Privacy

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Our phones DO listen to our voices 24x7 (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

98 comments fedilink hide all child comments

(I know many of you already know it but this incident I experienced made me so paranoid about using smartphones)

To start off, I'm not that deep into privacy rabbit hole but I do as much I can possibly to be private on my phone. But for the rest of phones in my family, I generally don't care because they are not tech savvy and pushing them towards privacy would make their lives hard.

So, the other day I pirated a movie for my family and since it was on Netflix, it was a direct rip with full HD. I was explaining to my family how this looks so good as this is an direct rip off from the Netflix platform, and not a recording of a screening in a cinema hall(camrip). It was a small 2min discussion in my native language with only English words used are record, piracy and Netflix.

Later I walk off and open YouTube, and I see a 2 recommendations pop-up on my homepage, "How to record Netflix shows" & "Why can't you screen record Netflix". THE WHAT NOW. I felt insanely insecure as I was sure never in my life I looked this shit up and it was purely based on those words I just spoke 5min back.

I am pretty secure on my device afaik and pretty sure all the listening happened on other devices in my family. Later that day, I went and saw which all apps had microphone access, moved most of them to Ask everytime and disabled Google app which literally has all the permissions enabled.

Overall a scary and saddening experience as this might be happening to almost everyone and made me feel it the journey I took to privacy-focused, all worth it.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 weeks ago (2 children)

Looks like the silent majority disagrees with you... Stop convincing yourself of things that aren't true.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 weeks ago

76 up's / 68 down's on OP's post.

It's very close, still the majority wins, that's how it works, if not happy change the system not the voters.

Maybe not 24x7 but this did happened and people have reported it multiple times. If you really think those multi-billion dollars companies are not capable of or won't do anything so sketchy because it's not "worth it", then it's time to open your mind to the possibility that those companies are not your friends.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago) (1 children)

cos the majority in this thread cannot even read the articles they cite mistakenly thinking it supports their unscientific claims that this topic is decided.

afaict no researcher has formally claimed a full coverage binary analysis.

if you know of such a study please link?

afaict the researchers are very upfront about the limits to the coverage of their studies and the importance of that uncovered ground being covered.

when the researchers themselves are saying the work isn't over. why are all the super geniuses in this thread so smugly announcing this topic is wrapped up?

i guess they know better than the actual researchers do. amazing, someone should tell them not to worry cos the geniuses in the forums have it all worked out 🤣

[if you're unable to reply with a direct excerpt from actual formally issued research (not some pop media headline) i will not bother responding]

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

Hahaha.... What a stupid take. Yeah scientific research isn't biased and hasn't been poisoned by conflict of interest... never has been and never will I guess? Scientific research is the ultimate truth of wisdom and you don't need your own critical thinking anymore 😮‍💨 (Yeah the tobacco industry was right, smoking is healthy !)

when the researchers themselves are saying the work isn’t over. why are all the super geniuses in this thread so smugly announcing this topic is wrapped up?

It's better to be safe than sorry

Edit:

Therefore, the fact that no evidence for large-scale mobile eavesdropping has been found so far should not be interpreted as an all-clear. It could only mean that it is difficult – under current circumstances perhaps even impossible – to detect such attacks effectively.

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-22479-0_6

Scientific enough?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

hey man, i think you may have misinterpreted who i was replying to /what i was saying, or perhaps i didn't communicate perfectly.

i am 10,000% on your side with this, and very much appreciate your post and appreciate your support in this thread/community on this topic. it's actually giving me a tiny bit of hope that this community isn't entirely lost.

i've really grown absolutely weary of the ridiculous denialism in society and especially in so-called tech communities on this topic.

the kindest thing i think you could say about the rampant denialism is they emotionally do not want to believe it could be happening, and therefore all rationality has gone out the window.

these threads are always a circle jerk of denialists repeating popular media headlines which say "its not happening", and then if you read the article IT DOESN'T SAY THAT AT ALL. and these denialists WON'T EVEN FUCKING READ THE ARTICLES THEY POST.

apart from the emotional cope, perhaps also partial exposure to eg. basic consumer stuff like installing steam or downloading a movie, so they assume the bandwidth is too high to exfiltrate audio cos their music/game/movie audio files are big, completely ignoring the fact that the telecomms industry has put many decades and $ into producing efficient voice codecs for around 50 years now. they probably think nyquist is a brand of cough medicine

same goes for all the other erroneous 'consumer tech' false facts they parrot back and forth.

eg. the lunacy of saying the tired old statement "if they were listening ALL THE TIME, we'd know" completely ignoring threshold based noise gates have been a thing for well over half a century.

these self-proclaimed know-it-alls can't even put in 10 minutes reading BASIC topics in an encylopedia to realise this shit was solved over half a century ago. (actually you don't even need tech knowledge or an encylopedia to imagine such a fundamental thing as...i don't know...not recording when nothings happening 🤯). they can't put in even BASIC effort, yet are SOOO smug in not only telling us "its absolutely not happening", but they actually can't wait to be rude and ridicule randoms for even asking the question.