Not my title! I do think we are being listened to. And location tracked. And it’s being passed on to advertisers. Is it apple though? Probably not is my take away from this article, but I don’t trust plenty of others, and apple still does
Ads aren’t why you should be concerned about apps w/ microphone access…
Where exactly are you getting the idea that this belief is widespread?
Not my title, as I already said. But anecdata backs this up ime. Go ask your parents for a giggle, see what they say
I have heard it repeated several times. It’s based on how virtual assistants are allowed to listen over your mic for keywords, applications like Facebook requesting full microphone access, and people with stories of getting ads for things after having a conversation about the same.
The third could be a form of recency bias; I just learned about this, and now I see it everywhere. Also, it’s easy to know who is in your circle, and items you recently searched could be advertised to your friends. I saw this by getting sudden ads for handguns after getting an Amazon link from my gun crazy friend.
Like people allowing google Gemini to always listen for permanent background Shazaam functionality and and having surprised Pikachu faces lol.
I saw it happen about 3 years ago. I mentioned Omega watches to my buddy who had somehow lived to 50 w/o ever hearing the name. Later that same day there was a Facebook ad for Omega on his Samsung phone.
Yep me too. Wife was adamant her phone was spying on her so we decided to test it by talking about Lexus cars (having chosen cars because at the time she was getting no car ads anywhere, had no interest in cars, and she had never heard of the brand before so certainly hadn’t searched for it). A few hours later, her Facebook feed was full of Lexus ads. 100%.
I’ve heard many folks suspect it. It’s a widespread, if weakly substantiated concern.
I don’t think that most of the big tech companies are listening to your microphone (I’m not ruling it out entirely, and I’m certainly there are some smaller sketchier companies that are doing it)
But I think most of the time most of the time they don’t need to
They know what ads you’ve seen on your phone/computer, what you’ve been googling, the websites you’ve visited, where you’ve used your credit card, what shows and movies you watch, and where you’ve been (from gps locations, or from what wifi networks and Bluetooth devices you’ve been near or connected to) and what ads, playlists, stores, products, etc. you were exposed to while you were there, and of course who you talk to and all of that same information about those people.
That’s all going to influence the things you think and talk about, they probably have a pretty good idea what kind of conversations you’re going to have well before you do.
And don’t get me wrong, that’s creepy as fuck.
I think most of it comes down to people not even realizing how much data about ourselves we put out there and all of the ways it can be collected and used to build a profile about you.
And honestly I think they can probably get better data from that most of the time than from trying to filter out background noise and make sense of what you’re talking about through your microphone.
Few hours later on timeline:
https://lemmy.world/post/23832012 (Apple randomly spying using microphone)
It kind of sounds like that article is about the “hey Siri” feature getting activated accidentally, like if it picks up something that sounds similar to the trigger phrase and starts recording
Which is still a big security/privacy issue, but not exactly the same as if they’re just turning the microphone on whenever they want to listen to you and serve you ads
not really the same thing but it could happen to anyone: https://www.reuters.com/legal/apple-pay-95-million-settle-siri-privacy-lawsuit-2025-01-02/
They need to demand a code review to find out who set up some of these triggers. Especially the zipper sound. Send that creep to prison.
Apps listening to your mic to give you targeted ads is an urban legend. There’s tools to see which apps listen to you and there isn’t any evidence that any of the popular stuff ever open the microphone (unless you’re in a call or something). If you’re too worried about it, you can always turn off the mic permission for the app.
The ads are actually coming from other ways of tracking you like browser fingerprinting to follow what things you browse and build a profile on what you like/are interested in.
See also EFF’s article on it: https://www.digitalrightsbytes.org/topics/is-my-phone-listening-to-me
agreed. online tracking is so good it just seems like they’re listening to you.
The ones serving up the ads aren’t even the ones listening. They’re buying collated data from many different sources, then their algorithm matches your interests with one of the products they’re contracted to sell. Next thing you know you’re looking at a Rolex ad because you zoomed in on someone’s watch on their Instagram post.
Jfc, finally some sanity in this thread. Thank you. You’d think a bunch of supposed computer nerds would have done a fucking experiment before going off on some anecdotal bullshit.
I’m not so sure. When my partner and I were on a road trip we had android auto connected and were singing along to songs we listened to via Spotify. At some point though, when I tried to fiddle with some settings the connection between the car and the smartphone bugged out and while trying to fix it we suddenly heard his voice being played back on the speakers “whispering” some lyrics he had sung 30 to 60 minutes earlier.
I put whispered in quotes because he certainly didn’t whisper those lyrics and I recalled the moment he sang them quite clearly. Beside his singing and the music playing there were no other sounds at that time.
My best guess is that he was actually recorded while singing and something was stripping all the background noises and music to make his speech more clear for speech to text analysis. It was creepy as fuck.
We both work in IT and I truly have no other idea what this could have been given the circumstances. He said there is actually a company that provides a framework that listens to, records and analyses whatever is spoken near smartphone microphones and all the big tech players like Google are using it. I don’t remember the name though. Would have to ask him.
That’s the most unlikely story I’ve heard in a minute… Even assuming there’re some deep rooted kernel level shenanigans, which no one has found yet, how would you fiddling with some settings expose that?
Probably just got a dropped call, and it resumed the playlist in shuffle, I’ve had it happen where the music comes out as if in a phone call (messes up frequencies) for a few seconds before it goes back to normal. Occam’s razor and all
Believe what you want, I don’t really care. The whole connection bugged out and the car’s infotainment system including android auto became unresponsive. There was no call, it wasn’t shuffle and it was definitely his voice, not the music playing. Especially since there was only the whispered singing. No other instruments at all.
I believe it was sunspots that caused bit flips on the phone CPU and regurgitated data from the L5 cache. /s
Yes Apple.
Apple is the one who got caught so far
If you think Google, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Samsung et al aren’t doing this, I’ve got a bridge to sell you.
Did yall read the article?
I’ll buy-t. What did Apple get caught doing that these other companies haven’t got caught doing?
Edit: Oh, the Siri settlement. The article linked argues against the claim of it being used for advertising, though.
Ok? I didn’t say differently. OP said
Is it apple though? Probably not is my take away from this article, but I don’t trust plenty of others, and apple still does
Literally the news story that this author cites as motivation for writing this article in the preamble to the article.
One of my weirder hobbies is trying to convince people that the idea that companies are listening to you through your phone’s microphone and serving you targeted ads is a conspiracy theory that isn’t true.
ARS said, that reuters said, that users said.
Someone needs a new hobby. “Proof” from 3 layers of journalists interpreting a case that they themself said never went to court. Trying to use evidence of absence as proof will never win any hearts in a debate.
I didn’t seriously believe it happened either for quite some time because confirmation bias is a bitch. But I’ve seen it happen a few times where it would have to be a seriously unlikely coincidence.
If it was searched for in Google, Facebook, apple, or whatever sure
If it was correlated with locality and time, sure.
You can infer a lot from a few searches but there are times where nothing was searched for and a novel concept came out of conversation and book there’s ads and search completion for it.
Maybe, just maybe, someone settling a lawsuit without being found guilty, doesn’t ACTUALLY mean they’re innocent.
So Apple and Google have created the most sophisticated spyware known to man, so undetectable that tens of thousands of developers and researchers have never even seen a sign of it, and then they use the data for ads so sloppily that anyone can prove they’re listening?
I’m sure Apple just paid 95 mil because they were bored.
That Siri was bugged in a way that activated it unintentionally, which then sends recordings to Apple, is not in dispute. Turning that into “they’re always recording your conversations” is a big leap. Why would the whistleblower that revealed the recordings being misused not bother mentioning that?
It was activated at times in which it was unintentional and then they sold that data.
People are saying, and I have observed, extreme coincidences with the ads were timely, They were on novel data that wasn’t thrown through searches, and they weren’t explainable by locality.
You don’t have to be recording 24x7 to get they observed outcome.
Do you have any proof they sold that data? I’d love to know why the plaintiffs settled out of court if they thought they could prove Apple is feeding every voice recording into their ads. They had to pay 5x as much just for slowing down old iPhones, actively selling voice recordings would undoubtedly be worth far more than that.
The issue is that contractors had access to the recordings, which is certainly a breach of privacy, but not a grand conspiracy to target ads.
I’m not going to play move the goal posts with you all day long.
At what point did I move the goalposts? I never denied that the recordings existed. I simply fail to see how someone at Apple would decide that selling private conversations is worth the insane risk.
Quick experiment. If you don’t own a dog or a cat, talk about buying dog or cat food a couple times today.
about buying dog or cat food a couple times today.
I have both, also, if it’s real, you’d have to match up with an advertiser that really wants your profile.
I search for crap all the time but don’t get ads most of the time, then one time, I look up this one kaz air filter and get nothing but ads for it for a week. hundreds of home depot ads.
I love how having both a dog and a cat is somehow dismissive
My big problem isn’t with the concept I could talk about buying parrot food.
But there has to be a vendor out there that says hey whoever I’m buying this data from, I need to put an ad in front of parrot owners.
These are going to be very high cost ads, so whatever products they’re going to sell you probably have a respectable profit margin or respectable expected lifetime value.
Trying to trigger it on purpose, without any idea of who’s advertising or for what is somewhat of a fool’s errand.
I’m always torn on this topic because, yeah there’s hundreds of biases that can be attributed to this phenominon.
IE something becomes a popular topic in your area. Meaning more people in the area start searching the topic in that area, thus advertisers start pushing it to that location.
Obviously ads are also tracking you in 100 ways on what you’ve searched for, looked at etc… which means it could have a good guess of what you are going to talk about, before you do.
But at the same time, I think everyone can think of a lot of stories of things that just seemed to perfect, to out of the blue. For me the big one was 10 years ago when I walked into an attic, said “man it’s fucking dark up here”, opened my phone, and a big ad for a flashlight app popped up.
I think we will need a few more lawsuits such as Apple has agreed to pay $95 million to settle a lawsuit alleging that its virtual assistant, Siri, recorded users’ conversations without their consent before this is no longer treated as confirmation bias or people been paranoid.
My wife used to tell me that her adds would change after discussing something and at first I did not believe her, but it just kept happening again, and again. It reached the point that we would put our phones away, discuss something and there is no change in ads about the topic. If we had our phones near adds would change.This would happen on things that we would not see adds for normally. For example we would discuss a trip to a place we have never been and she would start seeing adds about the destination after that.
Ads is from advertisement, not adds
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ADS
This article’s preamble cites this news story as the motivation for writing the rebuttal presented.
ITT:
People saying “They already use every other bit of data they can access, why do you naive optimists think they wouldn’t use the most obvious one?”
vs.
People saying “They already use every other bit of data they can access, why do you naive optimists think they would need to use the most expensive one?”
it’s effective, timely, accurate, and profitable.
ofc they’re gonna use the audio, too; where and when possible.
On Android, I have the mic, location, and camera blocked via the pulldown tiles menu. I turn them on when needed. The OS and some apps like to bitch about this sometimes but it seems to be working ok.
My iphone does not offer these blanket blocking options. It’s a work phone, so I just leave it off unless I need it.
So one of the devices allegedly grabbing keywords from heard conversations, you’d trust with a software based toggle?
I’d only trust hardware toggle.
At this point, it’s the best I can do. I have tape on the selfie camera too. I guess I could bust this pixel 7a open and add physical switches to the cameras and mike, but I’m not real confident in my ability to pull that off. Maybe you can tell me how to do that.
You really trust that the button does what it says it does though??!??
You mean a hardware toggle? Because those can be double checked with some electronic knowledge.
And a software toggle can be checked with some software knowledge if the source is available.
Although chances of code being available are quite low for most mobile devices, not to mention software takes many many hours longer and you’ll have to make sure your build matches the code (which means manually checking the code of every update).
Question for you: Do you manually check every hardware toggle for correctness?
Weird question. A better question would be how hard it is to check. It’s pretty easy. It only requires a multimeter and basic knowledge of electronics. Opening a phone isn’t hard either. You can easily use a clothes iron with a rag in front of it.
I talk to my father on the phone.
We finish.
I receive ads for a very specific thing that we talked about that I’ve never ever looked up.
Same thing with my therapist.
We talk. I receive highly specific ads.
It can always be explained by something else. Recency bias being a big one. It’s very possible you saw an ad yesterday as well, but didn’t notice you saw it because you haven’t talked about that item. Talk about it today, see the same ad, and now you think you’re being listened to.
It’s very possible your father googled something after hanging up the phone. There are endless ways they can connect you to knowing your father.
It’s possible someone on the same wifi network as you or your father overheard the conversation and looked it up.
All of these are far more likely than everything you say and do being recorded without anyone ever finding any definitive proof.
Ever had a free free flowing conversation for hours?
You talk about things you wouldn’t possibly think of alone because of the other person.
Im located in Germany ne I guess many of you people are have not yet been victim of this, else you would agree with me.
There have been ad agencies who have claimed to be able to do this, so they would if they could. https://www.404media.co/heres-the-pitch-deck-for-active-listening-ad-targeting/
Just because an ad agency makes a claim doesn’t mean it’s true or doable.
Right
So I’m hearing that you don’t use an adblocker.
Only on Spotify, which is another scandal
Perhaps they track who you talk to and show you ads that are relevant to those people, or their best guess based on two profiles.
I don’t think there’s a data center out there with a live audio stream of literally billions of always-on devices 24/7/365.
Perhaps there’s some local processing first, but devices have permissions for apps, and lights that indicate the mic/camera is in use.
I figure someone would have figured it out by now (reverse engineering, decompiling code), or someone from Google/Apple/Samsung would have leaked it if it were true. Think of the number of people required to keep this secret.
And yet my android phone is able to detect what song is playing 24x7 without being a noticeable drain on the battery or using extra data. Doesn’t seem far fetched to be able to do keyword spotting under the same constraints.
Here’s one example of a company getting caught: https://m.economictimes.com/news/international/us/next-time-you-talk-on-your-phone-be-careful-facebook-and-google-are-listening-to-your-conversations/articleshow/113071827.cms
And yet my android phone is able to detect what song is playing 24x7
What is this referring to? Spotify?
What is this referring to?
Oh like Shazam
On my android it’s called “now playing” and it’s a feature of the os. It even recognizes live cover versions as the song they’re covering sometimes. Claims to do it all local-only without sending data, just always listening and seeing what it recognizes.
It listens to music being played on other devices? I haven’t seen it on my phone.
Or live music played by musicians, in this case.
Maybe it is only for Pixel phones. It’s hard for me to differentiate between pixel features and stock android recently.
Granted, things are getting to the point that it may very well be possible. But these kinds of claims have been around for over a decade, and today my voice control devices still fail to understand me rather regularly.
Not to mention, a song is usually extremely easy to pick out. In a loud bar with background music, your brain tends to pick up the beat and start grooving along with it, even if you don’t realize it most of the time. Compared to the person sitting across the table trying to yell things to you, and you having to resort to lip reading and guesswork.
No. With my therapist I talk randomly about so many things. It’s impossible to predict or calculate.
Also I talk to my therapist in person while the phones in my pocket or table.
Edit: also have you ever had a natural flowing conversation? It’s not predictable because you can possibly talk about everything and anything.
They are absolutely listening. This is very easy to test. Speak around a Google or Amazon or Apple device, and start talking about things you would never buy, never need, have never looked up, and is completely irrelevant for your demographic. You’ll get ads for it anyway by the end of the day or week.
Listen to the Big Tech comments to press and congressional testimony very carefully. They always say something like, ‘Facebook is not spying on your microphone.’ They’re always very carefully wording it as the parent company is not listening to your devices. But they absolutely know either one of their subsidiaries or their partners are listening to your microphone, and feeding the data to them.
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Two ways to process voice, on device or on server. Device-based solutions either are very basic and just detect differences between words or need training data based on your voice or they need lots of processing power for more generalized voice recognition. So is your battery draining and phone is often hot because an app is keeping the mic on and keeping the phone from slowing the processor? Other option is to stream the data to the server. This would also increase battery usage as the phone can’t sleep, but might not be as noticeable, but more evident would be your phone using a lot more bandwidth than is reasonable while you aren’t actively using it.
The comments here show the real problem, adverts dont have to say why they’ve been selected.
All online ads should have to say which filters they matched to advertise to you. The advertising in most cases now is centralised into Google or Facebook, this is absolutely technically possible.
All online ads should have to say which filters they matched to advertise to you.
According to the Signal foundation, the reverse is true. They claim they got banned for revealing that info.
https://signal.org/blog/the-instagram-ads-you-will-never-see/
Sharing data with the plebs is the true crime.
Wow.
This gives me that gut uneasy feeling. Those grabs are hyper specific examples.
