Why Phones That Secretly Listen To Us Are a Myth (bbc.com) 219
A mobile security company has carried out a research investigation to address the popular conspiracy theory that tech giants are listening to conversations. From a report: The internet is awash with posts and videos on social media where people claim to have proof that the likes of Facebook and Google are spying on users in order to serve hyper-targeted adverts. Videos have gone viral in recent months showing people talking about products and then ads for those exact items appear online. Now, cyber security-specialists at Wandera have emulated the online experiments and found no evidence that phones or apps were secretly listening. Researchers put two phones -- one Samsung Android phone and one Apple iPhone -- into a "audio room". For 30 minutes they played the sound of cat and dog food adverts on loop. They also put two identical phones in a silent room.
The security specialists kept apps open for Facebook, Instagram, Chrome, SnapChat, YouTube, and Amazon with full permissions granted to each platform. They then looked for ads related to pet food on each platform and webpage they subsequently visited. They also analyzed the battery usage and data consumption on the phones during the test phase. They repeated the experiment at the same time for three days, and noted no relevant pet food adverts on the "audio room" phones and no significant spike in data or battery usage.
The security specialists kept apps open for Facebook, Instagram, Chrome, SnapChat, YouTube, and Amazon with full permissions granted to each platform. They then looked for ads related to pet food on each platform and webpage they subsequently visited. They also analyzed the battery usage and data consumption on the phones during the test phase. They repeated the experiment at the same time for three days, and noted no relevant pet food adverts on the "audio room" phones and no significant spike in data or battery usage.
bullsh!t (Score:5, Informative)
Re: bullsh!t (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: bullsh!t (Score:5, Interesting)
Buy an Alexa.
Plug it in and set it up.
Say "Blarble goo ha wiz wozzle".
Wait 5 minutes.
Log into your Amazon account on a PC.
Dig through the devices pages to find your Alexa.
Dig through the settings/troubleshooting pages.
Find the page that lists what Alexa has recorded.
See that Amazon helpfully lists an instance of speech detection that was not meant for Alexa (because it didn't hear "Alexa").
See that you can download and listen to that instance.
See that "Blarble goo ha wiz wozzle" was recorded and sent to Amazon and is available for people on the internet to download and listen to.
Re: bullsh!t (Score:4, Funny)
First of all, that's an "Alexa" that you bought, not a smartphone. Second of all, it's pretty easy to detect speech without actually recording anything beyond making a log entry stating that somebody said something.
And you do have to ask, at some point, where you're going to draw the line on what's listening to you and what isn't. Though, if it isn't transmitted to any other entity and never leaves your vicinity, then what difference does it make?
Of course, virtually every computing device we use has the capability of recording audio in some capacity, and it doesn't matter whether you have a microphone connected to it. If it has any kind of precision instrument, like a hard disk or an accelerometer, it can, in practice, be used to record audio. In some cases, that also includes capacitors, which are in basically everything.
You know what that means, right? We, the Illuminati Order, can track every move you make, and every sound you make, and therefore predict very accurately what you'll do in the near future. We know you better than you do. And there's nothing you can do to stop us.
Re: bullsh!t (Score:4, Insightful)
I just said "Blarble goo ha wiz wozzle", and 5 minutes later logged into Amazon. The only thing that is helpfully listed is the recording purposefully made immediately following the most recent time I said "Alexa".
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Why would you even post this? It's easily checked. Worse yet, what fools modded him up?
For those that don't actually want to bother, the answer is no. The entire post is garbage. You won't see anything you said without a wake word.
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You don't know how that is how it works. It is a closed system. It could be doing anything, and the behavior can change at any time. It could "wake up" the secondary SoC at any time and transmit whatever it wants.
Re: bullsh!t (Score:5, Insightful)
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If it's not scraping your conversations for ads, it's at least priming the voice recognition, which shares data with the search bar. Everytime I'm talking to my mother about something and I decide to search related to it, the autocomplete knows exactly what I want, even if I've never had an interest in that topic before.
Re:bullsh!t (Score:5, Insightful)
It is hearing, not listening.
Normally the Ok Google/Hey Siri call out isn't sent to the cloud, but in the software on the OS. Voice Recognition for a few simple words, can be done in hardware. What you say after that is sent to the cloud and back with a data response. As it needs more computing power to interpret what you actually said.
Now listening is comprehending at some level. When you talking there is no comprehending other than you phone is going does this waveform match Ok Google or Hey Siri wave form with appropriate deviation.
You can put your phone in a Faraday cage and try it out, see what works and what doesn't when there is no radio connection.
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You SERIOUSLY think that the phrases "hey siri" or "ok google" are the only phrases that "activate" the device to further "listen" to you? It's certainly demonstrable that other phrases cause adverts of a specific type. We all know that if there's no direct law against it, then some corporation is going to exploit everything possible. Why not this?
Re: bullsh!t (Score:4, Insightful)
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It's certainly demonstrable that other phrases cause adverts of a specific type.
Is it? This is exactly what this experiment tried to demonstrate, and failed. Do you have a link to some other demonstration that succeeded?
Re:bullsh!t (Score:5, Informative)
This BS test that they did, they didn't have casual conversations, they put the stupid phones in a room where adverts for cat and dog food was looped. This test was presented to you by the same people that are listening to you. It was a BS test, with BS results.
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I've got a pixel 3 will the Playground camera mode (ie: altered reality). The following worked shortly after it came out (but Playground doesn't seem to offer automatic suggestions anymore, so I don't believe you can recreate this). I removed my sim card and unplugged my wifi access point so
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difference between can , may, and must (Score:4, Insightful)
The phones can listen. And they may listen. But they don't have to listen. Two phones does not a sample make.
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Not to mention that it would be significantly more useful to listen when the phone is moving vs just sitting there idly.
Re:difference between can , may, and must (Score:5, Funny)
And if they talked about their plans around the phones while the phones were listening, the phones probably behaved until the experiment was over.
Re: difference between can , may, and must (Score:3)
Agreed. Actually it would make sense that any such system detect a certain level of transactional activity on the account before "bothering" with the relatively cpu-intensive prices of parsing/interpreting for commercial cues.
But I'd guess that most examples of this are selection bias; if once every 6 months someone notices "hey, I was just talking about my dog and there's a dog food ad on my browser!", that's what we get the story about...not the 4 billion people browsing the web daily who see no suck thi
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The wake up phrase is handled locally by dedicated low power silicon that only recognises one or two phrases. If it was actively recording and decoding speech the whole time your battery would last a few hours. The low power chips don't understand words at all, they just look for a certain sequence of tones.
Also, at least on Android you can disable "OK Google", or configure it to only be active when the phone is unlocked. I suppose if you were paranoid you wouldn't trust it, but given that all the speech re
Re: bullsh!t (Score:2)
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Partial is a subset of total. So can you be partially correct if you are also totally correct?
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I agree, this is TOTAL bullshit. You can take note of all adverts that you receive. Do any of them have anything to do with horses, trains, or mountain biking? If not, just start having discussions about any of them, and see if it changes what adverts you receive. I've done this, and it's certainly a thing.
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When you say "Ok Google/Siri" and the phone "wakes up" and responds.. it's frigging listening - always- period.
There's a difference between the phone listening, and Google listening. Turn on airplane mode and say "Ok Google". Notice how it still works? Though I don't blame you, the summary and the title are talking about two very different things.
You can't prove a negative (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not sure how to tell you this, but you can't prove a negative...
At least not this way.
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Its not a negative when the phones literally listen for commands 24/7. That is not in question.
The question is to what degree do they listen. I do not know personally but I do know the track record and history of the companies being questioned and they are not good.
Re:You can't prove a negative (Score:5, Interesting)
Proving a how a coin landed isn't "proving a negative."
Prove horses exist. Here's a horse. I've proved horses exist.
Prove unicorns don't exist. Here's no unicorn. I haven't proved anything.
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Here's the universe.
Here's the arrangement of atoms indicated by the word "unicorn".
No match found. ...It's a little computationally intense though.
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Who says it has to be constantly? Maybe it only does it when it detects certain keywords, or five minutes per day, or week, or only when it is sunny outside? Who knows?
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Who is to say it's not like when you buy a new car. You have no idea how many there are on the road until you own one and suddenly your hanging something unique from the rear view mirror because the same model car is always parking near you. You just didn't notice.
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Their is a-lot of shade between what we know amazon and google are doing (always listing on millions of device for a single phrase) and what we know they are not doing (profiling every product mentioned around all of these devices.)
Where is that cutoff in what is possible today? It would be possible, for example, that google could profile just 1% of their devices as high value users, and thus be looking at a custom 10 keywords each day only targeting key products around only that small demographic. So this
This is exactly what you would expect... (Score:5, Funny)
Google (Score:5, Interesting)
I recently went to the grocery store. Asked an employee if they had coconut cream pie. There wasn't any at the time. I left and went home.
Google popped up a question on my phone, asking about the grocery store. "Can you get coconut cream here?"
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Re:Google (Score:4, Interesting)
Congratulations. You are that 1 person.
And yet... (Score:5, Interesting)
A few months ago I was on lunch with a friend and I mentioned how I'm thinking about going to Europe (and this was before I searched for flights etc) and magically 3h later all the shitty car ads on facebook became KLM ads...
My friend has the facebook app and uses it, I disabled mine on the phone when I got the phone earlier this year.
Way too spooky of a "coincidence"
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This is the same reasoning used by people who claim psychics really work. Just ignore (willfully or otherwise) all of the stuff that they got wrong, and focus only on something that may, kinda, be right. It can't possibly be a 'coincidence'. Except it is. How many hundreds or thousands of other conversations have you had that DIDN'T result in ads?
Re:And yet... (Score:4, Insightful)
When data mining makes a plausible hit in identifying an ad target, it can feel spooky.
A year or two ago the Internet really decided I was just the sort of person who might take up unicycling. Everywhere I went I was confronted with advertisements for unicycles. How to unicycle videos showed up in my search results when I wasn't specifically looking for them. I complained to my son about this, and he said, "But Dad, that's something you would totally do."
Which of course is what makes it creepy. On the other hand, recently the Internet has decided that I really might want buy refrigerator ice maker water filters. I have no use for such a thing. Such false positive matches happen all the time, we just don't notice because it's irrelevant information to us.
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There's the other alternative -- they've been advertising flights to Europe for a while and you've only subconsciously processed them. Now that you've said something about it to a friend you're consciously noticing them.
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There's the other alternative -- they've been advertising flights to Europe for a while and you've only subconsciously processed them. Now that you've said something about it to a friend you're consciously noticing them.
No, I was heavily being spammed SUV ads for almost a full month before that (I drive a Leaf so...). And it was during a period of time where facebook was managing to evade adblock plus, so the ads were particularly annoying and in my face...
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A few months ago I was on lunch with a friend and I mentioned how I'm thinking about going to Europe (and this was before I searched for flights etc) and magically 3h later all the shitty car ads on facebook became KLM ads... My friend has the facebook app and uses it, I disabled mine on the phone when I got the phone earlier this year. Way too spooky of a "coincidence"
I think the most likely explanation is that you're just more predictable than you think.
I guess you mean that you use facebook via its website either on your phone or on your desktop? Did you do any searches at all related to Europe prior to the ads showing? Did your *friend* do searches for Europe after you mentioned it to them? It'd be easy for a tech giant to see that you're friends with someone, and they searched for Europe, so it's going to show you ads for Europe-related stuff too.
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I think the most likely explanation is that you're just more predictable than you think.
Perhaps, on the other hand it was the first time I mentioned going to Europe in about 3 years to someone else...
I guess you mean that you use facebook via its website either on your phone or on your desktop? Did you do any searches at all related to Europe prior to the ads showing? Did your *friend* do searches for Europe after you mentioned it to them? It'd be easy for a tech giant to see that you're friends with someone, and they searched for Europe, so it's going to show you ads for Europe-related stuff too.
No I did not search for Europe before the ads showed, and I only use my facebook account on desktop computers. With Firefox using the facebook container. I've gone through the trouble of disabling it from my phone, and also remove Bixby. I don't know if my friend searched for Europe, didn't think of asking at the time.
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Some flaws in the study (Score:2)
For 30 minutes they played the sound of cat and dog food adverts on loop.
Google is smart enough to identify a song by listening to 30 seconds of it, even against the backdrop of people talking, bar patrons, etc. Content-matching algorithms regularly flag copyrighted material based on small snippets of it uploaded to YouTube. So I don't think it's tinfoil-hat territory to believe that any app that could listen in for clues on interests, etc. could also differentiate between a repeated advert and regular human speech.
There's also the fact that one study, conducted on a couple of
Re:Some flaws in the study (Score:4, Insightful)
Some flaws? Sample size of 2? Using specific words played on a loop? Who "engineered" this study? Were the intentionally trying to not re-create actual use cases? Because they did a damn good job of it.
You could show me 1000 "studies" that show the phones aren't listening, and I still won't believe you. FAR too much anecdotal evidence and personal experience show that they are. Ironically, one of the cases of it happening to me was related to a dog food conversation with my mother-in-law.
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It should be pretty easy to prove by sniffling/logging all traffic coming from the phone. I can't take any study about this seriously if they didn't analyze every packet leaving the device especially since it would be trivial to do.
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Exactly! A sample size of 1000 is nothing compared with personal experience and anecdotes. In fact, science, who needs it!?
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This was a sample size of TWO. Over a very, very short period.
Not a thousand.
If I wanted to set up a phone "listening" service and didn't want it to be easily found, I'd certainly set it up so it would dodge a test as simplistic as this one.
For one thing, make sure it didn't engage on a new phone, since testing labs will always use "clean" setups. Only use phones that are well-used, with a good history of miscellaneous net traffic. Those are your high-value "networked" customers in the first place.
For anoth
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The study also assumes that if the app vendors are listening to what we say, they use the most simplistic thing imaginable with that data. "Oh, somebody within earshot said the world 'dog food', let's start spamming the user with dog food ads."
If these guys are listening, they aren't listening to trigger discrete events; they're in the business of building a profile of your behavior and habits.
Are there any other studies? (Score:2)
Who sponsored this research ? (Score:3)
Google, Facebook, NSA, GCHQ, Israeli Spyware Firm NSO Group [slashdot.org], or someone else ?
It's the government you should watch out for! (Score:2, Insightful)
Probably true but (Score:3)
The anecdotal evidence is overwhelming (Score:2)
My wife and I have discussed things recently only to have those topics reflected soon after in her Facebook feed. Unique topics we had not discussed before. That we had not searched for. New and unique. Travel plans were the most common ones, but others included legal issues, and specific medical issues not previously discussed by us because, well, they actually didn't affect us personally. Undeniable.
I haven't noticed this in my Facebook feed (She's got an iPhone, me, Pixel 3a), but I wasn't observant befo
Which is scarier? (Score:2)
One of the arguments that phones are listening is that sometimes, people will have a conversation about something, and suddenly, without making any social media posts or sending messages or emails about the topic, ads will show up for that thing.
For example, I was discussing the fact that I hadn't had a steak dinner in some time not too long ago. Interestingly, ads for a local steak house showed up.
How did they know? Well, some folks think the phones are listening. This is 1984 scary. But the other poss
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Yet you link to Amazon...?
Listening but filtering (Score:3, Interesting)
Duh (Score:2)
The phones have GPS, so the apps know when they're in a testing facility and turn off the surveillance -- duh. They also have various sensors that tell them they're not being handled ... /tin-foil-hat
Sounds far-fetched, but VW did this to pass emissions tests -- the vehicle detected when the vehicle was being tested and enabled emission controls during the tests. It did this by (from How They Did It: An Analysis of Emission Defeat Devices in Modern Automobiles [ucsd.edu]
The defeat device in Volkswagen vehicles used environmental parameters, including time and distance traveled, to detect a standard emissions test cycle: if the engine control unit determined that the vehicle was not under test, it would disable certain emission control measures, in some cases leading the vehicle to emit up to 40 times the allowed nitrogen oxides.
Defeat devices like Volkswagen’s are possible because of how regulatory agencies test vehicles for compliance before they can be offered for sale. In most jurisdictions, including the US and Europe, emissions tests are performed on a chassis dynamometer, a fixture that holds the vehicle in place while allowing its tires to rotate freely.
Simpler: repetition (Score:2)
Too much evidence to the contrary (Score:2)
The apps use software from Alphonso, a start-up that collects TV-viewing data for advertisers. Using a smartphone’s microphone, Alphonso’s software can detail what people watch by identifying audio signals in TV ads and shows, sometimes even matching that information with the places people visit and the movies they see.
Quote from here: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/1... [nytimes.com]
riiiiiigh (Score:2)
Well sure I can hear everything, but I promise not to listen.
Conspiracies and non-technical friends (Score:2)
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Although you are correct, it doesn't have to be a constant stream. Maybe it only transmits when it detects speech at a certain volume, or certain keywords. The criteria can change on the whim of the corporate overlord. We do know that phones constantly listen: that is how the whole "wake word" that the various agents (Siri, etc) works. The study itself is idiotic, because even if the phone isn't listening now, it could 5 minutes later after. It runs a closed ecosystem, so the behavior can change minute by m
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Before you start calling people stupid, you might consider that at a technical level this wouldn't be very hard to do. There is no reason to constantly transmit. The phone can pick and choose when to listen based on any criteria. Maybe it only does it 1% of the time the phone is on, or when it hears the word "Vacation". In fact you both are just displaying your technical ignorance.
Invalid test (Score:2)
I'm calling BS on this.
For starters, this is not valid. Taking some unused phones and subjecting them to 'test condition' audio seems completely bogus. One of the things these phones do, over time, is 'learn' about their owner.
Feeding the phone 'test condition' audio with no actual normal use... invalid.
Second, even if that was valid, and it's not... who's to say the operators of the backend don't know what's going on and invalidate the test by making the phone respond differently than if it wasn't in a l
Google Maps (Score:2)
Google Maps did it to me. Picked up a conversation in the car and mirrored the information in my Youtube recommendations.
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It May be Worse than That... (Score:2)
It does seem like they're listening, doesn't it?
One of the leaks from Facebook said that the problem isn't that you're being recorded, but that their machine-learning algorithms pattern match to figure out what you're likely to think of next based on their big data.
Another commenter here said that he asked the clerk at a store for some coconut cream pie and then he got an ad for one when he went home. So there are four possibilities:
1) they were listening.
2) they pattern matched and failed to predict your
Why going all the trouble.. (Score:2)
When people will just willingly give you all the freaking data, and you can use it with NNs to generate even more data?
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That is probably more accurate. It isn't worth the effort. They already know what location/age/gender/income/etc you are, which is enough to market to you.
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They also have the way you write, all your pictures, the way you talk, everything you searched, all your social connections...
I don't think it works quite like they assumed? (Score:2)
I'm pretty sure I read an article a while ago where they interviewed a developer who wrote some of this "listening" software for social media apps. And his explanation was more that apps like Facebook can and do/did listen occasionally, but only for certain "target" keywords.
Basically, they have no interest in what you're saying until you say just the right word that they've been paid by someone to drive targeted marketing based on it.
If a Japanese airline company pays for ad placement, then for the length
Skeptical, skpetical, skeptical . . . (Score:2)
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Missing the point (Score:5, Insightful)
If you wanted to know what the Facebook app is sending to Facebook, then modify the phone to track what is being transferred. Or have we reached a point where end-to-end security is so good that we can't even read the communications send by our own devices?
We should be less concerned about what is being sent, and more concerned about the fact that we don't have an easy way to find it out.
Sample size is too small to be significant (Score:2)
Conduct a proper study: have thousands of people volunteer for the 'study'/'experiment', select thousands at random, conduct a background check on them to be sure they're not Google/Facebook/whoever plants intent on poisoning the data with false negatives, have them all sign NDAs so no one but the researchers and the participants know who is actually involved, and spend a
Algorithms... (Score:2)
They know where you go well enough, they can easily know when to listen for keywords and when to wait to send it so it doesn't impact your data. It can tell that nothing is going on, so doesn't activate any reporting. It also could be recognizing that the data it's getting a stream of is advertisements, not conversation, so it just stops processing it until a significant change. Or perhaps the reporting waits for WiFi connection anyway so as to not use up someone's data, so it seems no data is sent during t
Camping Equipment! (Score:2)
I conducted a similar experiment a year ago. I wandered around my apartment which contains multiple phones, computers, and microphones talking for days about how much I wanted to buy camping equipment: Tents, sleeping bags, a canoe, you know... camping stuff.
I waited for the ads to show up in my browsing experience, but....nothing.
Then again, that was a year ago...
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Even if its not phones... (Score:3)
What did this prove? (Score:4, Interesting)
The claim was that phones were listening to people's conversations, so they tested this by using audio from advertisements? Didn't an advertisement that activated people's smart speakers cause the industry to start testing for and filtering out non-spoken audio like this? What sort of audio does the advertisement consist of?
The article says the researchers noted "no significant spike in data or battery usage.", but then also notes "interestingly, the study found that most of the Android phone apps seem to consume significantly more data in the silent rooms with many iOS apps using more in the audio-filled rooms." So their own data shows the devices act differently in silent rooms vs non-silent rooms. The analysts say they aren't sure why this is, but we can assume it's not phones spying?
The company co-founder is "confident that the overall results show that any secret transfer of significant data is not happening" after such a limited test? The experiment only ran for 3 days!. What if it stores and forwards data on a weekly schedule?
Not Facebook the Facebook ad network (Score:2)
Always assumed if this were occurring it would not be Facebook doing it directly rather a part of their third party/network/API for in app advertising.
You install some third party app... it does the microphone spying then feeds the context to Facebooks ad network.
If it were me making a serious attempt at detecting this I would start with app lists of all those involved with creepy "coincidences" I could find and do my testing from there.. not with a clean slate but with app lists in the wild as devices are
They do listen (Score:2)
Driving with google maps open. Began talking with my wife about rentals in Italy, where we were going the following week. Did not say "ok google" or anything approaching. Maps begins helpfully popping up bed & breakfast locations around us.
Wandera (Score:3)
Good product but I question the result. Not even a month ago, I watched a YouTube video with millions of views where a guy showed the ads he was getting at the start of the video (sans dog toys), then talked about dog toys next to his phone for like 3-4 minutes, then showed his ads at the end of the video which were about dog toys over several different websites. Maybe that's not proof, but it's suspicious as hell.
I can come up with a number of reasons they might have reached this result. Perhaps Google implemented counter-measures for experiments like this. It's probably not hard for an algorithm to tell the difference between a looping advertisement being played repeatedly and a person organically mentioning a product a couple of times. Perhaps there are other flaws with their methodology exist that I didn't think of. Or perhaps a company that puts out software to track data usage has a compelling interest in making people less paranoid about companies tracking what they're doing or saying.
SilverPush (Score:3)
I can't comment about listening to conversations, but advertisers are using phones, computers and televisions to surreptitiously listen to the environment as a way to deliver targeted ads, and have been for a long time. The technology isn't hard to build, I could do it myself if I was so inclined. There's a relevant article from 4 years ago about a company called SilverPush on arstechnica.com.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-p... [arstechnica.com]
Mobile security company? (Score:3)
This was research? What kind of research? The kind where we wear tin foil hats?
Get an Android phone and an iPhone.
Connect them to the Internet via Wifi.
Use an MDM solution to install invasive enterprise certificates.
Play sounds and capture all data from phones.
Use private keys to decrypt traffic
Find anything which seems suspicious
Why not download the Android source, instrument it and build it?
Why not disassemble the facebook app, write a "trace finder", follow the trace back from socket system calls?
This was shit research
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
(Some) security companies understand things like confirmation bias and the importance of control groups, that are (almost always) missed by YouTube conspiracy theorists.
Re:Security company? (Score:5, Interesting)
IMHO, the test was useless. Here's why:
1) used only one product segment of low-priced goods, not big-ticket goods (e.g. over $50/sku).
2) didn't use products with a competitive market with many willing players vying for customers
3) didn't establish a pattern for the user on other media as buying stuff from online adverts.
The ostensible "myth" continues-- there is a scent of bad research with a tiny sample size being used as empirical evidence. Although the phrase "I call bullshit" is over-used on /., this one has that stench.
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OTOH, maybe they were paid to do the research results in the first place. Lord knows their sample size is unprofessional. I never had any preexisting confirmation bias regarding my phone snooping on me, until both myself and my wife started noticing ads pop for stuff we did not browse for, but merely talked about, perhaps having seen a commercial on TV.
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Indeed, it's impressive (or scary) how much they have you profiled. Also apart from collecting and analyzing data there's very simple techniques to target you more. Like if your phone have seen a friends WiFi network or connected to it they might send you ads based on his/hers searches even minutes after you left - that could feed confirmation bias and make you think they've listened in on your conversations.
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I'm kidding, but I think the point is you'll never convince these weird, paranoid people that the tech companies aren't all secretly listening to every conversation and targeting them.
People are not paranoid enough. Consider what is known to be occurring:
Millions of TVs equipped with software to analyze content and report back to the vendor everything you are watching.
Apps continually listening for ultrasonic beacons emitted from colluding partners. On your phone within earshot of a TV or other colluding device... It knows and will now leverage that information against you.
Ubiquitous theft and leveraging of location by huge numbers of apps affecting hundreds of millions of people.
Ubiqu
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It is also key feature of human nature that we would be more likely to notice the odd coincidence and elevating it rather than placing i
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Or, your friend searched for it, or it noticed that your friend's phone was in proximity to his address or your work address or whatnot where such things are commonly searched for. If your friend did the search, and it knows you're friends, or even both of your locations by proximity to each other, that's enough data to start serving you ads based on your friend's data.