
Your Phone Is Listening and It's Not Paranoia (2018) - tlrobinson
https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/wjbzzy/your-phone-is-listening-and-its-not-paranoia
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phishfi
I hate these anecdotal stories and how they're used as absolute evidence that
something like this is happening. Google would never allow the data from their
back end recording to be seen by other apps, for the same reason that this
article says Facebook keeps the data they collect close hold: it gives away
their exclusivity.

Seriously. You met with a friend at some place where you probably sat around
and talked for a long time together. Is it unreasonable that FB saw the two of
you were together at a place where you might reminisce about previous trips
together.

As for saying specific phrases near your phone, this sounds like Baader-
Meinhof to me. The writer probably spent a lot longer on FB than usual, which
led to more ads (and an expanding category of ads to keep from repeating the
same ones over and over), leading to him finally seeing what he was hoping to
see.

There's just no way that either Google or Apple are storing the voice
recording data anywhere where other apps could see it. Further, I don't think
either are maintaining recordings long enough to make sense of a conversation
or even full sentence. In Google's case, they've talked ad nauseum about how
it's just a voice signature they listen for and they never maintain non-
triggered audio (even device-side).

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orev
The thing I always come back to with these claims is battery life and/or data
usage. If your phone was always listening to you, it would need to either be
always streaming the audio data back to home base, in which case you’d notice
the data usage, or it would be doing on-device voice recognition, which would
cause noticeable battery drain. Both cases would make it very easy to detect
and this question would already be answered definitively.

~~~
rjf72
You could test your local drain hypothesis pretty easily. Turn on voice
activation of e.g. Google on an Android. This means your device is now
listening to and analyzing every word to see if it ever recognizes 'Okay
Google'. If your theory is correct you'd notice a substantial battery drain
compared to having this functionality disabled. I'm going to guess you will
notice basically nothing. The nice thing about neural network driven systems
is that while they are very resource intensive to build, once built they are
(generally) extremely resource friendly. And training a network to recognize
one of a wide array of terms would be no more difficult than training one to
recognize Okay Google. And the best thing is that false hits don't really
matter that much, if you assume the only motivation is advertising.

Though, for what it's worth, my bet would be on exfiltration of the data
instead of local analysis. Put the shoe on the other foot. Imagine your goal
is to exfiltrate data from a device in a covert fashion. You can come up with
countless clever ways starting at the most low level with extreme compression.
All that matters is that what is said can be recovered - it doesn't need to
sound pleasant, or even intelligible as long as another system can reconstruct
the speech (even if at great computational expense) from what you send. And
from there you can come up with all sorts of clever ideas such as only sending
the data during other normal transmissions.

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malvosenior
Is the claim that these apps have special deals and APIs with Google and Apple
to access this data?

There are certainly no public APIs to get these recordings (if they exist).
The claims in the article seem pretty audacious and are presented with no
evidence.

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jammygit
I read recently that some things are explained in part by a data sharing
agreement between amazon and Facebook

[https://gizmodo.com/amazon-and-facebook-reportedly-had-a-
sec...](https://gizmodo.com/amazon-and-facebook-reportedly-had-a-secret-data-
sharin-1831192148)

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chadmhorner
Related! [https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/109-facebook-
spying](https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/109-facebook-spying)

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chippy
2018

and past comments.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17255265](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17255265)

note that the submission was flagged.

------
davesque
Related: Am I wrong that Facebook's apps cannot access random conversation
without having been granted microphone access on Android?

~~~
phishfi
I don't even have the app installed, but I see similarly relevant stuff
occasionally when I browse to FB, which tells me that there gathering enough
knowledge Annie me from a plethora of other sources.

