this post was submitted on 16 Dec 2023
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344
Marketer sparks panic with claims it uses smart devices to eavesdrop on people (arstechnica.com)
submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago (4 children)

I've always stood by the position it's totally possible to snoop audio and match it to a bloom filter or on device least of keywords for ads. Siri is always on so your mic can be always listening and have no impact on the battery life.

In modern mobile OSs it should be clear that your mic is either on or off (to apps) and we don't see the mic on all the time as would be needed for this. Maybe there's a hack, but at the scale and being used for commercial services I think someone would have noticed.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 10 months ago

That's probably because you have no technical knowledge of voice recognition whatsoever.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

Lots of people of Siri disabled entirely. My household included.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

I have often wondered if Siri is actually off when I set it to off. It is not as though I am running ps or top as root to check. A bit of a "trusting trust".

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

At one point Google had highly specialized hardware that only listened for "ok Google"; that's why you couldn't (and AFAICT still can't) change the wake word.

Things may have changed in the years since I learned that, but I suspect recognizing a bunch of words from an ever-changing list would still need to be done in software and require the phone's CPU to run.

OTOH, the way Android phones recognize and songs for you is very much like what you described, so maybe there really is hardware already that can recognize a shitload of arbitrary sounds using practically no power.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

And you aren't wrong, from page 2 of the article:

Amazon, for example, has previously confirmed that it uses stuff people say (and do) with Alexa for targeted ads (Amazon has long claimed that it doesn't sell customer data). But our devices are only expected to gather data on what we say when we ask them to listen to us.