Ad Company Claims 'It's True. Your Devices Are Listening to You'
gizmodo.com
gizmodo.com
2. Common product has common name.
3. You call your child that same common name.
Therefore:
Ads for this common product shown to you must be because some unnamed entity was listening to you talk to your daughter.
Did I get that right?
I'm not sure I understood everything correctly, if you're sure, we'd certainly appreciate the names of any consumer products that you feel do this, as well as the consumer product.
Any tech product that keeps an audio livestream, then shares the entities with a powerful company later, just so they can show you ads, shouldn't go unnamed.
Try it for yourself. Choose a product. Maybe one of the examples here. Talk about it loud with your phone in proximity. Maybe turn off adblocker and see what happens.
(2) Android is open source and I'm familiar with the core codebase as part of my job
(3) Even if I get an ad after talking about a product, that isn't proof (hence my confirmation bias comment...)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-device_tracking#Applicat...
edit: and before anyone asks, this nickname was only said verbally, in my house, among my family members, and never typed into a computer a single time
I'm supposed to believe that it's listening to my every word from my pocket on a noisy road with a half-dead battery?
I think people just don't want to accept that:
1. We fall into very basic trends and interests that are very predictable based on age and gender and expressed interests
2. We do so much mindless scrolling and are not aware of all of the random content we see until we get something that triggers a memory.
Your claim that it's not "possible" seems completely baseless and absurd to me
There has not been a single shred of evidence produced to support yearslong claims of devices constantly listening in on you. Intelligence services spend huge money to purchase compromises from private companies, or produce them in house. If they could simply compel a tech company to utilise this supposed technology, they would obtain a warrant to do so.
All of the ‘targeted advertising’ anecdotes on here can easily be chalked up to confirmation bias.
I have a pretty solid understanding of the western IC and I can fairly confidently say that if this technology existed it would be used constantly as it supersedes a typical phone surveillance warrant.
I am a privacy advocate, but this is not one I’ve been especially concerned about.
It requires NO cooperation on the part of Apple, Google etc.
For smartphones it just requires allowing microphone access to some app; there are troves of apps with legitimate needs to access the microphone (voice chat in games, voice notes...); and many people accept all the permission requests they're offered, in any case.
Whether this access is allowed when the app is in the background depends on the OS version, the permissions the user grants and some other conditions (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/64306994/access-micropho... , https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/106415).
Active microphone indicators have been introduced in Android 12 and iOS 14; many people still have older versions; those who don't might not care about them; and everything is still possible when an app with legitimate microphone usage reasons is in the foreground.
On other devices (such as smart tvs) there are often even less problems.
Most of all, there ARE well known services that use microphones to report on ads reach, and the one object of this thread only goes further by detecting arbitrary (pre-chosen) words:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/business/media/alphonso-a... (Alphonso is now lgads.tv)
https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/ftc-android-developers-...
And again, this cmg offering exists, and is openly advertised by a reputable company; why so many people just want to ignore its existence, is beyond me.
The original 404 Media article took every claim at face value and stirred some additional hyperbole to boot.
The FBI has a warning about third parties using smart TVs to spy on people.[1]
It does not specifically make mention of the devices surreptitiously listening in on you. Anyone accessing these devices with compromised credentials would be using them in the same way the actual user would.
But today there are some pretty good local speech recognition models. I don't know if it's happening today, but I wouldn't be surprised if ad companies start figuring out ways to do local speech processing and only send the most relevant bits for full processing in the near future.
We'll have to depend on Apple and Google to protect us.
Wellp, we're boned.
Let's try to imagine a world where that exists, keyword detection exists as well ("ok google" etc), and keyword detection for targeted ads doesn't exist. Can you? I can't.
It would not make sense to train a model for every advertiser and then upload that to the phone. It would only make sense to capture the audio and send it to the cloud for generic speech processing. But that would also not make sense because it takes a bunch of compute to do speech processing, not to mention you'd see all the data being uploaded from your device and the cost of receiving, processing, and storing all that data.
I'm 99.9% sure that this is not happening today, but we are on the verge of the tech being good enough to do local speech processing, and then there is no bandwidth limitations, no storage issue, and the consumer pays for compute.
I was assuming that's what they were doing. Maybe you could combine both ways, with really imprecise models, so the phone captures and upload only words that above average chance of matching (so not that much data), and have heavy servers do the rest?
Yes I don't work in this field, but you shouldn't assume that just because you don't know how something can be achieved, then no one else has figured it out either (especially where they're motivated to keep it secret).
Here's a very basic offline app for Android: https://f-droid.org/packages/org.stypox.dicio . It works pretty bad for me, with its tiny not specialized models, but still enough for some purposes.
You can use an online model for the confirmation of the recognitions, by the way
I dramatically extolled the virtues of "Corinthian leather" during a dnd campaign and started getting advertisements within 24 hours about Corinthian college. I don't need another degree, I graduated 10 years ago. I'm thousands of miles away from their campus, I live in a cabin in the woods.
So am I and no oce at this point can convince me otherwise, it's the singular "conspiracy" I believe.
The amount of times I've had the same thing happen is staggering to the point I can't dismiss it as a mere coincidence anymore.
I was at work one day and my co-worker was dribbling a basketball in the office just talking to me, and I happened to mention that I could ALMOST dunk but never actually got it in no matter how hard I tried. I open my phone and see an ad for "learn to dunk in 30 days guaranteed."
I don't care about basketball. Haven't watched or played it regularly since the 90s, never search anything related to it.
This happens all of the time in our household. I'm seeing ads for things I never talked about, but are related to my wife's searches because that's as close as they can target.
“Smart” TV manufacturers have all the wrong incentives to get 1984-style telescreens fully operational. They plug into the wall so there’s no battery drain to worry about, and the prices are so artificially low (cf non-smart displays ) that they must be doing something to make it all worthwhile.
Most people have a TV, spend a lot of their time near that TV, and probably have bought a 4K screen in the last decade to bring this hardware into their home.
I think the laser focus on smartphones (you immediately thought smartphone when you read the headline, right?) where it’s likely impossible to do wrt power consumption, ignores the other microphone almost everywhere by now
It's not linked to anywhere else from the site.
The claims are insane if serious but hilarious if satire.
Any device that responds to voice commands must be listening. Always. This is obvious.
We also have proof that companies like Amazon do collect the data, store the data, and listen to the data [1].
They try to make this sound like a conspiratorial idea in contrast with debunked ideas. I question their motives when the ideas they call false are so clearly true.
[1]: https://time.com/5568815/amazon-workers-listen-to-alexa/
Processing sound is required, but recording or sending to a server are not. I think the latter two is what most would be concerned with.
If someone were to show evidence that any such products were in fact sending audio back without being triggered by such a wake word (either continuously, triggered by something else covertly, or without giving a cue that it was listening), it would likely be quite a scandal.
Nobody has provided evidence that they're always recording and sending (only conspiracy theories). It's possible those theories are true, but there's currently no evidence.
The idea that "wake words" equate to your voice being sent off to the internet is pretty easy to disprove. These devices will respond to the wake words even when disconnected from the internet.