This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
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.
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?
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.
I'll tell you my story, believe it or not.
I had a Samsung phone. got sick and tired of getting not just targeted advertising about shit I had spoken about, buy also targeted emails as well. really freaky shit.
I switched phones. got a fairphone with e/os.
it's been about 2 years now. my old Samsung is a phone I use strictly for work. it only exists inside my office and is never taken outside of the room.
ALL my ads and emails are about work related topics now.
I could talk about stuffing cheetos up my rectum outside my office and never see an ad for chester cheetah. as soon as I say anything about it in the office, boom!
Sure, Google, or Amazon, or Facebook may not be listening to you...but that doesn't mean ~~Samsung~~ someone isn't listening and selling them that information.
Instagram showed me an ad for a medical condition I only discussed out loud, in person, in my doctors office.
Instagram was immediately uninstalled that day.
Other methods of data collection can be scarily effective. Stores have identified people were pregnant before they knew.
Very likely they identified you as someone that could have that condition, and you noticing the ads after talking to your doctor is a form of recency bias.
You can collect almost all the same data from traditional surveillance methods. Collecting and processing mocrophone data just isn't effective enough to make up for the massively increased costs from processing it.
As much as I logically know this to be the case, especially now that Android and iOS indicate when things like the mic are active... My brain still wants to reject it because it is just too coincidental.
I do not trust mic switches however, unless someone can provide proof that it physically disconnects the circuit to that microphone, it can be bypassed somewhere and there's no reason to trust the manufacturer.
It displayed the ad before I could get home and research it. It had only been discussed out loud and in person.
There’s always other signs.
Did you connect to the clinic's WiFi?
Just being near their WiFi is enough.
I hate to add to the conspiracy, but I know my eye doctor uses a 3rd party which has sections of their hipaa privacy acceptance which allows them to use your info to sell you ads if you don’t decline. Phreesia, is the 3rd party company. Now add the other apps that track your location… time spent there…
and I know my grocery store does the same when you use the discounts. and worse, they have facial recognition so I can’t even opt out (kroger).
Your issue was likely a combo of that.
Can’t be facial-recognized if you always wear an N95 mask in stores ;)
A random person recognized Luigi in just a couple days, and he was wearing a mask in all the video footage released.
Modern recognition systems can scan footage a lot faster than humans. Many modern systems don't just use facial recognition but other factors like general height, walking gait, stride length, etc. to make more accurate recognitions.
Wasn’t his face revealed in cab footage where he’d taken his mask off within like, a day?
I think there is also probably a difference of scope in what is leveraged when Kroger is trying to get your facial pattern while you’re in the store to track where you go and get more data to sell advertisers vs like, the lengths gone to by the state in order to catch someone who shot a rich person dead in the street.
I'm not saying it's completely 100% not possible and has never happened in the history of human technology, but the situation is not as ubiquitous as most people seem to think it is.
Don't get me wrong, collecting and inferring personal information is happening on an epic and ubiquitous scale these days, but for the most part, it's not the microphones on your devices that are doing the data collection.
Pretty much all my older relatives are completely convinced their phones are listening to their day to day conversations and serving up ads based on those conversations. One of them came to visit me for a week over the summer. One night we had been talking about having asparagus for dinner, and as evidence that their phone was listening to us, the next day they showed me that their news feed was filled with asparagus recipes. Another night, we were talking about one of their medical conditions and the drugs they were taking, and the next day they showed me that they got notifications about a prescription drug for that condition. On another day, we had been talking about a specific actor's filmography and all their movies that we liked, the next day their streaming video app was suggesting a bunch of content from that actor.
I can understand why this seemed pretty convincing that our phones were listening to us, but consider the simpler explanation.
I live in a rural area where there's not good cellular reception, so for the most part, our phones are connected via wifi to the same internet connection. Essentially, every device on the property has the same external IP address. So, when I looked up asparagus recipes on my laptop later that night because I wanted to surprise my relative with that specific dish, and when I Googled the prescription medication the relative was taking to see what the side effects where, and when I looked up that actor on IMBD to see what all movies they'd been in, that pretty much gave all the advertisers all the information they needed to start targeting ads and recommendations to folks sharing the same IP address.
Occam's Razor being what it is, I assume that's how things went down versus all our conversations being constantly recorded and uploaded to the net to be interpreted and used for the purposes of serving ads.
Believe it, don't believe it, some people believe the earth is flat, and 5G gives you cancer
We live in an age where the voice can be processed locally on the phone (we’ve had on-device speech-to-text since the late 90s…), and it’s already listening for a wake word, meaning mic is always hot. It doesn’t need to be streamed and use bandwidth; it can fire off 4K of JSON every few hours and relay more than enough information.
Just program whole dictionary of key phrases and scan the wake word buffer like you are already doing. Easy, stealthy, encrypted. Every voice assistant from a major tech company could (and likely IS) doing this.
This also provides ample opportunity for domestic (or even foreign!) spying my state actors, too.
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.
Why wouldn't you think this? There is no system in place for monitoring those companies, nor is there any type of punishment for if they were to be proven to be doing so. While on the other hand, there are piles of money to be made from advertisers for allowing exactly that to happen.
I've personally had things come up as being advertised to me after being NEAR people talking about those items, and I have seen several videos where people show this effect in action.
Frequency illusion is real, but is not reliable enough to repeat over and over, back to back, unlike the advertising.
When, ever, have the capitalist companies prioritized morality over money? Never.
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.
I don't either hut the alternative is much worst in my opinion. It would mean the algorithms are so advanced they are predicting conversations instead of listening to them.
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?
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.
as I posted this, found this Apple law suit for Snooping Siri post on my feed lol.
Ugh and Google fingerprinting free for all Feb 2025
me, a GrapheneOS user 😈🙈🙉🙊
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.
Not my title, as I already said. But anecdata backs this up ime. Go ask your parents for a giggle, see what they say
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.
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
Aw jeez not this again.
battery life would fall through the floor if they did spy
Yeah, there's just more effective methods to get essentially the same data.
That was once true, but I am now very skeptical of that with on-device processing that can log key words and send them without using much data or power.
