this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2023
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Privacy
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Do people seriously still think this is a thing?
Literally anyone can run the basic numbers on the bandwidth that would be involved, you have 2 options:
They stream the audio out to their own servers which process is there. The bandwidth involved would be INSTANTLY obvious, as streaming audio out is non-trivial and anyone can pop open their phone to monitor their network usage. You'd hit your data limit in 1-2 days right away
They have the app always on and listening for "wakewords", which then trigger the recording and only then does it stream audio out. WakewordS plural is doing a LOT of heavy lifting here. Just 1 single wakeword takes a tremendous amount of training and money, and if they wanted the countless amount of them that would be required for what people are claiming? We're talking a LOT of money. But thats not all, running that sort of program is extremely resource intensive and, once again, you can monitor your phones resource usage, you'd see the app at the top burning through your battery like no tomorrow. Android and iPhone both have notifications to inform you if a specific app is using a lot of battery power and will show you this sort of indicator. You'd once again instantly notice such an app running.
I think a big part of this misunderstanding comes from the fact that Alexa/Google devices seem so small and trivial for their wakewords.
What people dont know though is Alexa / Google Home have an entire dedicated board with its own dedicated processor JUST for detecting their ONE wake word, and not only that they explicitly chose a phrase that is easy to listen for
"Okay Google" and "Hey Alexa" have a non-trivial amount of engineering baked into making sure they are distinct and less likely to get mistaken for other words, and even despite that they have false positives constantly.
If thats the amount of resources involved for just one wake word/phrase, you have to understand that targeted marking would require hundreds times that, its not viable for your phone to do it 24/7 without also doubling as a hand warmer in your pocket all day long.
The point of OK Google is to start listening for commands, so it needs to be really good and accurate. Whereas, the point of fluffy blanket is to show you an ad for fluffy blankets, so it can be poorly trained and wildly inaccurate. It wouldn’t take that much money to train a model to listen for some ad keywords and be just accurate enough to get a return on investment.
(I’m not saying they are monitoring you, just that it would probably be a lot less expensive than you think.)
This along with much else that's pointed out make the whole devices capturing audio to process keywords for ads all seem unlikely, but, one thing worth pointing out is that people do sell bad products that barely or even just plain old don't do what they told their customers it would do. Someone could sell a listening to keywords to target ads solution to interested advertisers that just really sucks and is super shit at its job. From the device user's standpoint it'd be a small comfort to know the device was listening to your conversations but also really sucked at it and often thought you were saying something totally different to what you said but I'd still be greatly dismayed that they were attempting, albeit poorly, to listen to my conversations.