This is what infuriates me about commercials that intentionally set off Alexa. I don’t, and would never put such an unnecessary piece of surveillance in my house, but it pisses me off that that’s legal to do.
The corporate spying network doesn’t care if some television gets mixed in with our most intimate secrets. As long as they get what they’re looking for, they’re happy to accept having some TV in there, too.
I can’t tell you whether your phone, specifically is listening to you. (How many free games are installed? More than zero?)
I can tell you, we should trust our phones less than we have in the past. There’s new evidence of privacy invading innovations every week.
Voices or any sound on TV or radio are broadcast with a subaudible identifying channel which pips the programme title and production date in a tight asymmetric closed loop. Your phone can read this and so separate it out from actual spoken voices in the room. An organic spoken voice will produce phlegmatic outflow during natural conversation that can mimic this pipping giving your date of birth and street location but most modern phones can detect and discount it but will record it.
It uses the camera to tell
Thank you!
smashes iPhone front camera with a hammer, accidentally breaks the whole screen
Your phone typically isn’t actually listening to you. Constantly recording and uploading that data would destroy your battery.
A lot of it is just the metadata from ads, apps, location, nearby devices etc. Your phone doesn’t need to know that you were watching CNN last night. CNN knows that this IP was watching them, google knows that your phone was at that IP at that time, so it can assume you watched CNN last night.
Bullshit. I read a funny comment about different types of nipples out loud to my wife the other day, literally within 24 hours I started getting ads for breast pumps. I use pihole at home, but when I’m out and not on my DNS, I get ads sometimes. It absolutely added ads for that, you’ll never convince me otherwise.
Your phone typically isn’t actually listening to you.
It is if you have any “voice assistant” on.
Emphasis on the active part. It’s listening, but passively for the keyword. The phone isn’t constantly sending all the data it hears 24/7 off to someone else. But once that keyword has been activated now it’s actively listening and that data is being recorded and sent.
Really because I was just watching Colbert on YouTube and he set Siri off, and when I asked her to tell me what the last question I asked, she couldn’t. But they’re not always monitoring they just happen to wake up when the correct phrase is said…
It’s also the voice training you do when you set up assistant. Sometimes it recognizes my voice only and once in a while a phrase on the TV will set it off as it’s close to my inflections.
Also, they know your contacts. When you share links and stuff with friends they see what your friends search and sometimes assume you’re interested too.
Always sanitize your links when sharing them. Look at the querystring (everything after the ?, separated by &) most of that data isn’t needed.
YouTube link? Delete the si=(value) v= is the video.
It’s irritating that YT added that. The vast majority of people have no idea, of course.
It knows you intimately.
😏
Anybody got recommendations on cases or other solutions to mitigate this?
I recently installed /e/OS on my phone. It’s based on Lineage OS, which is based on AOSP.
Battery lasts a week in sparse use.
Its main feature is privacy. Tracker blocker pictured:
Idk… I have an iPhone and pretty strict privacy settings and habits. I have yet to find a targeted ad on instagram (I have it since an argument with my brother to prove to him that the phone is not always listening to you)
Yeah I seen you can turn off personalized ads. Doesn’t mean it’s not listening to you though.
grapheneOS for pixel phones
It turn off the mics when not in use?
You can toggle mic off through quick tiles to be sure it’s off. Same as location, Bluetooth etc.
Tbh I don’t believe at all that phones record you, they leak enough info in every other way that they don’t need to spy on your conversions.
grapheneOS has a metric shittonne of features that allow much better seperation between apps, sandboxes all Google services so you can control it’s permissions (or not use/install them) and much more
You can leak a lot less data with it, not using/installing google services, using PWA/webpage shortcuts instead of apps, focusing on using FOSS software over proprietary, etc
It does.
Both your TV and phone hooked to the same WiFi?
Shazamm like program for detection of TV audio.
If the phone is not moving (known by phone) the TV and your voice could be differentiable.
You’re voice is within a certain range of Hz
Most important: it doesn’t need to. Just the stuff you do on your phone is probably more than enough data
It’s not literally listening 24/7, people are insane if they think it’s doing that. And even if it were, just block all the ad, tracking domains and/or IP blocks and be done with it.
Mostly just listening for keywords that wake it up and send a small true-false keyword thing, I’d assume. Maybe stores it locally and sends out once/day or something? Could be as part of the check for updates process.
Rig it up to something to detect all target IP addresses is a good start.
That asked about their phone SPYING on them. So I’m taking this at face value and assuming more than just targeted advertising.
Block all the IPs you want, you can’t block a Stingray
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stingray_phone_tracker.
Then you could also have mesh network built into devices inside your WiFi connecting to similar devices.
And my favorite for right now, and the thing I finished my last response with, your phone.
Your phone is most likely unique, between the device id, your carrier, location, other apps, contacts, operating system, etc. I personally assume most large websites could find you in minutes.
The selfie camera can read lips.
