Mastodon has reached 13M accounts

It looks like about 10% "not finally" content and 90% "finally" content. You can see the same thing by clicking "mastodon.social" at the top of this page.

good stuff

Reply on news.ycombinator.com