(I know many of you already know it but this incident I experienced made me so paranoid about using smartphones)

To start off, I’m not that deep into privacy rabbit hole but I do as much I can possibly to be private on my phone. But for the rest of phones in my family, I generally don’t care because they are not tech savvy and pushing them towards privacy would make their lives hard.

So, the other day I pirated a movie for my family and since it was on Netflix, it was a direct rip with full HD. I was explaining to my family how this looks so good as this is an direct rip off from the Netflix platform, and not a recording of a screening in a cinema hall(camrip). It was a small 2min discussion in my native language with only English words used are record, piracy and Netflix.

Later I walk off and open YouTube, and I see a 2 recommendations pop-up on my homepage, “How to record Netflix shows” & “Why can’t you screen record Netflix”. THE WHAT NOW. I felt insanely insecure as I was sure never in my life I looked this shit up and it was purely based on those words I just spoke 5min back.

I am pretty secure on my device afaik and pretty sure all the listening happened on other devices in my family. Later that day, I went and saw which all apps had microphone access, moved most of them to Ask everytime and disabled Google app which literally has all the permissions enabled.

Overall a scary and saddening experience as this might be happening to almost everyone and made me feel it the journey I took to privacy-focused, all worth it.

  • N0x0n@lemmy.ml
    0·
    5 days ago

    I get your feeling :) Don’t worry the silent majority is on your side. However they won’t comment because they fear from being banned or backslashed…

    While It can’t be proven or disapproven, I also had my share of strange coincidence where my mind goes “Huh? How is that even possible?”… Kinda strange feeling! But that feeling gave me the push to the privacy route maybe in a rather to extreme direction? Always follow your guts when there’s to much noise to make a clear decision.

    • RethinkDNS (block every in/out request except those manually allowed)
    • Degoogles android (Shizuku+canta, magisk, debloater)
    • Only open source apps and delete everything else (no exceptions here) -…

    You will never get full 100% privacy or anonymity, however you can make your data as much as difficult to get and waste some of their resource and time :).

    Good luck !

      • ganymede@lemmy.ml
        0·
        3 days ago

        cos the majority in this thread cannot even read the articles they cite mistakenly thinking it supports their unscientific claims that this topic is decided.

        afaict no researcher has formally claimed a full coverage binary analysis.

        if you know of such a study please link?

        afaict the researchers are very upfront about the limits to the coverage of their studies and the importance of that uncovered ground being covered.

        when the researchers themselves are saying the work isn’t over. why are all the super geniuses in this thread so smugly announcing this topic is wrapped up?

        i guess they know better than the actual researchers do. amazing, someone should tell them not to worry cos the geniuses in the forums have it all worked out 🤣

        [if you’re unable to reply with a direct excerpt from actual formally issued research (not some pop media headline) i will not bother responding]

        • N0x0n@lemmy.ml
          0·
          2 days ago

          Hahaha… What a stupid take. Yeah scientific research isn’t biased and hasn’t been poisoned by conflict of interest… never has been and never will I guess? Scientific research is the ultimate truth of wisdom and you don’t need your own critical thinking anymore 😮‍💨 (Yeah the tobacco industry was right, smoking is healthy !)

          when the researchers themselves are saying the work isn’t over. why are all the super geniuses in this thread so smugly announcing this topic is wrapped up?

          It’s better to be safe than sorry

          Edit:

          Therefore, the fact that no evidence for large-scale mobile eavesdropping has been found so far should not be interpreted as an all-clear. It could only mean that it is difficult – under current circumstances perhaps even impossible – to detect such attacks effectively.

          https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-22479-0_6

          Scientific enough?