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
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.
not really the same thing but it could happen to anyone: https://www.reuters.com/legal/apple-pay-95-million-settle-siri-privacy-lawsuit-2025-01-02/
They need to demand a code review to find out who set up some of these triggers. Especially the zipper sound. Send that creep to prison.
I used to think the same. I’m all for digital privacy, but listening to a microphone? That’s ridiculous, the legal ramifications would be enormous. Plus, encoding and sending all this data? Not practical, and of course, we are fully aware of confirmation bias and selective memory so for sure those personal anecdotes must be coincidences.
Then it happened to me. I use a VPN, all my devices have a billion types of ad blocking, private DNS, JavaScript disabled by default and so on. Then I mention a product next to my girlfriend, a product that only interested me and I had recently discovered, nothing she was ever aware of… and while I was still right next to her, five minutes later, her phone is showing up ads for said product. Her phone, not mine. The product is not Coca-Cola, it’s not something that often pops up.
What other explanation could there be? The coincidence of the year? They are listening.
The speech recognition software used by digital assistants that come with most modern smartphones would make it trivial to process the audio locally and map the output to your ad profile. Much lighter lift than sending audio recordings.
And a much smaller footprint. It could even be binary data for tweaking your algorithmic profile, say the name of a branded product or in the case of a product with few options just the type of item. Audio runs in the megabytes per minute, transcripts in the kilobytes, but reducing to a conclusion of interest in a single specific item is really very small, hard to notice tbh.
They are absolutely listening. This is very easy to test. Speak around a Google or Amazon or Apple device, and start talking about things you would never buy, never need, have never looked up, and is completely irrelevant for your demographic. You’ll get ads for it anyway by the end of the day or week.
Listen to the Big Tech comments to press and congressional testimony very carefully. They always say something like, ‘Facebook is not spying on your microphone.’ They’re always very carefully wording it as the parent company is not listening to your devices. But they absolutely know either one of their subsidiaries or their partners are listening to your microphone, and feeding the data to them.
My roommate, an iPhone user and English only speaker, left his TV on the Spanish channel with his phone right next to it and left for work. When he came back home and checked his phone, all his Facebook and Twitter ads were in Spanish. This was at least 10 years ago.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The plural of anecdote is not data
Yes, this is the common statement I am referencing.
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.
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.
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.
Aw jeez not this again.
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?
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
I’m not saying it’s completely 100% not possible and has never happened in the history of human technology, but the situation is not as ubiquitous as most people seem to think it is.
Don’t get me wrong, collecting and inferring personal information is happening on an epic and ubiquitous scale these days, but for the most part, it’s not the microphones on your devices that are doing the data collection.
Pretty much all my older relatives are completely convinced their phones are listening to their day to day conversations and serving up ads based on those conversations. One of them came to visit me for a week over the summer. One night we had been talking about having asparagus for dinner, and as evidence that their phone was listening to us, the next day they showed me that their news feed was filled with asparagus recipes. Another night, we were talking about one of their medical conditions and the drugs they were taking, and the next day they showed me that they got notifications about a prescription drug for that condition. On another day, we had been talking about a specific actor’s filmography and all their movies that we liked, the next day their streaming video app was suggesting a bunch of content from that actor.
I can understand why this seemed pretty convincing that our phones were listening to us, but consider the simpler explanation.
I live in a rural area where there’s not good cellular reception, so for the most part, our phones are connected via wifi to the same internet connection. Essentially, every device on the property has the same external IP address. So, when I looked up asparagus recipes on my laptop later that night because I wanted to surprise my relative with that specific dish, and when I Googled the prescription medication the relative was taking to see what the side effects where, and when I looked up that actor on IMBD to see what all movies they’d been in, that pretty much gave all the advertisers all the information they needed to start targeting ads and recommendations to folks sharing the same IP address.
Occam’s Razor being what it is, I assume that’s how things went down versus all our conversations being constantly recorded and uploaded to the net to be interpreted and used for the purposes of serving ads.
Using your search data is bad enough
phew
Except it is also listening. This was a minor scandal back in September. I believe Cox media has since been dropped by Facebook and Google and such, but it happened.
What’s Happening: In a pitch deck that has surfaced since the initial story broke out, Cox Media Group (CMG), a digital marketing outfit based out of Atlanta, Georgia, was spotted touting “the power of voice” in a pitch. In it, they outlined how they can use AI to collect and analyze voice data from users through more than 470 sources.
https://news.itsfoss.com/ad-company-listening-to-microphone/
That article covers a pitch deck by an ad agency with absolutely zero detail of how it works.
If this is happening, it should be easy to test.
According to the company, CMG Local Solutions’ access to advertising data based on voice and other data is collected by third-party platforms and devices “under the terms and conditions provided by those apps and accepted by their users.”
In the since-deleted blog post, CMG Local Solutions discusses whether Active Listening is legal. “We know what you’re thinking. Is this even legal? The short answer is: yes. It is legal for phones and devices to listen to you. When a new app download or update prompts consumers with a multi-page terms of use agreement somewhere in the fine print, Active Listening is often included,” the company said in the post.
Apps still need mic permissions to do so. Many Android ROMs include notices when the mic is being used, it would be very easy to tell if an app was actually doing this.
