Don’t iPhone have an indicator when the mic is recording? Also, this feels like it would be insanely easy to test by capturing the payloads sent to FB; you could even use something like Charles Proxy to do it.
FB having access to microphone makes sense for plenty of other completely innocent reasons (for example, if you can record a video from inside the app).
If this was actually true, I can’t help but feel that someone would have proven it technically by now instead of relying on these types of self experiment and anecdotes, especially given how commonly this is touted.
> 3) If a background app starts then stops recording audio while the screen is off, would you have an indicator that it recorded audio?
Yes. iOS displays an indicator if an app has recently used the mic.
> Note: Whenever an app uses the camera (including when the camera and microphone are used together), a green indicator appears. An orange indicator appears at the top of the screen whenever an app uses the microphone without the camera. Also, a message appears at the top of Control Center to inform you when an app has recently used either.
The phone was sitting between two people having a conversation, one of them "swiped it open" meaning it was off to begin with, then was immediately displayed an ad for that conversation, and upon hearing this the tech-savvy person in the house understood what happened, confirmed it with the mic access to facebook in the settings, and then disabled the behavior.
Considering the original claim was "zero indication that the mic is hot" and now it's "zero indication that the mic is hot if the screen is off", I'd say that the goal post has moved considerably.
But if you want to know if Facebook is listening to you through the iPhone microphone, you should probably look at the screen for the indicator. iOS apps can't start recording on their own in the background, there's no API for that. If they are listening to you, they'd have to start the audio session in the foreground, which would allow you to see the indicator.
I wrote the original "Wife swipes open the phone" comment, so that's the context you seem to be missing. Sure you can see a little dot on your phone when YOU run some experiment today and look for it, but was that indicator available in the exact situation where the targeted ad was displayed? No.
Also, this incident happened in the past and we know there have been dramatic API changes on both Apple and Facebook products. The limits of the API today don't reflect the capabilities that were available to developers in the past. I doubt Facebook is hacking the App Store process to use hidden APIs. It was probably just available in the past and my wife granted the facebook app complete access to the mic, so they took what they wanted.
I'd make sure to disable that permission today too, just in case.
One last thing is I just opened my iPhone again and hit record. I honestly didn't see the tiny orange pixel at the top of my phone until you pointed it out. I was basically looking for the green video indicator light to show. So I'm technically wrong about NO indication, you're welcome.
Android has a notification now when the mic is recording and has had the ability to deny microphone and lots of other access for a long time now. Thankfully it sounds like iOS is catching up
And don’t forget the battery. A mic recording 24/7 would drain the battery much faster and would not go unnoticed unless specialized hardware is used like the one for “hey siri” and “ok google”.
Try any voice recording app for a few hours, now use the facebook app for the same number of hours. The impact on battery life of a mic actively recording alone is very noticeable, so noticeable that your phone has a special chip just to recognize patterns similar to “hey siri”.
It would not need to record high quality audio and could maybe even take advantage of that same chip? Just thinking out loud here - smaller, crappier audio would also be easier to send back unnoticed (or instead of even recording audio it could be transcribing on the fly to a text file using something super basic and easy with low accuracy)
> This way too I can troll people on the internet when they suspect this is happening and I can say "bUt ThE bAtTeRy LiFe!" to defend Meta: my corporate overlord business daddy.
Please, stop with the sarcasm.
Okey, let’s say they manage to record us without a huge impact on our battery life. Now, how do you send these recordings or even the extracted keywords from a popular app, a client installed on devices controlled by the users and susceptible to reverse engineering and network traffic analysis without anyone noticing it?
FB having access to microphone makes sense for plenty of other completely innocent reasons (for example, if you can record a video from inside the app).
If this was actually true, I can’t help but feel that someone would have proven it technically by now instead of relying on these types of self experiment and anecdotes, especially given how commonly this is touted.