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Comment by pcstl | Hacker News Reader

People have. And it's always shown that no apps are opening your mics when you're not using the app, and that if you're using the app they generally will only open your mic when it makes sense to do so.

These companies are most likely lying or exaggerating their capabilities. Since so many people believe in audio eavesdropping anyway, it's in their interest to make the buyers of their software believe they're much more powerful than they really are.

It's the same as how it's good for AI companies to talk about how AIs are just on the verge of ending the world and must be regulated at any cost - more people believing that what they're selling is absurdly powerful is good for sales.

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> People have. And it's always shown that no apps are opening your mics when you're not using the app, and that if you're using the app they generally will only open your mic when it makes sense to do so.

Can you link to people who have checked?

I had a couple of the last BlackBerry phones, that ran Android. They came with this "DTEK" [1] app that monitored when apps accessed your phone's sensors. And I remember every time I checked it, the various social media apps had all been caught snooping something like hundreds of times a day. This was happening even when I didn't use the apps, so there definitely didn't seem to be any reason that "makes sense" to do it. Not sure if it was microphone, or maybe just location or something, but audio eavesdropping isn't really out-of-character based on that.

1: https://docs.blackberry.com/en/apps-for-android/dtek-by-blac...

https://crackberry.com/how-control-your-mobile-privacy-black...

https://futurism.com/the-byte/phones-listen-theory-debunked https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVazBWGgg64

They're sending pretty much everything BUT audio.

Main reason is that audio is just tremendously inefficient compared to other signals. It's large and expensive to store and process and doesn't really give you that many bytes of information you can't get elsewhere for how expensive it is to handle.

That's not a very compelling experiment, compared to e.g. logging the actual traffic, core dumping the app, and decompiling the APK.

Could have a delay. Could only work when physically moving, indicating activity. Could only be activated for some user profiles based on usage patterns. Could only activate for device owner's voice, like the voice assistants.

I used to think audio would be prohibitively expensive for Facebook to eavesdrop. But they could easily sample at random, compute it on-device, then only send keyword hashes. I think it's much more technically feasible than you're giving it credit.

I agree they probably aren't. Most likely, they predict using their other spying, then people notice frequency illusion/coincidence. But I find it odd nobody's checked.

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