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In summary: Google, Amazon and Meta all deny that they directly access your microphone, and all three failed to actually deny purchasing voice data from third party apps that definitely do use your microphone and pair that with your ad targeting profile.
This is getting more attention because an internal slide deck from Cox Media Group was leaked. Based on the nature of leaks, it's safe to assume that Cox isn't the only organization up to this, they were just the least careful.
So yeah, they're listening to anyone who isn't incredibly careful what apps they install and what permissions they give those apps.
Exactly as we all have suspected for years, while they gaslight us promising that they definitely don't.
Notice that they're still denying it, and trust that as you will.
This is nearly a year old news, and noone ever could prove it.
CMG is simply lying. Also originally it was not "leaked" it was published on their website, it's just the same bullshit from different source.
At least I want to see some proofs my voice data being transmitted over some medium. Those slides are ads created by ad company to potential ad clients.
No, people are just super predictable, that's why it feels like it has to be spying sometimes.
No one has ever managed to prove this is actually happening and people have been paranoid of this for over a decade now. Someone would have 100% found some evidence by now.
Admitting by the ad company is for sure not a proof. So what is? If in courts, pleading is good enough for thr court
tl;dr: no. The article shits all over the question. Newsweek is still trash.
Still it looks like CMG pitched a plan to serve ads by listening to user conversations. Of course CMG and their clients are gonna deny it.
It was not just a "leak" this was literally on their website a year ago: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/12/no-a-marketing-firm-isnt-tapping-your-device-to-hear-private-conversations/
Marketing people bullshitting to get investor money. Anyone can imagine non existent technology and lie on the internet, you don't have to believe everything
I've heard and experienced WAY too much supporting anecdote to just wave it off as confirmation bias. Official statements by telecoms and such be damned, this shit is 100% happening.
So I have never experienced it at all. But my wife, at least once a week will mention something random and get an ad for it. If it were just purely confirmation bias I should be seeing the same biases.
The last one last week she mentioned checking out a certain store 10 minutes later she got around to searching for it. Google auto completed "where can I" with find (whatever store she was looking for) It was the first time she had typed it in and it was dead on what we had been talking about.
It's definitely not everyone and everything every time but it happens in awful lot for coincidence.
I do not see why everyone wants to deny this and trust big tech. After you lot completely brainwashed?? Assume the worst, that malicious applications are recording both your microphone and your camera, and do the best you can. Anyone even taking Meta's/Google's side here is absurd to me.
It's not trusting Big Tech, it's understanding that Little Tech can also lie.
Cox Media Group wants to hype up their product and use AI buzzwords. To be seen as reliable they say that they work with Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc.
The report is basically CMG saying they can do X, and everyone else calling bullshit. (And in response CMG clarifying "No, we don't actually do that" and then also removing the companies they don't actually work with.)
It isn't definitively saying they don't, but also isn't saying that they do. You can assume the worst if you like, but that doesn't mean the worst is actually true.
Is it possible this type of spying exists? Yes. Is it possible this is a cover up? Yes. Do we have actual data to support that? No.
Tomorrow an investigation may reveal otherwise, but for now it doesn't seem to be the case.
And because some random report from a third-party who is just as interested in profit said something that matches the worldview of the general masses is out, you're going to believe them?
I don't care what "tech" it is, they are incentivized to lie and you know it. I am still baffled at how absolutely anyone takes the word of corporations to heart
Yes? I'm forming my opinions based on reporting. You're basing your opinions based on opinions.
Again I'm not saying you're wrong. Look at the information Snowden revealed. Before the reveal it was conspiracy theory. Now it's fact.
This reporting isn't fact, it's reporting in progress. At the moment it doesn't find the always listening allegation to be true, but not impossible either.
Because the amount of data use alone would be so astronomical as to be very obvious. Unless it's specifically recording you locally and then uploading that information when you're on wifi (which would be obvious too because of the slow down it would cause, the amount of bandwidth it would take up (making you hit data caps with your provider and throttling your service), and the fact that most phones just do not have that much storage and don't have a slot for added sd cards anymore. Feasibly it doesn't make sense for a handheld device to be recording everything you say passively. Your battery alone would have to last several weeks of normal use.
It's surprisingly easy to use adtech without voice and make a connection to serve a targeted ad. Had a friend ask me about what I was drinking. They were on my guest wifi network. They searched for it. Next day, I'm getting ads because of geoIP pinned my IP address as having an interest.
Also had someone that lives off the grid with no active network or devices watch a DVD of a movie and the entirety of their Internet connectivity was two cell phones in the room. They started seeing things related to the movie. They're older and not constantly on their phones. The phones just sit somewhere in the room.
Had a discussion with some tech friends a few years back and remarked that keeping awake to do this would take a lot of power. The EE mentioned running audio recording would take basically nothing. I expanded from there, the device uploads audio for off-phone translation to text, or queues batch jobs to process locally when power is high enough or on charger. Etc.
It is 100% probable that code runs on phones and just ships off amalgamated text frequency charts or entire conversations and the user won't even notice the battery dent.
That being said, I can't find even in the greediest capitalist money-claw that the person giving a go would not think, "well, I can't trust my own device anymore..." and maybe go: "yeah, I shouldn't do this." Maybe I'm too optimistic though.
How do you think your friend in the woods got the advertisements?
And yes, I still think you're too trusting of Big Tech. They are 100 times more vile than you think they are. THEY WILL do everything they can, and this is nothing to them.
The funny part is nobody wants to believe me and instead want to trust for-profit companies for their supposed pinkie-promises. Oh well, they'll learn in time.
My best guess is that I know one of them uses Facebook. Apple phones. Facebook, Uber, and a few others have had pretty deep access to APIs not accessible to other software companies. Sometimes they're caught like when Uber was caught using a screen scraping API. Sometimes they aren't. The other guess that glues it together is that Facebook has indeed scraped audio to text for a long time. It was almost 10 years ago that I had the EE conversation.
Google and Meta pay Apple money to gain access to their user metrics. It's likely symbiotic relationships. Facebook once had hooks directly in iOS. Likewise, the little mic/video indicators the OS displays when they are "active" are completely software-controlled and can be overridden.
At a time, I worked at a company that had(has) deep access to other aspects of iOS. Apple always required the source code is available to them so they could inspect it. I doubt that has changed. It also means they would be complicit. External tools wouldn't really be able to figure this out. For someone to black-box this they'd need a jailbroken iPhone and some specialized tooling or MITM decryption capabilities.
Not to sound hyperbolic, I'm connecting dots with no evidence, it's pure speculation. The compute seems to be there and with no regulation in source code, anything goes, if you want money bad enough. Especially with the mad dash every tech company has been on for the last 20ish years to harvest everything they can, ever since smartphones became powerful and commonplace enough.
Exactly. People should read your comment before shouting at me for not providing "proof". They seem incapable to understand that Big Tech can be smarter and more resourceful than a lot of security engineers
Nobody wants to believe me (a random person on the internet who has provided no proof whatsoever of their own that can be replicated in any way by a credible source, over actual investigative journalists and security experts who have been actively looking for such a thing to validate it and have found nothing after years of these allegations). Hmm. I wonder why that is.
Until proven otherwise this is nonsense.
Got a fun one today!
Wife gets a piece of snail mail from the school. Little post card saying you should try pickupusafitness, it's a service on the other side of the city that organizes pickup games for elementary-aged kids. Place is 20 miles away through Baltimore suburbs.
She talked to me about it, mentiones the name, picks up her phone, goes to search them out, types "pick" and they autocomplete in her search. She's never searched for it before.
My phone and PC autocomplete pickles pub, pickleball, pick 3 md, pickup lines, pickled cucumber...
They have to be listening all the time if you have voice activation. The mic always needs to be open so it knows when you say "hey siri" or "hey google". How would it know you said that if it didnt already listen to every word. The question is if that stays local on the device.
Had this explained once, I might miss a detail, but it's like this:
The only way not to drain your battery is to program in selective key words.
"But then its always listening" yes, but also, no.
Imagine someone speaking into a microphone, and seeing their voice bounce around on a oscilloscope.
This compresses the audio a LOT, and makes it very difficult to discern the differences between words.
But if you were trained to notice the pattern for a specific word, like "Siri", then you could ignore all the other shapes, conserving your battery.
In that sense, yes, they are always listening. But that's a very small system that only compares like the last two seconds of audio against the stored model of the user saying "Alexa".