The idea of smartphones and smart speakers listening to everything you say and then sending you targeted advertisements has been around for years, and has largely been debunked by privacy experts. But the marketing unit of Cox Media Group, which owns newspapers and local radio and TV stations around the country, says it can do […]
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I usually wear the tin foil hat in these debates, but I must concede in this case: the eavesdropping phone theory in particular is difficult to substantiate, from a technical standpoint.
For one, a user can check this themselves today with basic local network traffic monitors or packet sniffing tools. Even heavily compressed audio data will stand out in the log, no matter how it’s encrypted, streamed, batched or what have you.
To get a sense of what I mean, run wireshark and give a wake phrase command to see what that looks like. Now imagine trying to obfuscate that type of transmission for audio longer than 2 seconds, and repeatedly throughout a day.
Even assuming local audio inference and processing on a completely compromised device (rooted/jailbroken, disabled sandboxing/SIP, unrestricted platform access, the works) most phones will just struggle to do that recording and processing indeterminately without a noticeable impact on energy and data use.
I’m sure advertising companies would love to collect that much raw candid data. It would seem quite a challenge to do so quietly, however, and given the apparent lack of evidence, is thus unlikely to have been implemented at any kind of scale.
What if the processing is done locally and the only thing they send back home is keywords for marketable products?
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That is glossing over how they process the data and transmit it to the cloud. The assistant wake word for “Hey Google” invokes an audio stream to an off site audio processor in order to handle the query. So that is easy to identify via traffic because it is immediate and large.
The advertising-wake words do not get processed that way. They are limited in scope and are handled by the low power hardware audio processor used for listening for the assistant wake word. The wake word processor is an FPGA or ASIC - specifically because it allows the integration of customizable words to listen for in an extremely low power raw form. When an advertising wake word is identified, it sends an interrupt to the CPU along with an enumerated value of which word was heard. The OS then stores that value and transmits a batch of them to a server at a later time. An entire day’s worth of advertising wake word data may be less than 1 kb in size and it is sent along with other information.
Good luck finding that on wireshark.
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