Tested this a while back, had me and my gf talk about kids like where going to have one and all that but never got any baby products before and never typed or asked any electronics about anything related to it.
Within like a few days we started getting ads for babies and expecting parents.
It’s solid proof there always hearing us.
It’s solid proof there always hearing us.
there was actually a study performed a few years ago that didn’t find any evidence for several thousand tested apps to listen on you (some of the scummy ones were caught recording screens, on the other hand). also, the company mentioned in the posted article admits that their claims were exaggerated.
Uh dude, your girlfriend is pregnant
I have ads blocked on nearly everything, but when I was at a client where they are not blocked, I got an ad for something I was talking about the week before. Don’t remember it, but it happened exactly as you said.
Good breakdown on this in arstechnica:
https://arstechnica.com/?p=1991469
In a statement emailed to Ars Technica, Cox Media Group said that its advertising tools include “third-party vendor products powered by data sets sourced from users by various social media and other applications then packaged and resold to data servicers.” The statement continues:
Advertising data based on voice and other data is collected by these platforms and devices under the terms and conditions provided by those apps and accepted by their users, and can then be sold to third-party companies and converted into anonymized information for advertisers. This anonymized data then is resold by numerous advertising companies.
The company added that it does not “listen to any conversations or have access to anything beyond a third-party aggregated, anonymized and fully encrypted data set that can be used for ad placement” and “regret[s] any confusion.”
That last paragraph. I knew they were lying with that headline.
My sister snd I had a conversation in a terrace about flower seeds to gift my mother. Neither has google assitant or any other voice search app acrivated. We both started getting seed ads. Pretty damning
I’ve always stood by the position it’s totally possible to snoop audio and match it to a bloom filter or on device least of keywords for ads. Siri is always on so your mic can be always listening and have no impact on the battery life.
In modern mobile OSs it should be clear that your mic is either on or off (to apps) and we don’t see the mic on all the time as would be needed for this. Maybe there’s a hack, but at the scale and being used for commercial services I think someone would have noticed.
That’s probably because you have no technical knowledge of voice recognition whatsoever.
Lots of people of Siri disabled entirely. My household included.
At one point Google had highly specialized hardware that only listened for “ok Google”; that’s why you couldn’t (and AFAICT still can’t) change the wake word.
Things may have changed in the years since I learned that, but I suspect recognizing a bunch of words from an ever-changing list would still need to be done in software and require the phone’s CPU to run.
OTOH, the way Android phones recognize and songs for you is very much like what you described, so maybe there really is hardware already that can recognize a shitload of arbitrary sounds using practically no power.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
But a marketing company called CMG Local Solutions sparked panic recently by alluding that it has access to people’s private conversations by tapping into data gathered by the microphones on their phones, TVs, and other personal electronics, as first reported by 404 Media on Thursday.
A November 28 blog post described Active Listening technology as using AI to “detect relevant conversations via smartphones, smart TVs, and other devices.”
This is a world where no pre-purchase murmurs go unanalyzed, and the whispers of consumers become a tool for you to target, retarget, and conquer your local market.
The website previously pointed to CMG uploading past client data into its platform to make “buyer personas.”
The archived version of the page discussed an AI-based analysis of the data and generating an “encrypted evergreen audience list” used to re-target ads on various platforms, including streaming TV and audio, display ads, paid social media, YouTube, Google, and Bing Search.
Before Cox Media Group sent its statement, though, CMG’s claims of collecting data on “casual conversations in real-time,” as its blog stated, were questionable.
The original article contains 711 words, the summary contains 179 words. Saved 75%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Always listening is somewhat preferable to ‘Has such an accurate profile on you from the data that is available that these instances happen by pure coincidence’. That’s way scarier and just as intrusive. At least with a listening device you can get rid of it.
Sad thing is, it’s likely both.
Talk about a new car near your phone.
Enjoy car ads.
Nope, nothing going on here.
I have a govee backlight for my tv which basically points a webcam into my living room
Let’s start with this. Google Assistant, Siri, Cortina Alexa, etc are always listening.
Your phone can be listening, but at least on Android the microphone permissions are necessary, and unless there are native exploits I’m super unaware of, this happens at the lowest levels.
Keep your phone in your pocket, check the app permissions, learn how to check data leaving your network, and learn to love Big Brother.
Language really muddles things here. What counts as “listening”? In some sense a microphone not connected to anything is always “listening” but we don’t call it that because the electrical impulses it generates don’t go anywhere. Is a phone “listening” if it’s just running that data through a routine that only recognizes a wake word? Does it make sense to use the same word for that as for live streaming data to a server?
“guys google assistant isn’t always listening lol it only wakes up on the trigger word. you people know nothing about IT or how good marketers are at guessing” -10,000,000 neckbeards for the last decade, despite everyone’s obvious anecdotal experiences that are just too bullshit to ignore.
Did it really take them admitting it for a publication to talk about it?
the company itself has admitted that their claims were exaggerated.
It was the admission that was the news. People know they are being gaslit so when someone finally admits they are gaslighting you you can and should make them pay. Problem with gaslighting is that you don’t have proof, but you know
At the risk of being called a neckbeard:
Before Cox Media Group sent its statement, though, CMG’s claims of collecting data on “casual conversations in real-time,” as its blog stated, were questionable. CMG never explained how our devices would somehow be able to garner the computing and networking power necessary to record and send every conversation spoken within the device’s range in “real-time,” unbeknownst to the device’s owner. The firm also never explained how it acquired the type of access that requires law enforcement to obtain a warrant. This is despite CMG’s blog claiming that with Active Listening, advertisers would be able to know “the second someone in your area is concerned about mold in their closet,” for example.
In other words, they were hyping up capabilities they don’t have.
Are you familiar with Wireshark and network sniffing? Instead of just wondering, why not look for yourself what these devices are sending out? It’s not hard, and it’s not a secret.
I’m not scared of them, because I know exactly how they work and exactly what’s going across my network at all times.
Is there a way to route traffic from the router to Wireshark? Or would this require a router capable of like OpenWRT?
I have a stupid linksys that has awesome wifi power, but I can’t seem to get custom firmware on it. I might be able to configure it as an access point.
My router is a full on Linux server PC in a rack, so in my case I can just monitor all its interfaces directly on the box. I’ve got an entirely seperate VLAN for my IoT stuff (because a LOT of them are still very unsecure and I’m more scared of my network being compromised that way, by them just getting straight up hacked).
An easy way to do it in your case if you have a gimped ISP-provided router is to find an old hub (not a switch), plug a wireless access point into that, and have the device connect only to that access point. Then plug your laptop or computer into one of the other hub ports and you should be able to listen in on everything being sent across that hub.
More advanced switches might be able to do port-mirroring, which accomplishes the same thing.
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Just because you don’t understand statistics and metadata analysis doesn’t make it fake. And of course, since it’s real, you can surely point to all the apps whose network traffic was monitored and all the voice data constantly being transmitted that was captured. Because surely in an era where many people pay for data, it’d be impossible to miss the constant audio stream coming from every one of these devices eating up your bandwidth cap.
But nah, “I feel this is true” is all we need. Even when the person who says it, and said it to advertise their product, admits they lied for sales.
Are they tracking you? You bet. If you think they’re so unsophisticated that they need to literally listen to your every word instead of the millions of other data points you FREELY give away already, you just don’t understand the tech and are fear mongering.
Try block your phone’s front camera with a piece of black tape. The phone will ask you to remove it*, which is creepy as hell.
*Depends on the phone (I had a obsolete Huawei model) and only occured to me at random like 1 times per month.
I’m skeptical of this, but I wouldn’t put it past them either.
Since when? I disable the camera through software and also use a makeshift lens cap attached to the phone case. Never once came across this. What phone are you using?
