In Leak, Facebook Partner Brags About Listening to Your Phone's Microphone to S
futurism.com
futurism.com
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cox_Media_Group
Apparently they have access to Smart devices, but through apps.
The whole thing is not a big scandal for big tech.
It is a shady company doing shady stuff.
It just reminds you should not install untrustworthy apps, or limit the amount of apps, etc.
It's not big tech fault but it's such a "surprise" that there is some compagny doing shady stuff.
Maybe in a year Microsoft will cut ties with xandr (https://techcrunch.com/2024/07/08/microsoft-owned-adtech-xan...). Oups might be harder to do since they own it ...
Cambridge Analytica was a company that used personality quizzes on Facebook and took advantage of the open-to-everyone social graph API when it existed. They then claimed that people answering shitty personality quizzes somehow unlocked secret advertising magic to elect Trump.
So no, they did not "partner" with Facebook. And their data was all bunk, too, as a professional digital advertiser I can promise you they didn't move the election one way or the other.
It is much more likely they're listening in using the microphones in smart TVs, which have much weaker privacy protections. This would also make sense since Cox Media Group is a broadcaster, thus they're much more likely to have broad access to data from smart TVs than from smartphones.
I also block 31... range globally and the FB and FBCDN addresses (namely)(but I don't use FB/IG/WA anyway)
2016: https://qz.com/697923/heres-how-to-stop-facebook-from-listen... https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/facebook-using-people-s-p...
2018: https://money.com/how-to-turn-off-phone-microphone-facebook-...
2019: https://newatlas.com/computers/facebook-not-secretly-listeni...
"Please be aware that if your spoken words include personal or other sensitive information, that information will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party through your use of Voice Recognition," Samsung posted in its SmartTV privacy policy.
https://money.cnn.com/2015/02/09/technology/security/samsung...
There's nothing to hide, it's part of the way the TVs work and explicitly stated by the manufacturers.
Sure there is. I would expect a feature called "Voice Recognition" would only be active when I was using voice commands (and perhaps the occasional accidental activation), but not at other times.
How would you activate certain voice commands if it wasn't listening to all?
If the microphone was off than it has no way of hearing and activating the commands. So by design it's microphone needs to be on 24/7.
You could have a push-to-talk button on a remote control to enable the mic but than you just might as well use the remote control.
All these talk to activate features are designed only for the sake of being gimmicky and unethical surveillance.
Smart TVs might work similar, but I surely won't have anything like it in my home anyway.
But like I said, I don't want to have those devices either and my smartphone has a removable battery ..
One common implementation is to use a locally detected wake word (described in another post), but I've also seen many which require you to hold down a button to speak voice commands. Both solutions answer your technical question satisfactorily.
However, this is how I (and most people) expect voice commands will work based on plain reading of the fine print: the voice commands will be transmitted, but it won't establish 24/7 audio surveillance of your house.
The fine print (and therefore the "explicit" "consent" so obtained) is deceptive and fraudulent.
---
However your real concern is apparently a trust question, not a technical question. The technical question was apparently just a distraction.
Obviously if you don't trust the implementer not to lie about their implementation (ie you assume fraud at the outset), then any microphone (or speaker for that matter!) could be a 24/7 listening bug regardless of trigger implementation or EULA fine print. I see that in another reply you already moved the goalposts thusly.[1] ;)
We are always talking about the people that don't let their kids use their apps, while they want us/ours to. If that isn't the biggest red flag...
Amazon are especially zealous of making sure no-one else can steal data from them. Not because of privacy concerns, but because they want to use that data first.
Full transcription is really difficult to do at the edge on battery power. It's either bandwith heavy or CPU heavy. Both of which nail the battery. The only really practical way I can see it being done is with keyword tracking, and then recording snippets either side.
But that still takes a reasonable amount of power to do.
If this is the case I'm not sure what the fb/google/az connection would be. Perhaps, they could be buying the resulting data.
It would sort of makes sense if you installed a voice-note taking app and it asked for access to the microphone. However, when you are not using that app - is it still using the microphone? Who knows? I do get somewhat irritated with Android's inability to report which apps are doing what at any particular moment.
Imagine ”facebook kills children” title, where article clarifies that it’s actually contractor that is doing the killing and also at other company request.
Far be it from me to defend Meta on privacy —- I won’t —- but we should at least characterize their numerous evils honestly.
True.
Good thing (glass half full) about clicky-baity version, it forces facebook to take action, because it directly associates their brand with the problem.
I think they would like their customers to believe this is active listening between two humans having a conversation but I doubt this is the case.
I suspect it's actually a conversation with a smart device they're listening too.
Such as, if I ask my smart TV to show me a YouTube video on how to bake a cake, or if I ask an Amazon Echo what time a local computer hardware store closes, then I expect this is fed to advertisers.