this post was submitted on 29 Dec 2023
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And yet we /still/ have people who assume that a corporation that routinely pulls shit like this, that has more or less complete control over your Android phone, default to tying everything on your phone to your Google account, and then also put an enormous amount of effort to making the default easiest option to log in to nearly any online service or app also be your Google account...
...we still have people that do not believe that the phones are always listening when seemingly any website or app you use gives you advertisements about what you were just talking about in the other room with the phone locked.
Its possible to go in and reset or delete your advertising id and use firefox and deny hardware access to every possible google process you can without breaking the OS to stop this, but 1) the capability to eavesdrop shouldnt even exist 2) it should be disclosed /plainly/ 3) it should be waaaaay easier to disable.
I actually saw a video once where the argument was that phones aren’t listening. Rather, Google (and Meta and the like) have so many other data points on you that they don’t need to listen. Listening to you would be far less efficient and far less insightful than relying on their vast network of other data they have on you. Even if you don’t use a single Google product, you’re still not safe.
Reminds me of the story where Target knew a customer was pregnant before she did. They started sending her ads for pregnancy/baby products before she even knew she was pregnant, all because they had so much data on her.
In my opinion, this is way more terrifying and problematic than if they were listening to us.
Exactly. This is what I try to explain to people when they bring up the listening.
Somehow it’s difficult for many to comprehend this. They find the listening easier to understand.
I described it to my dad like this: “They don’t need to listen to your conversations because they’re already able to simulate your thoughts.”
Kinda a stretch, but it worked for him.
Shhh shh shh, you can't just tell people that the vast majority of them are so predictable in so many ways that most of their life choices can be determined to reasonable degrees of accuracy such that they functionally /are/ NPCs to those with decent models and a huge training dataset.
It'll upset them.
This is really what’s likely happening. Running a microphone + speech decoding 24x7 on a device with limited battery and limited, metered bandwidth is quite a proposition, especially when there are so many ways to prevent microphone usage (not to mention how wrong Siri and Google and Alexa get things). It’s far easier to just gather data that people willingly provide and extrapolate.
Like what Cambridge Analytica did?
Oh I agree that is happening ... as well.
See my argument for /the phones really are listening and watching/ is pretty simple.
Parental Control mode.
A phone with parental control mode on does NOT let the user know it is on.
And it can listen, know your location, see what you are doing, etc.
It will even lie to the user and tell them location tracking is disabled... when it actually is not.
It will even lie to the user and tell them processes are disabled when they are not: Clear the cache, disable the thing, turn off wifi, and the process will update and reenable itself unless youve pulled out the sim card or turned airplane mode on. But then your phone isnt a phone any more, and they all reactivate once you let it be a phone again.
Only way you can get a hint this is going on is by installing an app that lets you monitor per app, per process network activity in detail.
If the OS has the capability to do these things and lie to the user about it... only showing up as strange bursts of google and android services firing off network activity when there shouldn't be any...
... then we know the OS has the ability to listen to you. Voice recognition isnt perfect for many reasons, but all your phone has to do is hear enough key words and make them out, and the fire off a little network burst of the key words to something like AdSense, or via a closed source api directly into an app.
Then all that has to happen is tech companies lie to their users and assume either they will never be definitively caught, or that if they are caught, they'll survive the fine, and do other market tactics to make it so competitors who do not spy on users never gain marketshare, including just buying them out.
Google gets money from selling your transcribed voice data directly via AdSense, and from selling it to apps that access the secret api that serve their own ads, other apps benefit from increased ad accuracy as well as other info maybe more pertinent to them specifically.
...
To me its similar to the argument around most anti cheat engines in games: nearly all of them are closed source, networked root kits. Its why to this day many online games cannot be played on linux: devs often seemingly just assume that linux players are hackers by default. Never mind that this is not true at all, that the vast, vast majority of actual hacks exploit vulnerabilities in windows and are sold on shady forums and darknet sites.
What you end up with is the current anti cheat paradigm for many large game studios of forcing pc players to use anti cheat software that causes massive performance issues, has full total kernel level access to your system, and you cant reveal anything about the code because then the hackers would know how to hack better! ... Even though anti cheat software does not actually work to stop effectively stop hacks in any decently popular game for very long.
Again the argument is: These are tech companies that would gain significantly by knowing as much about their players as possible for market research, we know the code is capable of spying.
...
Basically, motive, opportunity, murder weapon present at the scene but it cannot be determined if it was actually used, because the suspect will not let anyone examine it. Suspect has a conviction track record of killing people with similar weapons and would stand to gain financially from commiting the murder.
Obviously not a perfect analogy, but maybe reframing it like that gives a bit different perspective?
Absolute proof? No. Extremely suspicious and plausible? Yes.
Target knew before her dad, not her
Oh come on. Don't bring this into conspiracy territory. Yes, eavesdropping does happen, but it's not something an uncompromised Android phone will do when locked. Even when it does happen in the case of spyware, the people doing it aren't selling your transcriptions to advertisers.
People should still opt out of as many of GAPS's spyware-like features as possible, as you suggest, but not because it's a special anti-listening-device warding spell.
conspiracy theory
Get out.
https://bgr.com/tech/marketing-company-says-it-can-eavesdrop-on-conversations-through-our-devices/#:~:text=CMG's%20purported%20tech%20isn't,%2C%20Google%2C%20and%20Bing%20Search.
Read the document:
Key word is "technology partner". They're buying voice transcripts ripped from someone else's spyware and selling the service of scraping it for keywords and maybe somehow tying that back to an individual by cross-referencing the hit against data from traditional above-board ad platforms.
Google isn't buying transcripts, Facebook isn't buying transcripts. It's Cox Media buying shady recordings stolen from spyware-compromised devices and then trying to whitewash it into something sellable with their (unverifiable) cross-analytics middleware.
Oh sure, so now you're gonna insist they're buying shit that totally doesn't exist.
No, I am not contradicting myself. Let me say it again with the ambiguity removed:
I'm sure you still believe this is a load of apologia and frankly you can think what you want, but you should probably know that I'd already read about the Cox story when it first broke and specifically chose my words with that knowledge in mind.