Comment by wakawaka28 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wakawaka28 | Hacker News Reader

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I truly wish I had a bibliography to give you but it has been so obviously true to me that I hadn't bothered to catalogue all of this information. I'll try to get you started though. Start by familiarizing yourself with the Snowden leaks and how the government buys data from private companies to violate the constitution. Second, look for articles like this one: https://www.pcworld.com/article/2450052/do-smartphones-liste... This kind of thing is published periodically. Apple lost a lawsuit over Siri spying "inadvertently" very recently: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/apple-agrees-to-... There is no reason to believe that your phone is ever not listening. The audio can at least be transcribed and catalogued.

If companies are willing to track your every click and mouse movement, every footstep and slight movement you make with your phone even while you are asleep, build and bundle keyboard apps to capture what you type, monitor you with AI, etc., are you seriously surprised that they would not also listen to you? None of that stuff I just described is fiction. It's established tech that has been documented over time. The only reason it's not 100% illegal is because the EULA probably covers it.

I swear people who think they aren't listening when they can seem like people who would be shocked to learn that an armed carjacker might demand your wallet in addition to your car. Unreal...

Oh yeah one more tip. Try to use the data export feature from Google or Facebook. You might just be surprised what you find. I've heard of people finding recordings of private conversations picked up by Google devices. I personally found hundreds of Facebook messages and posts that I deleted with a tool, and aren't visible to anyone (OK maybe the messages make sense but not the posts).

> Apple lost a lawsuit over Siri spying "inadvertently" very recently

That's what my article is about: it's about how I'm certain people will use this settled-out-of-court lawsuit as "evidence" that Apple are spying and targeting ads, but it's very clear that's not what was happening here.

Apple settled because they knew they would lose. Winning is good PR since they (falsely) claim to be favorable for privacy. They are only superficially better than Google in that regard. I did skim your article and it's not as bad as I thought. I think you really mean it when you say these are just coincidences. But they're not.

Another one I forgot to mention: Google explicitly tracks your location history unless you turn it off, and you'd be foolish to think that they won't (or couldn't) save the data anyway. People have done experiments showing dramatic improvements in battery life using AOSP without Google telemetry and spyware.

The Google track your location history thing is true. You can confirm by using Google takeout to extract your location history.

The microphone thing is false. You can try the takeout feature (or equivalent) across multiple providers to confirm that.

I don't trust takeout features completely, honestly. Takeout only gives you YOUR data and not all your acquaintances' data, which can be assembled by companies you don't even know exist to profile YOU. The companies you deal with then have no obligation to share it with you, because to them they are only leasing access to data that they sold off or some crap. It's like how the government can't collect this data but they can buy it. The same trick is everywhere.

I seriously don't trust anything on a very deep level. Like I said, I've seen too much evidence that these companies are run by snakes that can only be trusted in certain ways. You might not agree, and I'm not prepared to argue all that tonight (I keep hitting the comment rate limit anyway). Just try to remain skeptical both ways if you don't believe we're being spied on, ok?

I hate corporations as much as the next guy (probably more than the next guy) but the argument that "it wasn't proven they were doing it which proves they were doing it" is probably the worst one you could have come up with tbh.

That case dragged on for 5 years, and ended up with them paying $95 million anyway. I think if they could have proved that they weren't doing it, they would have. Maybe I didn't say that clearly but it makes a lot of sense.

Apple spends a lot of money to keep its secrets. Paying $95 million to avoid letting people snoop in exactly how Apple systems work is a bargain, and I don't even think they're using audio for ad targeting.

Eh I don't think that is what happened here. If other companies want to know how Apple did things 5 years ago, they can just hire some ex-Apple employees. I think someone could build a competitive system with current technology for something in the ballpark of $95 million lol.

Now you should read the details of Apple's Siri lawsuit.

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