Cox (was) bragging about listening to user mics

Then laptops took off as primary computers and people were no longer installing their own peripherals any more, and demanded no external circuit-interrupting switches not even for cameras.

Back in the 1990s I was telling people, your plain speakers are not safe either (from being used as listening devices) as long as they do not have their own amps and are driven directly by a chip in the computer. How much do you know about that chipset and who makes it? One of the major early chipset players was Realtek.

Then some Ben Guriron researchers burst onto the scene in 2016 ( https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/woot17/woot17... ) with a real proof of concept where they used a jack assignment matrix in (you guessed it, a Realtek chip) to turn an idle pair of headphones into a listening device.

I'd be interested to hear anyone who heard the other shoe drop. I don't doubt that an internal assignment matrix facility exists in many modern chipsets. It would take a concerted and deliberate effort to mitigate this kind of vulnerability. Has anything like this been done?

Disney recently argued that its TOS for a Disney Channel free trial subscription could be used to force the husband of a woman who died from anaphylactic shock after her allergy diet requirements were mocked and disregarded by staff at a Disney restaurant because he signed it and it included a forced arbitration clause.

https://www.theguardian.com/film/article/2024/aug/15/disney-....

So, if you've given apps permission to use your mic, their lawyers may be telling them it's legal to use them at any time for any purpose.

For a contract to be binding, there is supposed to be a meeting of the minds, a shared understanding between the parties of what is being agreed to. Their argument is you signed the 50 page contract, so you knew.

If that doesn't sound right to you, talk to your congress person.

And the current pitch-deck piece, also from 404:

<https://www.404media.co/heres-the-pitch-deck-for-active-list...>

(That's the original, but paywalled, source for this story. As it's hard-paywalled, the TechDirt submission is appropriate.)

While there are reasonable concerns over access to microphones in various devices found in consumer's households, especially cheap IoT devices (although, I'm EXTREMELY about claims that any agent is listening to unfettered microphone access on smartphones, given the restrictions that have been put in place to get access to microphones), I don't believe that a limited scale (compared to any big tech) cable company could have the engineering chops to pull this off.

Things that would be required: * getting this system to work with an exceptionally large variety of devices from nearly as many brands. * having nation-state quality malware to get access to the microphones on many of these devices (either from the manufacturer not wanting to work with them or not incentivized to work with them) * battery powered devices not facing user-noticeable power draw (think a Dualshock controller) * having advanced enough AI (bigger issue 2 years ago than it would be now) at a very large scale filtering out noise and categorizing conversations such that they are useful to advertising partners (probably possible now with the vectorization techniques in LLMs) * having the AI be cost effective at that scale without local processing (unlikely to locally process on the devices themselves due to processing power limits; unlikely to locally process on their modems because cables modems are made as cheap as possible to offer the services that they are selling, without a FLOP more); this is a much bigger roadblock than the advanced enough AI * actually hiring talented enough engineers to accomplish these things (especially the AI)

And frankly, they are such a small player in the grand-scheme of things, they would be idiotic to not also be selling this tech to every cableco/telco in a developed nation, in order to get their money's worth. This would be 'discuss it at the shareholder meeting' important if that much money was spent and they wanted to get their value out of it, since they are otherwise limited to where they can physically roll out Cox cable.

Frankly, a bunch of marketing hot air (that they've since removed).