Better article about this story:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/12/no-a-marketing-firm-isnt-tapping-your-device-to-hear-private-conversations

Someone back this up with proof. Security researchers would've noticed this. They'd've had to have hacked their way around the microphone permission systems and microphone use indicator (depending on OS) on your phone and upload that data without being caught by security analysts. That kind of bug would probably be worth a fairly decent bounty too.

The article talks about a slide in a PITCH to advertisers. But not a concrete system. Then it goes on to say advertisers bought a dataset from other sources. What dataset? From where? It doesn't say. Transcriptions from voice assistants? Maybe. But without hard evidence I don't believe random apps are just recording clandestinely in the background. But people want to believe this so writing shitty unsourced articles with click bait titles and tenuous-if-I'm-generous linking of weak facts lacking entirely in context generates lots of clicks.

This is nearly a year old news, and noone ever could prove it.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/12/no-a-marketing-firm-isnt-tapping-your-device-to-hear-private-conversations/

CMG is simply lying. Also originally it was not "leaked" it was published on their website, it's just the same bullshit from different source.

At least I want to see some proofs my voice data being transmitted over some medium. Those slides are ads created by ad company to potential ad clients.

Still it looks like CMG pitched a plan to serve ads by listening to user conversations. Of course CMG and their clients are gonna deny it.

Admitting by the ad company is for sure not a proof. So what is? If in courts, pleading is good enough for thr court

So I have never experienced it at all. But my wife, at least once a week will mention something random and get an ad for it. If it were just purely confirmation bias I should be seeing the same biases.

The last one last week she mentioned checking out a certain store 10 minutes later she got around to searching for it. Google auto completed "where can I" with find (whatever store she was looking for) It was the first time she had typed it in and it was dead on what we had been talking about.

It's definitely not everyone and everything every time but it happens in awful lot for coincidence.

It's not trusting Big Tech, it's understanding that Little Tech can also lie.

Cox Media Group wants to hype up their product and use AI buzzwords. To be seen as reliable they say that they work with Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc.

The report is basically CMG saying they can do X, and everyone else calling bullshit. (And in response CMG clarifying "No, we don't actually do that" and then also removing the companies they don't actually work with.)

It isn't definitively saying they don't, but also isn't saying that they do. You can assume the worst if you like, but that doesn't mean the worst is actually true.

Is it possible this type of spying exists? Yes. Is it possible this is a cover up? Yes. Do we have actual data to support that? No.

Tomorrow an investigation may reveal otherwise, but for now it doesn't seem to be the case.

Because the amount of data use alone would be so astronomical as to be very obvious. Unless it's specifically recording you locally and then uploading that information when you're on wifi (which would be obvious too because of the slow down it would cause, the amount of bandwidth it would take up (making you hit data caps with your provider and throttling your service), and the fact that most phones just do not have that much storage and don't have a slot for added sd cards anymore. Feasibly it doesn't make sense for a handheld device to be recording everything you say passively. Your battery alone would have to last several weeks of normal use.

It's surprisingly easy to use adtech without voice and make a connection to serve a targeted ad. Had a friend ask me about what I was drinking. They were on my guest wifi network. They searched for it. Next day, I'm getting ads because of geoIP pinned my IP address as having an interest.

Also had someone that lives off the grid with no active network or devices watch a DVD of a movie and the entirety of their Internet connectivity was two cell phones in the room. They started seeing things related to the movie. They're older and not constantly on their phones. The phones just sit somewhere in the room.

Had a discussion with some tech friends a few years back and remarked that keeping awake to do this would take a lot of power. The EE mentioned running audio recording would take basically nothing. I expanded from there, the device uploads audio for off-phone translation to text, or queues batch jobs to process locally when power is high enough or on charger. Etc.

It is 100% probable that code runs on phones and just ships off amalgamated text frequency charts or entire conversations and the user won't even notice the battery dent.

That being said, I can't find even in the greediest capitalist money-claw that the person giving a go would not think, "well, I can't trust my own device anymore..." and maybe go: "yeah, I shouldn't do this." Maybe I'm too optimistic though.

I do not see why everyone wants to deny this and trust big tech.

This is the exact same logic conspiracy theorists use with aliens - "everyone wants to deny they exists and trusts the government, are you guys brainwashed????!!!!!".

Where is your proof this technology exists and is currently being used? The 404 media articles are not proof of either of these things. They are proof that CMG has some marketing slides and a former web page claiming that they have the capability to do this. They are proof that CMG has contacted at least one other company and tried to sell them this alleged service. They are not proof that the technology is being used, or that it even exists.

It's so ironic that you claim we are the brainwashed ones for demanding proof, yet you naively assume that CMG must really have developed this technology and employed it worldwide just because they said so. No one would ever lie about the capabilities of their company to inflate its worth and make more money! Only bad big tech lies, everyone else in the world is 100% honest!

Had this explained once, I might miss a detail, but it's like this:

The only way not to drain your battery is to program in selective key words.

"But then its always listening" yes, but also, no.

Imagine someone speaking into a microphone, and seeing their voice bounce around on a oscilloscope.

This compresses the audio a LOT, and makes it very difficult to discern the differences between words.

But if you were trained to notice the pattern for a specific word, like "Siri", then you could ignore all the other shapes, conserving your battery.

In that sense, yes, they are always listening. But that's a very small system that only compares like the last two seconds of audio against the stored model of the user saying "Alexa".