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Our phones DO listen to our voices 24x7 (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 month ago by zerozaku@lemmy.world to c/privacy@lemmy.ml
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(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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[-] DieserTypMatthias@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

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.

[-] zerozaku@lemmy.world 1 points 4 weeks ago

Bruh Brave or Vivaldi? Those are not even the best options out there

[-] DieserTypMatthias@lemmy.ml 1 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago)

Or anything else that isn't Google Chrome.

[-] zerozaku@lemmy.world 2 points 4 weeks ago

Yep I am not using that.

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[-] Lojcs@lemm.ee 1 points 1 month ago

These kinds of things never happen to me, could it be because I have all the tracking stuff disabled?? /s

[-] bamboo@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 1 month ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEo7FGkmRx0

[-] TheFriar@lemm.ee -1 points 1 month ago

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.

[-] ganymede@lemmy.ml -3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

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.)

[-] zerozaku@lemmy.world -1 points 1 month ago

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.

@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.)

Google app which is pre-installed is pretty a forced voice assistant on everyone on android.

[-] ganymede@lemmy.ml -1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

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.

[-] zerozaku@lemmy.world 2 points 4 weeks ago

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

Well said.

[-] N0x0n@lemmy.ml -3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

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.

  • RethinkDNS (block every in/out request except those manually allowed)
  • Degoogles android (Shizuku+canta, magisk, debloater)
  • Only open source apps and delete everything else (no exceptions here) -....

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 !

[-] zerozaku@lemmy.world 1 points 4 weeks ago

Thank you, will consider these options.

[-] breakingcups@lemmy.world 0 points 4 weeks ago

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

[-] N0x0n@lemmy.ml 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.

[-] ganymede@lemmy.ml 0 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago)

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]

[-] N0x0n@lemmy.ml 2 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

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?

[-] ganymede@lemmy.ml 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.

[-] GolfNovemberUniform@lemmy.ml -4 points 1 month ago

That's Google for you, mister/miss.

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this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2024
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