
Your Phone Is Listening and It's Not Paranoia - asdfasdfdavid
https://www.vice.com/en_au/article/wjbzzy/your-phone-is-listening-and-its-not-paranoia
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oceanghost
I believe this is happening, or will be shortly. I've had these weird
experiences as well.

But one casual experiment is not proof. I assume the implications for battery
life alone would make this impractical.

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ksangeelee
I searched for microphones with an integrated low power DSP, and the first hit
[1], from 2016, described a device for always-listening voice activation using
an EEPROM configured DSP that claims to consume 0.4mW at 1.8V (0.22mA). That
seems astonishingly low, and would be unnoticeable in terms of battery drain
on a modern smartphone.

While the article describes a 'trigger to activate' scenario, I guess the DSP
could also be configured to output data at an earlier stage in the chain for
post-processing on a server. The volume of data would be orders of magnitude
lower than sending raw waveforms. Of course, this would introduce the need for
some memory for buffering, which eats into the power budget, but having read
about this device, I'm pretty convinced that it's technically feasible.

Whether or not phones actually do this at a low level is another matter. It
would be an interesting experiment to graph the current draw from a sleeping
phone's battery while conversations were being spoken into the mic.

[1] [https://www.sensorsmag.com/components/mic-hears-all-all-
time](https://www.sensorsmag.com/components/mic-hears-all-all-time)

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acchow
I wrote this up elsewhere, so will paste here too:

I suggest trying out state-of-the-art voice assistants like Google Home and
Amazon Echo. These devices have had enormous engineering and computer science
resources thrown at them. They're able to do stuff like play a song from some
artist or genre off YouTube or Spotify. Maybe. Sometimes. You'll find that
even in this scenario that they have explicitly optimized for, you have to
repeat yourself sometimes. I'm talking about a tiny domain here - playing
music from artists - that the human is intentionally trying to hit.

The idea that the current state of Machine Learning can somehow take an
arbitrary, open sentences like "I’m thinking about going back to uni" to lead
to appropriate ad targeting for enrolling in college courses just doesn't
align with the reality of Machine Learning.

Maybe you think you don't actually need great Machine Learning. You could just
go with very rough categorizations such as...detecting the word "uni" appeared
in the sentence so bucket them into the "uni" ad category for ad targeting!
But then they would also bucket "I hated uni" and "oh yeah, season 2 takes
place in uni" and "I'm driving past uni" all into that category. Ad targeting
relevance would be diluted dramatically. Where is the financial incentive to
do such terrible ad targeting?

tl;dr ML just isn't there yet. Also it requires monumental leaps in Machine
Learning for Facebook to be financially incentivized to do this; ad targeting
would suffer otherwise.

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asdfasdfdavid
For those who understand the technical details, is this article legit?

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rcheu
Parts of this article are clearly false.

The “security consultant” claims to know that there’s clips of audio being
sent back to servers, but not knowing what that audio is since it’s encrypted.
First off, if the content is encrypted, you don’t know that it’s audio.
Secondly, if you had proof of a major app unexpectedly sending back recorded
audio clips, it would be huge news, so I’d assume he doesn’t have that.

Apps do not have access to always on microphone access by default as
insinuated by the article. On Android, until P comes out, apps can access the
mic in the background if you give microphone access to the app. On iOS, app
microphone access triggers the microphone symbol in the top left. These are
the apps explicitly asking to take microphone access though, not some sort of
listener pattern where apps can attach to the OS’s always on microphone
behavior.

Experiment is clearly flawed for numerous reasons (no starting recorded state,
didn’t record behavior on FB/other sites that could have impacted results
during expt, etc.)

