My favorite reality to wake people up to: You’re not being listened to, you’re predictable.
It’s not that they wouldn’t listen to you, it’s that they don’t need to. It doesn’t take much data about you for the corps that track you to realize what demographics you fall into. From there, it’s a matter of advertising to you the same way they do to everyone else in your demographic pools.
Whenever this comes up, people debate endlessly on whether your phone is listening to you. Or if it’s just listening for certain keywords. Or if audio isn’t involved at all.
If you have an iPhone and AirPods and a willing partner, I want you to try something. Put on the AirPods. Go into settings, then accessibility, and then under Hearing, go into Audio & Visual and turn on “Live Listen.” Turn it all the way up.
You can now hear what your iPhone can hear. Hold your mic (bottom of the phone, left of the charging port as you face the screen) up to your heart. Or your stomach as you drink (anything).
Now get your partner. Have them take your iPhone as far from you as possible without breaking the AirPods connection (about 10m). Then have them walk away from it whispering anything. Holler when you stop being able to hear them.
I’ll spoil the answer for you. Your iPhone can actually hear whispering from a couple rooms away.
There’s no reason to think Android phones can’t do the same. iPhones have a lot of premium parts, but no one’s bragging about the microphone. They’re all gonna be about the same these days.
There is your world which is made up of everything you can see, hear, smell, taste, and touch. Your phone’s world is very different. It can see and hear way better than you or anyone can. It can’t taste, touch, or smell, but it perceives WiFi and Bluetooth signals and it always knows exactly where it is because of GPS. And it has all kinds of information about you. If it’s an iPhone, it’s sharing this with every other Apple device you own (or are owned by?). If it’s Android, it’s sharing it with advertisers (possibly anonymized). Either way, the machines are conspiring. Whether it’s against you, for you, or neutral is up for debate. The facts are not. I’m a Mac guy, I like what Apple stuff does. I also like Android. I don’t harbor any illusions that these companies have my best interests at heart, or yours.
And yet, my iPhone let me type this. It did correct a few words, but nonsensically, not maliciously, and I was able to fix them as I caught them.
Thats still all local activity.
People said the same thing about google home and alexa - and the reality is that it doesnt send anything until triggered.
The reason why it seems like your devices are listening is because of related data. Looking for where to buy magnesium, calcium, and zinc? Maybe while also looking for unscented lotion? Probably pregnant. Searched for them on your phone or desktop? All that data is being shared to hundreds of third parties.
All this data can be used to predict if you might be sick, or if you might be having trouble paying bills, popular things in your area that you may be talking about with friends (who just searched for it and now the data is related to you as well if you are in the same region, age group, marital status, etc), and so on down the line.
What you’re saying near a device is practically irrelevant when there are thousands of other data points to go off of. They dont need crappy speech to text when all that data is being sent right from your keyboard.
Edited to add: I do literally mean your keyboard BTW. If youre using a google keyboard, Samsung keyboard, apple keyboard, etc - yeah they absolutely “share data with relevant parties”.
Oh no, I know the difference. I’m just pointing out that while people are debating whether they are, I’d like to point out (and I can demonstrably prove) that they can and do hear a lot more than you think.
It’s pure speculation if they’re using that data or not. Correlation and causation and all that. The capability is certainly there. The results speak for themselves. But does one cause the other? Or are there other factors involved? We don’t really know and everybody is just speculating.
I can say specifically that talking around devices, unless you’ve activated a voice assistant or something, does not transmit data anywhere. You can test this yourself if you’ve got a DNS server set up locally for the device being tested to hit, and sniff the traffic as well. This is not conjecture, its able to be tested pretty easily.
Is it it though? With closed source software we don’t know what the software does.
What’s stopping audio being recorded, stored locally, and only transmitted when other legitimate data is being transmitted? Hiding amongst the rest. Split up into random packets as to be obfuscated.
This used to be the talk of paranoid tin hat conspiracy theorists without any evidence but with the amount of tech scandals, Snowden leaks, etc it’s no longer unfounded paranoia. Tech companies are nefarious, they will figure out nefarious means to get what they want.
Is it it though? With closed source software we don’t know what the software does.
You can track network communication, yes.
What’s stopping audio being recorded, stored locally, and only transmitted when other legitimate data is being transmitted? Hiding amongst the rest. Split up into random packets as to be obfuscated.
Where it goes, and whether or not it sends. This can all be tracked, along with the size of the data being sent. Even when split. This is all manageable with readily available tools…
This used to be the talk of paranoid tin hat conspiracy theorists without any evidence but with the amount of tech scandals, Snowden leaks, etc it’s no longer unfounded paranoia. Tech companies are nefarious, they will figure out nefarious means to get what they want.
Audio is a terrible medium - especially when they can get it from your keyboard, your browser, the apps you have installed, the social networks you’re signed into, so on and so forth.
And, as I said, you can investigate this yourself. I’m hardly the only person who has actually checked. I did it for work, but others have done the same.
Edit: Let me expand briefly on “audio is a terrible medium”. There are issues with:
- Background noise / audio quality
- Speech patterns and accents
- Homophones
- Picking up context
- Specialized words or uncommon words
- Punctuation is hard to detect, which drastically changes meaning in a sentence
Audio is not worth it. Its too much effort for too little information.
The thing is that your phone doesn’t actually need to listen to you for this to happen.
For one thing, it’s possible that you’re interested in the product because of what your phone showed to you. It can lead you by the nose.
Also, it’s possible that your phone has been trying to sell this item to you but you didn’t notice before because you weren’t interested. It’s like how you notice more blue cars if you play a game where you count blue cars.
People often take longer to make decisions than they think. You may think that this is the first time you’ve been interested in a product, but you may have been hinting about it for a long time, and your phone could pick up on that from searches, for example.
It’s possible that your phone knows what people you are near to. If those people have been searching for something, your phone might be able to make recommendations from that data.
It’s possible that your phone knows what people you are near to. If those people have been searching for something, your phone might be able to make recommendations from that data.
It is horrifying. Phones have access to so much other cheap and easy data that I think the phone companies would see processing all of that audio as an unnecessary expense.
And so that’s why I suspect it’s a red herring. I could easily be wrong though.
