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In Leak, Facebook Partner Brags About Listening to Your Phone’s Microphone to Serve Ads for Stuff You Mention (futurism.com)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (5 children)

At least on iOS, it takes it a step farther and tells you specifically when an app is accessing your location, microphone, camera, etc… It even delineates when it’s in the foreground or background. For instance, if I check my weather app, I get this symbol in the upper corner:

The circled arrow means it is actively accessing my location. And if I close the app, it gives me this instead:

The uncircled arrow means my location was accessed in the foreground recently. And if it happens entirely in the background, (like maybe Google has accessed my location to check travel time for an upcoming calendar event,) then the arrow will be an outline instead of being filled in.

The same basic rules apply for camera and mic access. If it accesses my mic, I get an orange dot. If it accesses my camera, I get a green dot.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago

Android has the same feature.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

My Pixel does the colored dot thing as well. It also has the ability to add "Mic access" and "camera access" quick options to the pull down menu to quickly turn the permissions on/off at the OS level. I keep mine off at all times. If I receive an incoming call, I get a popup asking if I want to enable the microphone to answer it.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

Yeah it's great, same thing on the Google Pixel. The mic/camera thing brings peace of mind

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I know you mean well, but you are making assumptions that the software is not lying to you. You can't trust a UI element.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

because Google/Apple lie to you on behalf of meta, sure

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

For anyone who doesn't have a device that natively supports this feature, there's an app on F-Droid called "Privacy Indicators" that provides this for camera and mic access. It uses the built-in Accessibility services to provide this, and needs a couple of other special permissions

You can change the color of the indicator, mine's red for more visibility.

I installed it from GitHub however, since the F-Droid build was really outdated: https://github.com/NitishGadangi/Privacy-Indicator-App