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
I once worked in a charity providing mental health services to people without insurance, or who wanted to not have their insurance record the service for whatever reasons.
I once had a homeless man that I would see regularly. We set up each appointment at the end of the preceding appointment, because the only other way to get a hold of this person would be to call the fast food place he worked at, during his work hours, which weren’t consistent. This man did not own a phone, or any other electronic device. His facebook, and all of his online activity was done at his local library. I emphasize this because I need it to be stressed that there was no way any algorithm could connect his location to mine. There was no way for a system to recognize that his device was near mine, because he did not have a device. There was no way for any of his online habits to be algorithmically connected to mine, at all.
One session, we’re speaking. The only devices in our small, sound proofed room, were my cell phone, a digital clock not connected to any system, and a digital camera, turned off, and also not connected to any system. He mentions that he’s been contacted by someone who wants him to move to the Phillipines. We briefly discuss flights and work in the Phillipines. Then we move on to other things, yadda yadda, end session.
By the end of the day, I’m getting ads on Facebook for flights to the Phillipines. Freaked me the fuck out because those sessions are HIPAA protected. From then on I kept my phone turned off, and in a completely different room in our building than any of my sessions with any patient. Never ever had it happen again.
I’ve had a very similar experience.
Once discussed something, out of the blue, something I’ve never been curious about in my life, in the car, with a friend who also has never thought about the same thing.
Hours later we’re both seeing related ads.
Now, I get that the amount of data required for such analysis is supposedly outside the bounds of what phones can do. But I can’t see any other explanation. Neither of us ever searched anything in this subject, we talked about doe a couple minutes and moved on, never doing anything about it. We have very different interests, too.
What made you bring up the Philippines in the first place? Even if you have not been served ads before then, or the other guy. Someone either of you have interacted with could’ve done who brought up the Philippines to you or them.
And because there’s an ongoing campaign in your area, eventually you’ll get one of them ads too.
As I said in the original post, the client was contacted by someone over social media about moving to the Phillipines for work. It turned out to be a scam. Nobody else I interacted with made any mention of the Phillipines to me.
Yeah but that scam may have been going around the area elsewhere and had caused a spike of searches in your area so the add companies programmatically fill in what they see as an area with potential leads with ads.
Same here. Confidential discussion with lawyer/ doctor/ pharmacist, get extremely relevant ads at once. Therefore, I made it a habit to completely turn off my phone before entering such situations, and, if I can, put it in a switched-off microwave or some other Faraday cage structure, Snowden-style.
Difficult to judge. Could be confirmation bias, as well. Meaning you got ads for flight befores. But you were not paying attention to them at that point. Which changed after your session and now you think these are connected. (Or you looked something up about that location and that kicked it off.)
These are the usual findings in the rare cases people are able to trace it back and they write some article or podcast about it. Mainly confirmation bias. And once you interact with one ad that got you taken aback, you’re trapped.
Doesn’t rule out other possibilities, though. I guess what I’m trying to say is, this counts more as anecdotal evidence. And we have plenty stories like this. It’s not enough to infer anything. More a reminder to investigate some more.
And yes, it’s good practice to keep your phone someplace else when you’re having protected/confidential conversations. Smartphones are very complex and they certainly have the potential to spy on you. In fact we know a lot of the apps and computer code is meant to analzye your behaviour and transfer that information to third parties.
How many anecdotal stories before it becomes data? If hundreds of people are saying that this happens and there’s no other explanation? Thousands? How many things can be written off as “Oh, something you don’t understand is happening, even if we can rule out basically everything.” ?
There are billions of smartphones out there. Thousands of people getting ads relevant to what they just discussed is normal. And it’s not just about the number of stories. It’s also about how unscientific these reports are as well. If you want to come up with actually useful evidence you would have to test this multiple times to prove it’s not random and you would also have to objectively measure the effect. You need to show a significant increase in the probability of getting a relevant ad, which in turn means you need to know what the baseline probability of getting one is (when the phone has not been allowed to spy on you).
All that being said, I don’t think proving that smartphones spy on us is all that useful. The fact that it can happen very easily is already a problem. Security and privacy are protected when we design systematic solutions that prevent abuse. They are not protected in unregulated systems where we might sometimes prove abuse has happened after the fact. There’s plenty wrong with a modern smartphone regardless of whether it happens to be spying on you right now.
Btw, I think it’s pretty much accepted fact that smartphones do spy on everyone. It’s the main business model of any big tech company. Google, Meta… They definitely have algorithms to tailor their targeted ads to someones personal profile. And per default they look at what you’re doing online all day. Keep track of your location if they can… The one thing that’s unclear is whether they use the microphone and also listen to your offline conversations. My main point being: Listening in with the microphone isn’t that far off. If you feel uncomfortable with that, you might want to re-consider a few other things as well.
Thanks for the heads up. I am aware of the spying issues with smartphones (and any way you access the internet really). This is part of the reason why I don’t think proving the unauthorized use of the microphone to spy is really important and why we need systemic solutions to prevent abuse in any case.
Can there really be an objective measurement? You should think first thing data harvesters would implement is a sort of cloak, to erase any traces of what’s going on. Think Dieselgate, but more sophisticated. E.g. phone detects it’s being tested the way you described, or is in the hands of a state attorney or whatever, the recording/ forwarding/ prcoessing of data stops.
That’s only really feasible for phones they knowingly send to regulators. The phone would have no practical way of knowing that I’m having staged conversations around it and keeping track of the ads I see.
But even if you’re right, that doesn’t change the fact that a lack of objective measurement means all these stories are unreliable.
I think that no amount of anecdotal evidence would be enough. For a very long times doctors had anecdotal evidence that bloodletting saved patient, yet they were fooled by their bias. I’m not saying advertising isn’t spying on our microphones, I don’t know, it might be. But it doesn’t seem very plausible to me: the amount of processing necessary, and the amount of network seems way too high. Also, voice recognition is still not great currently, it was even worse years ago.
The plural of anecdote is not data
Yes, this is the common statement I am referencing.
With the scientific method and anecdotal evidence: kind of never. It’s illegitimate to draw that conclusion, this way.
You got to dig down to the facts. Or we can just tell the fact that a lot of people feel that way. And I mean “confirmation bias” is a very good explanation. We also have thousands of people believe in esoterics, homeopathy etc. The mechanics of psychology are well-understood. And it’s kind of the reason why we invented science in the first place. Because we found things aren’t always as they seem. And there are a lot of dynamics to factor in.
If we want to get to the truth, we have to do a proper study. I’m not an expert on this, so I don’t know if we got to that, yet. I know people have demonstrated this is technically possible. But as far as I’m aware people have also taken apart a few of the major apps like Facebook etc, logged the traffic and couldn’t find anything that uses microphone data to do targeted advertising.
Conclusion: It’s either not there, or we missed it.
Now I want to do some kind of experiment where I speak things into my phone and see what happens. It still seems too much to be coincidental.
Playing devil’s advocate here - we know voice information is being sent back to both Google and Apple, if the analysis were done server side dissembling apps isn’t going to show us anything we don’t already know.
That’s kind of the important question… We know it sends audio on request, if you trigger it somehow. But does it transmit anything clandestinely in the background? And does it suppress any microphone icons from showing up? I believe that’s where disassembly and sniffing network traffic come into play.
Great story.
Even if anecdotal fuck all of that better safe than sorry.
My dad use to say that Facebook listened to him back in the 2010s. We blew him off as conspiracy nut.
He would say diamond ring diamond ring diamond ring and then all his ads would change next day. We blew him off as conspriatorial and now the algorithm is common knowledge.
Who knows. Scary.
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.
It displayed the ad before I could get home and research it. It had only been discussed out loud and in person.
Did you connect to the clinic’s WiFi?
Yes, I was on the wifi before the appointment.
This is why. Not because your phone is listening to you.
The wifi was not related to the medical issues, the symptoms, or the specific clinical term mentioned by the doctor.
But it’s reasonable to believe other people would have searched the same topic on that network
Edit: or even that they looked it up o their own network following connecting to the clinic’s.
Just being near their WiFi is enough.
There’s always other signs.
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.
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 ;)
Sorry, but facial recognition software has basically caught up. I would not rely on a mask to prevent me being recognised today:
https://privacyinternational.org/news-analysis/4511/can-covid-19-face-mask-protect-you-facial-recognition-technology-too https://www.ft.com/content/42415608-340c-4c0a-8c93-f22cdd4cc2d6 https://www.techtimes.com/articles/304431/20240508/new-software-shows-promise-facial-recognition-underneath-mask.htm
It must be very situational on when it works, because the FBI has specifically cited a face mask as a reason that it still hasn’t caught whoever left a bunch of bombs laying around on Jan 6.
Interesting. I can imagine a scenario where the resolution of CCTV is low enough that a mask would impede recognition in that instance. It’s definitely not something I would want to rely on, though.
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.
Your age group, sex, location, profession/industry, income estimation - you can assume they have this data.
That + a few data points that could be tracked by apps or websites:
- Searched online for symptoms
- Searched for doctors
- Called the clinic to schedule an appointment
- GPS to the clinic
- Connected to the clinic’s WiFi
- Doctor is a specialist in X
Cross some of that, personal info, and ads of treatments for conditions of X.
They don’t need to listen to your mic.
That said, if it’s a fairly common condition, it might be the case you were presented the ad before and never noticed it.
None of those data points apply. It was nothing I had searched for or spoken to anyone until I saw the doctor that day and the Instagram ad was present by the time I had driven home, specifically mentioning the clinical term mentioned by the doctor.
It wasn’t even the stated reason for my visit, it was an afterthought at the end of the appointment… “Oh yeah, as long as I’m here, what is this…?”
People always talk about getting served ads after they talk about something. I think it’s the other way around. The ads put the thought into your brain and then you start talking about it and notice after you’ve already been thinking about it for a while.
While I do suspect they listen, I have pretty solid (anecdotal) evidence they scan text messages. When I bought my house I had no solicitor, I text my buddy to see who he used and he texted me a response.
Started to type into Google to get a number and it was the top suggested search after 2 chars. Nowhere else did I mention this solicitor, hadn’t heard of them before this, have no other searches for this solicitor. It’s not a big firm, it’s not even in my city - only explanation I have is they scanned the messages.
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.
Aw jeez not this again.
This is a great case of confirmation bias, too. The one time your ad happens to match a conversation you had earlier, you’ll be convinced forever, and tell everyone you know about it. The ten million other times you have a conversation that doesn’t appear in your ads will go unnoticed.
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
But most likely they use all of those recordings accidental or not to serve you targeted ads, like Google does.
It’s well possible and previously tv mic had been used as bugging device. The problem is, way too many security researchers look in system level software of iOS and even other components of the device that such practice will be too risky for apple (same applies for mainstream android products). Also processing realtime audio, finding potentially unrealiable topic from it and doing realtime ad is actually too much work as of today’s tech (might change sooner than you think though).
What, I think, is more practical is to use the whole query after the wake word to show ad, and potentially use other app tracking data, which is way much reliable than voice for targeting purpose. Voice data is useful for bugging purpose, primarily (ab)used by nation states and LE.
I bet in the medical procedure case mentioned in the blog the user searched/talked about that in other apps and average people aren’t good to notice these privacy leaks.
too much work for today’s tech
All the assistants listen all the time for their codeword. The new pixel phone show you a list of songs played around them and more. It is already happening all the time in the background.
That’s done locally. You can try training wake word models for any open assistant and see how much computing power it needs for even simple phrase.
I’ve always theorized that it should be possible to have multiple wake words with different functions, some invisible to the user.
It has to be “always listening” for the wake word to function at all, so it clearly is doing that, what’s to stop them from having another wake word like “bomb” which it then starts recording and sends to the NSA for instance, or even “clip the last 30 seconds” like an xbox could be feasible. Or even have corporations pay to get on the “list” of secret trigger words, like Toyota pays and it hears “Toyota” or “new car” and starts serving ads for 2026 Celicas (I wish lol). It doesn’t even have to send much data back for that, just “ohp, said word, check box to join ‘toyota’ ad group.”
I’m not saying they do that, but like, it sounds totally easily possible and I can’t be the first person that had this idea, why wouldn’t they?
Don’t give them idea :)
Yes that’s indeed a possibility.
The worse part is, they don’t really need to bug your mic to figure out what you are talking about to target ads to you. The best sales leads are the family and friends of your existing customers. So say you talk to you coworker about how they switched to this new diaper rash cream for their baby. You might not have a baby but you talked about it and somehow you got ads for diaper rash cream. What really happened though is that your coworker bought their cream on Amazon and that brand purchased target ads for everyone whose location data was nearby them. Or they bought it for everyone whose phone was connected to the same IP address. We have so much data tracked about us that they can guess what we are talking about without actually having to tap our phone lines
In addition to location, the data collected moreso resemble demographics than specifics. And on some of the most mundane shit at first glance, but actually gives a very clear picture of the consumer. Things like 1. OS installed 2. version of OS installed 3. Battery percentage 4. Total device memory 5. Remaining total memory and more things like that.
I liken it to how a psychic fools people into thinking they are magical when really they are incredibly perceptive and experienced in making judgements based on client’s clothes, appearance, demeanor, etc before they even open their mouths.
“Is it Apple though, probably not…”
Can I ask, why are you so ready to performatively forgive them here? Apple is not your friend, Apple and Tim lined up to donate the million like the rest of those greedy, transactional cowards.
Apple doesn’t “do” it per se, instead Apple shares certain data with third party partners for the purposes of “improving your product experience” the data is then laundered 17 times through middle layers and added to a shared digital fingerprint of you and your household’s web of connected devices. You and your family are then sold on a marketplace as advertising targets actively interested in X category or product (Apple is also subsequently a customer in that marketplace). You then either receive that advertising or your family is targeted with it so that they can then casually mention the product back to you (company knowing you were already interested) so it feels organic and “I was just thinking the same thing!” and boom, you’re buying that new set of pots and pans.
We’re already living in the matrix, you’re just a little drone being pinged around according to other people’s will, to support the pursuit of endless growth. So yes, in a way companies are spying on you… After you’ve given them individual permissions to access your microphone and permission to share “certain data” about you with third parties, in a carefully orchestrated dance - so that they have plausible deniability and so you don’t have to threaten your parasocial relationship with their brand and can continue saying “probably not Apple though…”
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?
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
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.
Using your search data is bad enough
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.
I found indisputable proof of this happening.
We were using Google maps, driving in a production van. We were talking about the song “Gasolina” by daddy yankee. The person whose phone it was did not speak Spanish. Moments later we were being served suggestions to stop at “estaciones de gasolina”
That’s not how proof works.
In September, I was using reddit, had an iPhone, etc. I was generally aware of digital privacy, probably moreso than the average person, but by no means was I knowledgeable.
I was running a beta on my iPhone at the time, for context. I had a short conversation with my roommate while my phone was in my pocket. I took it out to text my partner and pressed the dictation button. My phone proceeded to type out the majority of the conversation I had had maybe five minutes earlier with my roommate. Literally ruined my ignorance is bliss and now I have a Pixel with grapheneos and use almost exclusively open source software with a major focus on privacy. Obviously this is an anecdote from some idiot online and I can’t verify what I’m saying at all, but the experience definitely shook me.
