Agreed, broadly I use the same apps, and they either stagnated or got worse like the author mentions. And it kind of says a lot that the stagnated apps are the ones I like most.
"spam" is a grave mischaracterization, at that. It's a tool assisting citizens to voice their concerns to their elected representatives.
I also feel uneasy about Politico putting the lights on the creator this way and stopping short of doxxing them when they clearly wish to have their identity unknown and could face threats from having their personals broadcasted.
It's also telling that the two opponents to the bill named in the article are Musk and WhatsApp - hardly the most sympathetic picks for the Politico audience.
My main problem with Fight Chat Control is that it asks people to send messages to the wrong audience. The site asks me to contact members of the European /parliament/, while the proposal is being discussed by the EU /commission/, a completely different body.
The commissioners are not elected by the citizens of their respective countries. Instead, they are selected via a parliamentary vetting process, and approved by the European Parliament.
The commission has no direct responsibility towards the citizens in EU. It is also the European Parliament that scrutinized and votes on the laws created by the commission. The commission job is only to write proposal for laws.
This is a bit like complaining that people have objections about a politician speech and send emails to the politician rather than the employed person who wrote it. Should citizens direct their messages and complaints to speech writes?
This does not seem a fitting metaphor: you complain only after the politician has read that speech. But this whole campaign is about a speech that has not been written yet, i.e., a proposal that has not been finalized. You are writing to a MEP about a certain draft that is still being worked on, and that they might have to vote on in the future.
What do you expect them to answer, other than "thanks, I can do nothing for now, but I'll keep that in mind if and when I have to vote on it"? Why not wait and write to them when they actually have to vote on this proposal?
Just like a political speech writer do not invent what they write independently without some input and oversight by the politician, so does the commission.
This is also politics. You don't wait until last second to file a complaint. Politics is a slow moving process, not a single event, and creating support takes work over time. MEP are not subject experts so they will usually seek input long before it comes down to voting, which occur in parallel with the work of the commission.
"thanks, I can do nothing for now, but I'll keep that in mind if and when I have to vote on it"? is basically all that an citizens can expect by talking to a politician which only job is to vote on things. The same goes the other way around. If a politician today speaks about a political subject, I as a citizen can only say "thanks, I can do nothing for now, but I'll keep that in mind when its time to vote".
I don't understand. I thought politicians are a subset of the people. If millions are aware of the issue and the speech, why would the politicians be oblivious?
Yes you are correct, but technically the parliament passes the laws, so they have the final say. It should be the commission that gets slapped in the face (or even better dissolved as it's quite undemocratic), but what can you do...
>>or even better dissolved as it's quite undemocratic)
I never understood this argument. The comission's job is to write the laws, the parliment's job is to make sure they acceptable to all member states and either pass them or send them back.
It's the same how say, UK government uses various comissions to write legislation which then goes in front of the parliment which then either passes it or don't - and I don't think we would call the British system undemocratic(well, other than the monarchy and the house of lords - but the way the parliment works is deeply democratic). I don't believe any EU member state directly elects their law writers and comissions that propose them - the democratic part is always at the top.
I think it's fairly common that individual members of parliament do directly draft and submit their own bills, certainly it is not uncommon that they have the right to propose their own bills.
But by volume most of these bills are shit and so just quietly die in a vote nobody noticed, and so most law that we actually have was indeed drafted by a special commission and put forward by the executive before it was approved by parliament.
I mean, in the sense that your comment here was unsolicited, and thus spam, I suppose one could make a semantic argument? But generally "unsolicited" means that it's outside normal communication expectations: we expect people to post on a forum even if their opinion hasn't been explicitly solicited, and we equally expect people to communicate with their representatives.
That depends on how many comments you post in a short time and how repetitive they are. If it looks automated then I think it would be considered spam, at least informally.
Politico.eu is owned by Axel Springer, the same Axel Springer SE which received US$ 7m from the CIA back in the early 2000s [0].
It's the closest to a Fox News-esque entity in Western Europe, I believe. They also own BILD, a tabloid, and Die Welt, a newspaper that constantly publishes climate-skeptic articles, and also infamously published an op-ed by Musk supporting the AfD.
I agree, I feel like it gives the article a negative bias against the developer. Perhaps the editor wants to generate pressure against them or discourage further opposition?
At least it’s not a complete hit piece, if you ignore the title then it’s mostly balanced.
If you think it won't work or not be effective that doesn't change the stated intention.
If you think one or more of the proponents are lying that doesn't change what the article should state unless there is evidence
They already said "aimed at" which implies that's the goal instead of writing "that will stop child..."
It's not an opinion piece they are simplifying conveying information from both sides. The article even details that there is an opposition to the bill.
> The U.K. Online Safety Act was (avowedly, as revealed in a recent High Court case) “not primarily aimed at protecting children” but at regulating “services that have a significant influence over public discourse.”
I have every expectation that Chat Control is either similar or is a blatant cash-grab by people interested in peddling technical "solutions", or both.
Because the bill obviously can‘t do that even if they would scan every message.
They are doctoring at the symptoms than the real issue.
But that would mean more personnel and more money needed and less side effects like mass surveillance
They could say "notionally aimed at". The accusation of detractors would certainly include that that isn't the real goal, so to repeat it uncritically is a bit odd.
> Isn't this an egregious headline for such a neutral article? ... And the article itself describes the actual setup accurately in one of the opening paragraphs, so clearly the author knows the facts
I would guess that the author is to involved with writing the headline. An awful lot of journalists have been up in arms the last decade over the editors writing new headlines that imply the opposite stance of the article itself...
This resonates hard with me. At work I slave away under the edicts of the biome linter and I haven’t been able to articulate very well why I hate it so much. I think it comes down to your neighborhood analogy, it feels like consistency is enforced not just on the outside of my house, but inside as well, and I am effectively blocked from making any design decisions it does not agree with. Its opinions are not necessarily bad, but at least half of them I would have preferred to treat as guidelines. (Yes yes, I can //biome-ignore but that is not my idea of a cozy living room nook).
It feels good to see someone finally make this argument on the internet.
> If it's possible to control your environment through your thoughts or steer your perceptions (or soul if you prefer) through other universes, I'll bet the secret to doing that is a process called "affirmations."
> Even more interesting was the suggestion that this technique would influence your environment directly and not just make you more focused on your goal.
> I don't know if there is one universe or many. If there are many, I don't know for certain that you can choose your path. And if you can choose your path, I don't know that affirmations are necessarily the way to do it. But I do know this: When I act as though affirmations can steer me, I consistently get good results.
I'm not the person you replied to, but I would say that "He basically argues that our thoughts can influence reality" is a fair description of these quotes and the rest of the chapter around it. Some of it is him referencing what other people told him, and he certainly hedges his statements a lot, but I certainly read it as him believing that his affirmations are directly influencing reality.
In a literal sense, I agree with almost everything you wrote. He does not want to directly make the claim that he believes affirmations are magically affecting reality. He aims the text at people predisposed to certain types of woo. And he wants to convince those people to try his other type of woo. He doesn't say what he himself actually believes.
Where I differ from you in my take on this is that I also weigh what isn't there. He doesn't provide any form of alternate explanation. Nowhere does he say anything that comes close to "I don't believe that affirmations work this way" or anything of the like. I also don't agree that his hedges clarify anything, rather they muddy the waters.
He presents a thesis, presents other people's arguments for that thesis, presents no arguments against, and then explains that he lives his life in a way consistent with believing in that thesis. The hedges fill one function: to make it harder to argue against him. If the arguments aren't his, the chapter stands even if the arguments fall.
To me, that is basically arguing for the thesis, but in a roundabout and quite defensive way. What other point would you say that that chapter conveys?
Looking it from that perspective, aren't we just describing agnosticism? The lack of "what isn't there" does indeed distinguish it between atheism, as that would be a "I don't believe in X", but it is also distinguishable from the religious beliefs of a true believer.
There is also the possible half point between atheism and agnosticism, where people self identify as atheism but will act according to some religious concept because they view it as important to their lives. To me it indicate strongly that beliefs, any beliefs, sits along a spectrum. A person can live their life in a way consistent with believing in something, either because they believe in it, or they don't know, or that they don't believe in it but still behave in that way because of a reason or an other.
This article reminds me of this excellent tongue-in-cheek piece of writing by Jonathan Zeller in McSweeney's:
Calm Down—Your Phone Isn’t Listening to Your Conversations. It’s Just Tracking Everything You Type, Every App You Use, Every Website You Visit, and Everywhere You Go in the Physical World
There is so much time spent “debunking” audio recordings being shared with various entities it makes me more suspicious.
Just like Facebook’s “we never sell your data (we just stalk you and sell ads using your data)”. I’m sure there’s a similar weasel excuse… “we never listen to your audio (but we do analyze it to improve quality assurance)”
It’s similar with the TSA facial recognition photos. “We delete your photo immediately” but what they don’t say is that they don’t delete the biometrics from that photo.
Literally not compelled in this case, the TSA signage says that the image capture is completely optional.
More generally, having your stuff screened for security to get on a commercial plane isn't a 4th amendment violation, the word "unreasonable" is right there in the amendment for a reason. You're in public in an enclosed flying object bringing your goods onto someone else's plane with 100+ strangers aboard, it is completely reasonable and necessary for the freedoms of everyone involved for the TSA to ensure that your stuff doesn't have dangerous objects aboard.
Don't forget that freedom also involves the freedom of other people to not be negatively impacted by you exercising your "freedom."
That is not the other option at all. The other option is essentially just the traditional screening process.
> Standard ID credential verification is in place – Travelers who decide not to participate in the use of facial recognition technology will receive an alternative ID credential check by the TSO at the podium. The traveler will not experience any negative consequences for choosing not to participate. There is no issue and no delay with a traveler exercising their rights to not participate in the automated biometrics matching technology.
My goodness this thread is just the most annoying tinfoil hat thread I've seen all day. Y'all are spending too much time online.
> The other option is essentially just the traditional screening process.
I know that, and you know that, but you have to convince the average traveler that nothing bad will happen if they say no. In the mind of the average traveler, it’s safer to just say “okay” to whatever the TSA wants. There needs to be some kind of neutral ombudsman to placate travelers’ fears of reprisal for opting to preserve their rights.
Did this change? Last time I tried to take them (ten+ years ago, because my license expired) they refused my ticket purchase because my id was expired.
For better or worse, we didn’t have to make such hard choices for the first 80 years of aviation. And Greyhound etc require photo ID these days as well
The TSA is - objectively, by their own audits - complete security theater. Why bother to defend them, exactly?
Also, the spirit of the 4th Amendment is most certainly not "here, this is the easy way!" (yes, we are conducting mass surveillance but you can sort of opt out of one piece of it by going through a manual process over here that we will make you feel like you are burdening us by requesting)
correcting disinformation isn't defending something. do you want to live in a world where we dislike someone and so we just make up random terrible things about them that aren't true, and it's fine and encouraged because they're someone we dislike, and people aren't allowed to say "hey that's not actually true, at all"
Yup,people are really good about it in my experience too. I just stand off to the side of the camera, and say "no biometrics please". They take a minute to check my documents and it's done. Try it.
I trust the TSA agents brain to not get hacked in the next 24 hours, a database run by them, not so much.
The purpose is to gather biometric data on people that will be used for future surveillance in our incipient fascist state with the implicit statement that opting out is suspicious and will lead to greater scrutiny.
Some of us want to be able to cross the country in an afternoon, and not have to spend days on a slow, uncomfortable train to make the same trip. I don't think that's unreasonable.
Certainly not unreasonable. But it does require you to commission your own transport subject to the rules that that private entity seeks to impose. Public entities which indiscriminately service residents and visitors of a given territory would obviate this requirement. But if you're in the US, good luck convincing taxpayers to agree to pay for that.
> subject to the rules that that private entity seeks to impose.
It's not the private entity taking a 3D face scan, nor are they necessarily wanting for that scan to be taken. It's federal laws and regulations being done by federal agents in spaces controlled by the federal government.
TSA is absolutely a government organization, it's a part of the Department of Homeland Security. It was created by an act of Congress, the Aviation and Transportation Security Act. You might as well argue the IRS or FBI or the US Marshalls aren't a government organization. What about absolutely absurd thing to suggest.
> The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is an agency of the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that has authority over the security of transportation systems within and connecting to the United States.
You can also walk. Lovers of freedom can walk from Manhattan to LA in 40-50 days. Of course if you look “wrong”, you’ll probably get rounded up in some flyover town.
Depends on where you walk the US is amazingly poorly situated for long walks outside of major cities. Sidewalks disappear first then lighting then one is liable to run into major stretches with no safe affordance for walking whatsoever where one is either inches from cars or in a ditch.
> There is so much time spent “debunking” audio recordings being shared
Not really. 99% of the time it's someone claiming that it happens.
And it's always an anecdote, never clear proof that it happened. Let alone that it happened because of the audio and not web activity. And that the conversation was actually the cause for the ad and not the other way around.
Is it technically possible? Sure. But if so many people are so certain that it definitely happens, why didn't dozens of people already prove it with a fresh Google/Apple account and phone?
I observed a clean experiment that showed a friend’s Google Pixel phone listening to us and adjusting news stories on Google app’s home screen.
However:
— IIRC the phone was unlocked,
— this only affected the news feed, and
— this was 5–6 years ago.
We 1) noted how Google app shows some selection of news after opening, 2) talked clearly for a minute about a very random and conspicuous topic in presence of the unlocked phone, and 3) demonstrated that the Google app showing an article relevant to the topic within a few minutes. The article was a few days old, too, so it was clearly boosted out of more recent stories.
The only reason it could be something other than the phone microphone is if I was misled by my friend steering us towards a predefined topic. However, that would require some extensive preparation to rule out the story appearing in the first step and would be very atypical for that person.
I recall seeing an article about Google admitting this and changing their policy to stop, but can’t seem to find it now. I imagine it was bad publicity, though to my friend it was a feature to see personalized content.
How often does someone look at their phone over 5-6 years?
Having one incidence where you’re talking about something and then you also see that something on your phone out of 2000 days of using a phone is definitely more likely to be coincidence.
How often do you think this person did experiments? It is a study with n=1 but the unrelated metric of how many times something else happens does not influence the likelihood of a false positive
Only did it once. The likelihood of coincidence is low, because the topic was specific and unusual.
Here’s something relevant in Google’s current support KB[0], where the combination of the following further supports that the experiment did not have be staged (emphasis mine):
> Web & App Activity saves your searches and activity
from other Google services in your Google Account.
You may get more personalized experiences,
like: <…>
Content recommendations
> When Web & App Activity is on, you can include audio recordings from your interactions with Google Search, Assistant, and Maps as part of your activity.
Let’s now go back to the experiment. Given the phone was unlocked, voice activity was enabled, and Google app or search widget was on Google Pixel’s screen (I am certain at least the latter was true) during the experiment, could talking near the phone be counted as “interaction”? If the answer is “yes” then it seems very reasonable for us[1] to expect, per that KB, that the app would listen more actively than what’s required for assistant activation, and that recorded snippets would count as your “activity” designed to affect content recommendations (including the article feed Google app showed to us on its app’s main screen).
No tinfoil hat required.
***
Note that it does not mention ads among personalized experiences[2], and we had not observed any change in the ads either. I didn’t see what exactly counts as “interaction” or whether this blazing-fast content personalization used to include ads previously, but in line with the “move fast” culture of mid-2010s Silicon Valley it could well have been much more lax at some point. If so, I do not envy all the people who have observed it only to be gaslit and mocked by peers and media.
***
As to the article I was vaguely remembering in my original comment, the above makes me think that it was merely about the change of the default to opt-in, which it is as of today:
> This voice and audio activity setting is off unless you choose to turn it on.
[1] Us tech people; this might not at all align with the intuition of other people.
[2] I rather suspect that ToS and possibly some other KB article would indicate that your activity would, in fact, affect your interest profile and by extension ads, but probably in a much less obvious and more gradual fashion.
Here is an example that just happened today. I talked to my partner about me going to a city directly (via one state) or indirectly (via another state). All I said was "so you want me to go directly to X".
Boom, Illinois tourism ad shows up the next time I hit the internet. Scary thing is I didn't even say the state name, just the destination, and SOMETHING calculated that Illinois is in the middle.
This stuff has now happened far too many times in the last 10 years of my life, it is simply implausible to call it coincidence at this point. You are being listened to by your phone.
Ad firms have no ethical boundaries, and have lied about their data collection over and over.
What is really frightening is that if the ad companies know everything about you, then multiple state actors also know everything about you.
> Not really. 99% of the time it's someone claiming that it happens.
It’s never packet captures, reverse engineering of the app, or one of the tens of thousands of employees working for these companies blowing the whistle.
Nobody can even show that their phone app is using background CPU when they talk, utilizing the microphone, or sending packets from that app. All of which are in reach for anyone with Android and some basic skills.
It’s always an anecdote about someone who said something out loud and then saw ad for it later. That’s it. That’s the entire basis for the conspiracy. Yet it persists.
It’s a very good litmus test for people who don’t understand technology as well as they claim to.
On the other hand it might point to something more serious, that the level of tracking Facebook and Google use lets them loosely predict what you are going to think about.
So maybe the microphones are safe and pristine, but we should be worried and appalled the same as if they were actually listening.
I like to think about it sorta thermodynamically: consider your behaviour under the blurred lens of interests, what you buy, what you read, how you react to news, etc, in this model humana have, let's say, n bits of entropy; how many of those bits can Facebook decode?
Not saying this is true, but the amount of time and effort put into saying "no one is listening to you" could be attributed to the novel 1984, where the government is actively listening to its citizens. Enough people could associate the novel with government surveillance that it's what people interpret as the most likely surveillance happening - and enough people don't understand tech that it's lost on them that a) the tech to actively listen to millions of people constantly doesn't exist at the appropriate level to be effective b) there are significantly more and far more effective ways to monitor people with current tech than via microphone. It's truly unfortunate people don't understand tech to realize what's actually possible and what is actively happening vs what they imagine could be happening
Download OtterAI. Or run voice memos all day, load it into NotebookLM and it about your day. Hell, setup whisper on your MacBook and you can chug away at pretty significant quantities of audio.
I’ve seen solutions that process audio from hundreds of multi-party meetings and can do all sorts of analysis. In one case, it can do realtime sentiment analysis and alert security when an encounter is getting tense.
We don't "listen" to your audio, the microphone does, and your phone transcribes it to text on your device. You cannot listen to text. Therefore we don't listen to your phone audio.
There is a small list of reasons why it needs to be "debunked:"
1. Your phone is gathering data that you don't realize that it gathers.
One of the biggest examples of this is real-time location data that is brokered by cellular carriers and sold as aggregated marketing data. You don't have to give your apps permission to do anything like that because your cellular carrier can get that data regardless of your phone's OS.
2. Your phone is gathering data that you gave it permission to gather, perhaps gathering it in a way you didn't think it would do.
For example, let's say you give an app permission to read your entire photo library so that you can upload a photo. But since you gave it that permission on the OS level, it might be uploading more images than you explicitly select. Another example used to be clipboard data before the OSes asked permission for use of the clipboard. One last example is text that you enter but do not submit.
Another big aspect of this is that people don't realize how these ad networks work in real time. It's not a slow thing for an advertising company to learn something about you and react accordingly, it can happen in a few short seconds.
2. The average person doesn't have any comprehension of how easy it is for data science practices to uncover information about you based on metadata that seems benign or that you don't know exists.
Most people don't understand how your behavior in an app can be used to tell the company things you like and dislike. The TikTok algorithm is a great example, it can tell what you like just by extremely subtle inputs, how you swipe, how long you watch the video. A lot of people don't realize how many things about them aren't particularly unique and how many preferences can be tied to a really specific persona that you fall into.
A real world example of all of this put together is that I was spending a lot of time browsing appliances because I just bought one, and I went to physically visit a friend. We were talking about my new appliance, and later they got ads for that specific appliance. So, the person's reaction would naturally be "it was listening to us!!" but in reality, it is more likely that our cellular carrier or carriers knew we were physically in the same place and reported that piece of information to some kind of data broker. Consider how there are a limited amount of cellular carriers, that location data may not have needed to even exit the cellular carrier to sell this data to someone. I.e., if we both have the same cellular carrier , our company already has that information and it isn't selling it to another company, it's perhaps just telling a data broker that Person A and Person B interact with each other.
Just note that I'm not claiming this is exactly how it all works as I'm not in that industry, but the general ideas here apply. The general takeaway is that literally recording audio with a microphone just isn't necessary to derive hyper-specific things about people.
That's much worse compared to listening for keywords. You're looking up men's enhancement products and everytime you enter a room all ads on everyone's phone change to those products?
While I don't agree with these sorts of industry practices and believe the US needs a universal data privacy law, I don't see how matching up some relatively impersonal metadata could be considered worse than directly listening in to private conversations.
The advertiser trying to sell my friend appliances didn't really get a lot right about them. They're a renter and the advertiser thought they’d like to buy a major kitchen appliance just because we were in the same location.
If they were able to listen in to our conversations they wouldn't have sent them an advertisement at all.
This assumes that companies such as TikTok control their timeline up to the individual post, perfectly analyzed in order to extract your unique traits, and they have specifics ads lined up for you.
Where - in my view - their timeline is just a bunch of random submissions. TikTik is just trying to sell ads and will try anything to match your profile to one of their active ad compaigns so they can bill their client more.
I'm confused at what you're claiming here. Yes, the submissions are rather random, but TikTok definitely figures out what type of content you like and what advertisements are most effective.
Your feed is almost certainly personalized up to the individual post, but I think if we are making an analogy to human curation it's certainly not working the same way behind the scenes.
Think of it like an attacker (the app) would breach a cryptographic target (you and every other user of the app). The attacker starts to send random messages or try to mess around with signatures/tokens/APIs and listens for errors, timeouts, spam filters, possible side channels until it learns enough to figure out how to predict how the system will behave and maybe even to influence it.
Both in the analogy and with the timeline out does not matter if you mix a few random messages between a test and another as long as you comprehensively keep track of how the target behaves.
Every interaction is a data point, some data points are more useful than others but none is useless
I can just say that I knew an entrepreneur in early post Y2K who developed apps to track music played in clubs in SF for folks like ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC. They gave out "free" phones (these were the small expensive candybars and nice flip/slideups) to the influencers of the day. They compressed the audio for orthogonality, and had a huge number of hashes to match. If they got more than a few consecutive matching hashes at a location that wasn't paying royalties, they got an enforcement call.
So the idea that it takes a huge amount of computing resources, battery life, permissions, or bandwidth to do matching of keywords is hilarious. That's what "siri", "hey google", "alexa" etc are all doing 24 hours a day. Just add another hundred and report them once an hour. You don't need low latency. It's just another tool in the bag!
Of course the cat food example is bad, because if they weren't looking for that you wouldn't get a response. Who would be willing to pay big for clicks on cat food. Now bariatric surgery? DUI? HELOC? Those pay.
>That's what "siri", "hey google", "alexa" etc are all doing 24 hours a day.
You might have just convinced me that the “phone is listening” is total bunk, because these dedicated devices are just so bad at recognizing the very specific, short, phrases when explicitly directed at them that I can’t imagine they are listening for much more.
Listening to my in-laws try to activate their Alexa and Google Homes is something the CIA might consider for their next torture method.
You expect 95% accuracy matching activation phrases. You don't need that for ads. It only needs to work some of the time for some of the people, especially if it makes $/click.
> So the idea that it takes a huge amount of computing resources, battery life, permissions, or bandwidth to do matching of keywords is hilarious.
I also knew an entrepreneur who tried this same thing, but with TV shows.
Fingerprinting specific audio is a different algorithm problem entirely. You only need to sample a short section of audio every few minutes and then process the spectral peaks, which are fingerprinted against a database of known samples.
This is how apps that name a song work. It’s not the same as constant full speech to text.
But you’re skipping the key part of the story: They had to hand out phones specifically for this because you can’t get constant audio background processing from installing an app on a modern phone OS without the user noticing.
> That's what "siri", "hey google", "alexa" etc are all doing 24 hours a day.
Again, wake word monitoring is a different algorithm. Monitoring for a wake word is a much simpler problem. They’re not processing everything you say, concerting it to text, and then doing a string compare for the wake word. It’s a very tiny learning model trained to match on a very specific phrase, which might run at a hardware level.
I agree it's a different algorithm, but not a higher powered one. You don't need to know context to get HELOC, Bariatric, or DUI. You also don't need 95%+ accuracy for 95% of the population. You're just doing advertising.
Doing 100 different matches updated frequently is an entirely different problem than matching a single wake word that isn’t changing.
Regardless, this would require so much coordination, network traffic, and on-device code that could be reverse engineered that you’re implying that nobody has every found a hint of it existing and no employees of these companies have ever leaked any hints of it existing.
It’s very much in the domain of conspiracy theories.
Well, actually when you're hash based doing 100 different matches is the easy part. I'm not sure you know how steep FAR/FRR curves are for >99%/95% singe word accuracy, but having seen wake word development it's easily 100x harder than 95%/90% accuracy and none of the heavy calculation other than voice compression needs to be done locally or in a short time period. The network traffic is literally a few hundred hashes downloaded and hundreds of bits of hash matches a day (~1kB).
Even in the article there are multiple reports of it that are dismissed, and even though reverse engineering larger apps on iPhone/Android is certainly possible, with obfuscation searching for yet another hash table matching or simple voice compression is also quite difficult. Where are all the other articles reporting on the reverse engineering the very screencap apps this article talked about? Are they also just more well documented conspiracy theories?
Frankly, your best argument is that nobody is selling this as a product. So maybe there are easier more effective methods, but not because it can't or hasn't been done (since it literally has and it's been reported). It's kinda the opposite of a conspiracy theory. You have to assume that everyone capable with a vested interest won't do it, or that all of them will be caught, or that making money with ads becomes unpopular.
What kind of keywords would you imagine provide an actual, profitable advantage to an ad company? I can't imagine "computer 2", "fridge 3", "egg 4" being all that valuable compared to.. literally my whole browser history and my reaction to other ads/videos (I looked at that short for 10s vs immediately skipping builds a very nice profile). And now add i18n in the picture - even the main AI assistant products suck in anything other than English, so this fancy, advanced technology with low return of value would end up with a low target audience as well.
Also, "Siri" and the like ends up waking the main processor, which is definitely easy to prove/disprove. Just talk to your phone continuously for a long time and see if it wakes.
Low, even very low, return of value is not no return. Therefore, given they make some return, and it has some value, that's enough for them to do it.
Ads and ad data are two sides. We are often not the target for an ad, but our data provides stats about how an ad is performing. If more consumers are influenced to spend $1000 on something than not, then it's worth if for them. It's an aggregate cost benefit analysis not how effective it is at the isolated individual level.
Another thing to consider is that we should never fall into the trap of thinking we are immune from influence from advertisers. Firstly, it's basically what advertiser want; it allows more actions like this, more of our data to be sold and secondly because it's easier to influence someone if they think of a decision as their own choice, than if they think they were manipulated into it. We do not remember the ads we see but we can remember that we are all susceptible to influence.
Return of value is with respect to the costs of it. A lawsuit/brand value loss from illegally recording every communication you make (which we would have definite proof if it were happening, given that there our more phones than people on Earth) would far outweigh the tiny benefit (if any? I'm not convinced you would get any extra information in the general case compared to the tracking of the regular usage of your phone)
Also, I don't see the relevance of your second paragraph. The baseline is not "no ads", the baseline is "ads supported by all the tracking that Meta/Google currently does".
Reminds me of something that a Telco exec once said in jest - “A bank can track which hotel you stayed at last night, the Telco knows who you slept with”
The article omits a real, serious source of microphone data though: your smart TV. I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that my TV (a Toshiba Fire TV, although I’m sure many do it) is listening to every conversation I have within earshot, even when I am not using the voice remote, and selling it to ad networks.
And of course it is also doing screen recognition (the kind of stuff OP article mentions), but that is not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about microphone data picking up live conversation from people in the room.
Privacy-seeking users have physically removed microphones from phones. This should also be possible with laptops and televisions.
If Toshiba Fire TV is related to Amazon Fire TV, then it may include Alexa for voice recognition, which could be optionally disabled. In theory, Alexa is only activated after on-device recognition of the configured wake word.
I did this a few years ago and the winning recipe was a shameless (i.e. deeply shameful) linkedin post where I pretty much just summarized my skillset and explained that I was looking for a senior engineer equivalent of a summer internship, with no chance of extension.
Got me 3-4 offers. None of the offering companies had ads out for roles like this, so this was pretty much the only way.
Your feelings are what they are, but this is the least shameful post I would ever see on LinkedIn. It's someone actually looking for work! and not just posting some super cringe low-IQ engagement-farm copypasta.
Finding work is exactly what LinkedIn ought to be for
I certainly don't think it's shameful. But, while that's more or less what LinkedIn was intended for, it's also become sort of a last man standing medium for professional professional posts--or at least pointers to such--unless you can organically drive enough traffic to a subscription or a website.
> it's also become sort of a last man standing medium for professional professional posts--or at least pointers to such--
With you so far...
> unless you can organically drive enough traffic to a subscription or a website.
Ahh no, I hope you don't mean to "organically" drive "enough" traffic from LinkedIn to a subscription or website elsewhere? Because that's exactly the kind of thing that's killing LinkedIn for job search and professional networking.
Professional networking mostly happens in-person anyway. For me, LinkedIn is mostly an updating Rolodex. But, if you have a newsletter or website, you probably need to drive traffic somehow. LinkedIn isn't the only mechanism and maybe not a very good one but it is a channel at least in the tech industry.
I guess the reality is, what we term "shameful, amoral, slimy and vapid LinkedIn spammers" are actually thousands of relatively like-minded people all saying some variation of "please let me get/keep a job or I won't be able to keep living" in just a creative/repetitive enough fashion that one or more recruiters/persons who know other people will keep them in orbit for the next source of income.
I have been on the other side of this (not doing it) and the effects are fairly straightforward: no more paychecks.
I guess if you're not a recruiter or your job prospects are taken care of, you can safely pretend the LinkedIn social feed doesn't exist - it isn't written for you. Its sole purpose is for people to get what they need to survive and carry on. So I've resolved to not blame others for having to post there so much. This is money - hence life - were talking about here, unfortunately or not.
OMG there was one about how an engineer in San Francisco is crying about his $2K in salad bills and his Cyber Truck while making like a half a mil a year
There's literally no shame in this. Jobs are just value exchange. Job applications are a proposal, to say, here's what I can offer you. If you're very honest about that, and about what you're looking for in return, they can make more informed decisions. Everyone's life is vastly different, there's no shame in declaring what you have to offer (edit: and what you're looking for). Everyone is better at some things and worse at others. This is the basis of the economy.
> There's literally no shame in this. Jobs are just value exchange.
Came to say exactly this: some teams actually do just need someone to pick up some slack for a bit to ship some big project but don't have a long term role. Consulting companies are pure crapshoot since you can't typically pick your exact technical resource.
That's a very simple and non-biased model view. In reality, many people might read your job ad as "so, your profile claims you have the skills but how come then that you don't have a job already?" aka "there's something wrong with this guy".
I think it's the self-promotion part that's seen as slimy and shameful. Yes, as an employee I trade my time for money, but I don't write blog posts at the office about what kind of transformational and high-impact work I'm capable of, and about this week's top-10 coding life-hacks, and how I can single-handedly turn your project around from life support to on-schedule deployment.
Admittedly, the people who are good at this tend to get promoted and quickly end up as Directors and VPs... It just... ugh, turns my stomach.
Those people are good at imitating the form of what curious and highly motivated by things beyond money do naturally.
Early programming blogs were written by people who had thoughts they just needed to share with the world. Because they were highly confident and self motivated people, they also often ended up being sought after and making a lot of money.
Then later others tried to turn the process into a formula they could use to increase their earning power, even if they were writing about things they weren't passionate about.
My post was truthful, useful for both me and the potential employers, and I know it's what linkedin is for. Objectively, I did nothing wrong. And still I was really embarrassed by it, and deleted it after I landed a job.
I just really don't like tooting my own horn. I was raised to prize humility, I guess it's quite common in Sweden.
As one of the other replies (nested too deep to reply to directly) said, many of us were raised to be humble and self-effacing, especially about skills related to innate abilities like intelligence. So it feels unseemly to say, in essence, "Hey, you should hire me because I'm great at X, Y, and Z." It feels weird enough to list skills and accomplishments in a resume, but overtly selling yourself feels wrong.
Maybe people like us should team up in pairs and promote each other. I'd have no problem talking up a colleague I knew to be talented, far more forcefully than I'd ever do for myself.
that only works if we know each other very well. every time someone tried to talk me up i felt more awkward than if i had done it myself, because that person didn't know me well enough to actually judge that. the only talking up by someone else that i can tolerate is: "i have worked with this guy and i would hire him (again)"
Oh, I see. Well, I guess I'm fine with the self promotion (which you do a bit to get hired even as an employee), as long as it's honest, polite, done a the right place and not annoying.
I'm not on LinkedIn (and I hope I won't need to be there the day I want to freelance) but I guess people are there for exactly this stuff, so posting an ad for yourself there is only fair, I suppose.
> but I don't write blog posts at the office about what kind of transformational and high-impact work I'm capable of, and about this week's top-10 coding life-hacks, and how I can single-handedly turn your project around from life support to on-schedule deployment.
That's not at all what the comment above was suggesting.
Saying you're open for work and offering services is not slimy.
I think you're confusing LinkedIn slop with offering services. They're not the same thing.
Selling ANYTHING is demeaning? So you believe the only non-demeaning way to live would be to live entirely self-sufficiently, making and growing everything yourself?
Grocery stores are experts at sales tactics throughout the store. All that fruit does not look so beautiful in the field, and virtually every store is trying to develop their 'ethos' to capture the customers with enough money to be able to care about that.
There is no way to avoid selling in life. Otherwise, at the least, you will be constantly overlooked. There should be no shame in it. The shame is only when sales replaces instead of presents the value proposition you are offering.
There is a trivial defeat for nearly all grocery store sales tactics: make a shopping list.
Engaging with certain salespeople is an altogether different proposition. In order to buy a car, you are forced to interact with multiple odious people who have ripping you off as their sole objective. Thats what I think of when I think of a “salesperson”. See also mattress stores, wireless carrier “retention” departments, HVAC installers, etc.
I hear and understand that gut feeling. Whenever I hit that particular feeling, though, I remind myself that it’s only shameful if you’re knowingly selling something that can’t deliver what you’re promising.
Well it's a couple things
- Expectation to be "successful" i.e. social media presents extreme conceptions of success, similar to a supermodel body expectation vs. real life. To say, "I'm looking for work" is to publicly admit failure against such a standard. The fear is that for every potential employer, 10 people you know will see the post and say, "tut tut, what a failure" and then call their 10 friends to share the news of your failure
- some people think advertising for work is sleazy (as others mention)
- annoying people only to be told no, a sense that you're being annoying
It parallels something like the idea of being say 45, never married, and looking to marry, or being recently divorced at the same age. There is a sense of having failed, or being judged by people as having failed. For men, the sense of being a pickup artist or overly aggressive.
That's why some people struggle with it. And it ought not be shameful, in either case. But it's probably more wise to point out those feelings and work through them, process them, than it is to just say "I do not recognize any valid shame here, does not compute"
Right. All my family and friends see me as some kind of genius wizard because of my school grades and because I do stuff with computers that they don't understand. And they hear about all the fancy new stuff happening in the industry all the time, not the negatives. So the idea that I would have to look for a job just doesn't compute for them. They expect me to be headhunted, not sharpening up my LinkedIn page.
Of course, I shouldn't let their misconceptions bother me, but there it is.
I can understand what you're saying, but there's a different way to look at it. Imagine yourself in the future. You're in a position of leadership and people want your advice. Let's say a student asks you how they should get a high level job in a competitive marketplace. What would you say?
Personally, I would tell the student they should be ambitious and tell people what their skills are. They should ask for responsibilities and compensation. They should tell people that they are worth the risk.
If you agree with me about giving that advice, then you should now put yourself in the place of the student. Shouldn't you receive the same advice? Shouldn't you be ambitious and ask people to give you responsibilities and compensation? If so, then you can understand why selling yourself is actually important and there's nothing immoral or slimy about it. It feels wrong sometimes, but that feeling may not be aligned with reality.
Only when you're trying to sell bullshit. If I can actually solve someone's problem, and they don't mind my price, then we're helping solve each other's problems and everyone benefits!
Where things get sleezy is when you're competing with applicants that will bullshit, so you have to bullshit as well just to keep up, or when customers have unrealistic expectations and waste your time.
> You only have to use CORS to remove restrictions: if you do nothing, maximum security is the default.
This is only true if you see CORS as a tool only to prevent reading data. I personally find it to be a useful tool to prevent writes, because the Origin header fulfils several of the purposes of a CSRF token. But that requires work on the backend to not actually perform writes unless the CORS parameters are valid. That sort of security is not the default (which is probably good)
Give Tubi a try, it's like broadcast TV and the lower tier of cable channels died and went to heaven. Fox news is spending heavily on it at a loss right now so it's in the early phase of the enshittification cycle. (I didn't take it personally when I gave it my email and it showed me retargeted ads for brands I'd disengaged with years ago)
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