(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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Don’t get too paranoid
Root your phone and degoogle it if it doesn’t have LineageOS image. If it does have LineageOS image, then flash it. Oh, and don’t use Google and YouTube. Use Brave/Vivaldi for web search and Tubular for YouTube.
Bruh Brave or Vivaldi? Those are not even the best options out there
Or anything else that isn’t Google Chrome.
Yep I am not using that.
I’ve seen a lot of people using Vivaldi as “private” browser. What is the point here?
Because it’s one of the few browsers on Android that allow you to put your address bar down
Firefox?
Firefox is okay but most websites break on it.
I don’t see any main website being broken due to firefox
Most? Are you sure you didn’t install some extensions that break your browsing?
I meant on mobile. It’s the reason why I use Vivaldi on Android.
Still personally I’ve had very very few ones breaking, but I guess it depends on our browsing habits what we use the most. A report broken site function exists on desktop, but I think it’s still missing from mobile
I had uBO and Dark Reader installed.
Those 2 might very well cause issues sometimes, you should try and fiddle around with their settings on the websites that complain, or outright whitelist them if nothing works and you want to use them, other times it really is the browser or even more often an artificial check of the user agent string (dick move on the dev’s side), so if you spoof a Chromium browser it’ll start working right away
Chromite?
Person in a privacy community using YouTube and multiple Google accounts thinks the only way they are being tracked is through phone microphones…you can’t make this shit up.
As I have already mentioned in the post, I am not that deep into privacy rabbit hole that I am completely degoogled my life. If I did, I wouldn’t have any privacy concerns to begin with ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
On why I haven’t done it yet is simply because it is extremely hard. If you go full privacy-focused, you lose out on convience and vice versa. I’d like to stay in balance.
You focused on the wrong part of my comment. The issue isn’t that you have Google accounts or use YouTube, it’s that you seem to have very little understanding of how much data is being collected about you through these avenues. Instead you focus on some conspiracy theory about phone microphones which is still yet to be proven despite years of technologically illiterate people telling us that “the only way they could have known that is if they were listening to me!!!”. I don’t understand how you get to the point of posting in a niche privacy community whilst still being so completely clueless and misinformed.
I was in the same belief that phones do not listen to our mics for years until that news of Facebook employees leaked chat came out.
Let’s assume the incident you referred is true. It’s still not the phone microphone that’s doing it, it’s the spyware/adware/malware app you installed from play store.
Solution? Degoogle and stay away from tech giants like meta, apple, etc. Use opens source alternatives.
If you are still paranoid, Android 13 and onwards, whenever your cam/mic is being used, you can see a green microphone or camera logo on the status bar top right.
What are you referring to? I searched for this and the results were just the CMG story. That wasn’t even proof that the technology existed, let alone was being used.
Yes that was the story I was referring to. It doesn’t really take that much technological effort to listen to your mic and send bits of data to server.
Maybe I should have removed this post, because it is ridiculous.
Oh I just checked, this is a lemmy.ml community.
Exactly, it is “A community of privacy and FOSS enthusiasts, run by Lemmy’s developers,” and not a community for spreading nonsense like Google secretly listening to your conversations to better recommend YouTube videos to you.
Anyone saying they know for 100% certain it’s not happening is probably speaking from their emotional desire for it not to be true - rather than actual fact.
Anyone who has looked into the actual technical aspects, rather than spouting the usual surface-level “tech facts” or parroting headlines (rather than the actual academic findings), cannot seriously claim to know for certain its 100% not happening.
@op i would advise caution on stating ‘24x7’ until there is evidence of that specific claim. (unless you’re referring to while voice assistants are enabled.)
I am surprised by the response I got from majority here. I thought the people who are privacy-focused, wouldn’t give the benefit of doubt to Google of all companies. But it isn’t the case here. Everyone here just assumes and believes strongly it isn’t technically not possible which is really the case when you look at the other services offered by Google.
Google app which is pre-installed is pretty a forced voice assistant on everyone on android.
I get your feeling :) Don’t worry the silent majority is on your side. However they won’t comment because they fear from being banned or backslashed…
While It can’t be proven or disapproved, I also had my share of strange coincidence where my mind goes “Huh? How is that even possible?”… Kinda strange feeling! But that feeling gave me the push to the privacy route maybe in a rather to extreme direction? Always follow your guts when there’s to much noise to make a clear decision.
You will never get full 100% privacy or anonymity, however you can make your data as much as difficult to get and waste some of their resource and time :).
Good luck !
Looks like the silent majority disagrees with you… Stop convincing yourself of things that aren’t true.
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.
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]
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 !)
It’s better to be safe than sorry
Edit:
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-22479-0_6
Scientific enough?
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.
Thank you, will consider these options.
yeah the level of technical competence on this site has plummeted since the influx of the reddit crowd.
just enough consumer tech enthusiast knowledge to delude themselves they can smugly and self righteously shit on the average non-tech person.
and now they’re the majority, drowning out legitimate curiosity by loudly parroting headlines from articles they didn’t even read. slowly turning lemmy into the regurgitated reddit pop media shithole they wanted to escape.
this topic is especially difficult because of the clear emotional desire for it not to be true. hence the degree of fragile cope in this thread.
thankfully not everyone here is a lost cause, and you’ve been given some good advice on delineating the other possible causes for what you’ve observed. when we do a careful analysis we must ofc consider all possibilities.
what i’ve not seen properly acknowledged in this thread, however, is that the possibility of alternative explanations doesn’t preclude the possibility of voice-based surveillance either.
Well said.
Yup. I was driving in the car with a few people for work. We were talking about a music video a couple of us had worked on, and we were explaining who daddy yankee/bad bunny was, and we mentioned daddy yankee did the song “gasolina.”
We live in the US, the conversation was in English, but fuck if “estacion de gasolina” didn’t show up on our route.
Yet again, someone mistakes an anecdote for evidence. And evidence is also not the plural form of anecdote.
I’m sure we have people here who are tech-savvy enough to have actually examined the kinds of data that their phone is sharing.
If you have something like Google Home or Amazon Alexa, then yeah, those would be sending voice data back, and yeah, they could probably use it for advertising. But as far as I know, there is no evidence that phones are “always listening” and “always sending information back” when they’re idle.
And how often. have you said stuff that you have not received advertising for? You will notice it when you get a positive match but not on a negative.
Data collecting companies can predict/rate your behavior for more then 20 years based. Since then. it has been perfected. They know that you are interested in those topics without having the need to waste resources on recording and analyzing every single audio stream.
Same thing with microwaves
Food is ready and get a video for “why do microwaves hmm?”
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Listening to audio would be the least effective and most expensive method of data collection for advertisers. It’s not happening. They already have literally over a million data points on you, there’s nothing useful for them to glean from your audio that they don’t already have ad nauseum.
You see thousands of ads and recommendations every day. You finally found one that was relevant to you. It’s not that deep.
I’ve gotten ads for things I’ve just thought about. Never said anything out loud about or did any searches related to. It was something in a video I’ve watched dozens of videos about in the past. But on this occasion, I happened to think that I kind of want one for the first time. And I just so happened to start getting ads for them right after, also for the first time. They know way more about you than you think and don’t need to listen to you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEo7FGkmRx0
No, your phone doesn’t listen to you 24/7. With that out of the way, there are a number of places where youtube may have gotten that info. One possibility is that someone in your household looked up the movie and maybe checked if stuff ripped from netflix is indeed full HD. And since everyone in your family is using the same NAT IP, then it’s easy for youtube to target recommendations at everyone in that household.
I don’t doubt you, but it’s worth asking if your reasons for stating that our phones don’t listen to us 24/7 haven’t changed since you first formed the opinion.
Lots of things are meso-facts (a true fact at rhetorical time we learn it, but no longer true later). Tech moves quickly. It’s worth not assuming anyone is right here, & asking: under what conditions could our phones be listening (enough to produce what OP experienced)?
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But again, what I’m getting at here is, are we so sure it takes all that much anymore. Processing could take place in a shorter way now, more than it could when our current opinion was still true.
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The conditions would be that all the controls that are in place to prevent it from happening are bypassed, which no one has proven yet. For example, Apple has developed their devices (assuming not jailbroken) in such a way where the camera and microphone usage indicators are hardwired and can’t easily be bypassed by software hacks. So if your phone was listening to you all the time, then the microphone indicator light would always be on. Listening 24/7 would also drain the phone’s battery and use up so much data it would be noticeable. Another example is Siri. It is actually designed in a way where there are 2 components. The first one is local on the phone and separate from the actual Siri component. It is what’s actively listening for you to call it. Once you call it, it then activates the actual Siri that transmits your voice inputs online.
People saying it hurts battery usage, sends crazy amounts of network etc don’t seem to use the latest features from Google.
Now playing, Adaptive audio are some features of android system that Google has given in recent years which listen to our microphones all the time and serve their purpose. I have used them in the past, although it said it consumes battery, I never experienced huge battery brain. Google also says these services work on device and never leaves the device, but I assume extracting few words from my audio and sending them to their servers at frequent times wouldn’t be such a technically demanding process like everyone are stating here on this post. It entirely possible and probably happening.
Thank you, this is the kind of detail I was hoping someone would describe, no sarcasm. To be specific, too, this is all probably easier on Androids / jailbroken iPhones
Watchdog groups have been monitoring these services for years now and have yet to find the “your phone is listening 24/7” smoking gun.
Similarly before dieselgate, Volkswagen cars had been emissions tested for years without finding anything suspicious. Turned out VW used the car’s sensors to detect when it was being tested. A phone can notice when it’s in the hands of a security expert and start acting normal.
Here’s a fun little experiment you can try. Make a list of random topics and have a discussion about each of them on separate days. Make sure each topic is something that could result in creepy suggestions or ads on YT. If even one of these topics produces the expected result, you could be on to something.
Fun, sure, but not an experiment that would actually be meaningful.
The data from your phone’s microphone doesn’t magically appear in Google’s advertising servers. It would have to go through a lot of steps before it gets there, and one of the first steps is in your home (if you’re on WiFi). One can analyze the traffic/data that leaves their phone.
It’s good to be cautious, but worrying about your phone’s microphone is potentially like worrying about your windows while leaving your front door open.