• mox@lemmy.sdf.org
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    9 months ago

    “Meta does not use your phone’s microphone for ads and we’ve been public about this for years,” the statement read.

    Meanwhile:

      • ChapulinColorado@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        Why wouldn’t you want to share your fitness data with the company that will sell it to the company setting your health “insurance” premiums? </s>

    • Billiam@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      Not defending Facebook, but if you record a video with sound, then the FB app has to have permission to record your audio.

      That said, delete Facebook. Fuck Zuck.

      • mox@lemmy.sdf.org
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        9 months ago

        if you record a video with sound, then the FB app has to have permission to record your audio.

        It really doesn’t. The OS can provide a record-video API, complete with a user-controlled kill switch and an activity indicator, and the app can call it.

        • conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works
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          9 months ago

          Pretty sure that qualifies for that permission.

          But the whole point of doing so is to use it in the app, and you for sure can’t do that without the permission.

          • mox@lemmy.sdf.org
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            9 months ago

            Pretty sure that qualifies for that permission.

            I don’t know what you mean. Existing behavior does not provide the control or visibility that I described.

            One important difference is that the “permissions” in the screen shot are effectively all-or-nothing: if you don’t agree to all of them, then you don’t get to install the app. They’re not permissions so much as demands.

            (Some OS do have settings that will let you turn them off individually after installation, but this is not universally available, is often buried in an advanced configuration panel, leaves a window of time where they are still allowed, and in some cases have been known to cause apps to crash. Things are improving on this front with new OS versions, but doing so in microscopic steps that move at a glacial pace.)

            • conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works
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              9 months ago

              If your app touches the camera and mic, it will show up on that screen that it does so. “Using the API” (which is just how the OS works) doesn’t prevent it from appearing on that screen, especially when you’re doing so for the purpose of putting video and audio in posts.

              • mox@lemmy.sdf.org
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                9 months ago

                If your app touches the camera and mic, it will show up on that screen that it does so.

                Showing up on that screen is no substitute for what is actually needed:

                • Individual control (an easy and obvious way to allow or deny each thing separately)
                • Minimal access (a way to create a sound file without giving Facebook access to an open mic)
                • Visibility (a clear indication by the OS when Facebook is capturing or has captured data)
                • Farid@startrek.website
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                  9 months ago

                  All of those things are implemented in modern Android. Well, almost.

                  • Whenever the app wants to use microphone an OS popup asks you if you want to give the app permission to use the feature. The options are “when using app”, “only this time” (it will give the app one-time-use access to the mic) and “never”. If you click the 1st or 3rd options, you wouldn’t see the popup again and you’ll have to change the permission from settings. If you choose the 2nd option, you can manually choose to give permission each time it’s requested.
                  • This is impossible? The OS can either let the app use the mic or not, it can’t tell what the app is doing with the mic. Unless you mean give a one-time permission this time, but not in the future, then we covered that in previous point.
                  • Android always shows a green indicator on screen (upper right corner) when any app is using the microphone or camera API. Well, almost always, some system apps might not trigger it. But if you want to see which app is using mic/camera you can tap the indicator.
          • Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works
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            9 months ago

            I think this is more a teological argument he is making and I agree. We’ve become numb to these permission warnings. Oh this app needs access to my camera because I need to take a photo of something once at registration. Why can’t it link to my default trusted photo app and that app can send a one time transfer to it? I hardly question these permissions anymore since many apps need permissions for rare one off functions. The only thing I deny every single time is my contact list.

      • mox@lemmy.sdf.org
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        9 months ago

        Nobody said it was the same thing. It’s still relevant and important.

        I trust that most adults understand the implications of an exploitable permission and a strong incentive to abuse it, as well as the track record of corporate denials.

        • Evilcoleslaw@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          Using the permission to record audio triggers an on-screen indicator that the mic is recording. Someone would probably notice it on 24/7 recording. Someone would have also by now found the constant stream of network traffic to send the audio to be analyzed, because they also aren’t doing that on-device.

  • N0body@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    9 months ago

    “Meta does not use your phone’s microphone for ads and we’ve been public about this for years,” the statement read. “We are reaching out to CMG to get them to clarify that their program is not based on Meta data.”

    Ah, yes. The tried and true defense of “we’ve denied it for years and continue to deny it” must be credible coming from a source as trustworthy as Facebook. I hear they’re planning on holding a press conference to pinky swear they’re not listening to the microphone they demand access to in order to show you ads that make them money.

    • edric@lemm.ee
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      9 months ago

      FWIW, this was debunked when CMG originally made the claim. It was a marketing guy overselling their product and they had to correct their statement. They use the same info data brokers collect, and phones actively listening to you is not true.

      • N0body@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        9 months ago

        The fundamental question is, “Do you trust Facebook?” They have the resources to manipulate the story and twist the truth. They have the capability to spy on you with mics, but they say they don’t do so. Do you trust them?

      • conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works
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        9 months ago

        Even what they said could be true without applying to phones. They said “smart devices” a lot. They never said “smart phone”.

        There are a lot of IoT devices, some of which have microphones, a lot less secure than either iPhone or Android.

  • Redruth@feddit.nl
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    9 months ago

    easy to test. men can say “tampons glitter lotion” several times a day. women say “garage exhaust cable”.

  • patrick@lemmy.jackson.dev
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    9 months ago

    I highly doubt that they actually managed to do this, at least any time recently.

    As another commenter noted, Android alerts you when an app is accessing the microphone in the background, and it would also absolutely destroy the phones battery life more than the FB app currently does. The only way that we have the “Hey Google/Siri” command prompts active all the time is with custom hardware not available to the apps, and certainly not without Android knowing about it.

    Maybe they actively listen while the app is open, but even then I think recent Android/iOS would let you know about that.

    • ChillPill@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      Google’s “Now playing” feature constantly listens to what’s going on in the background to show you what songs are playing. They claim this is done with a local database of song “fingerprints”. The feature does not show the microphone indicator because: “…Now Playing is protected by Android’s Private Compute Core…”

      I’m not saying that other, non-google, app do this to my knowledge; but the fact that this is a thing is honestly a bit scary.

    • Blueberrydreamer@lemmynsfw.com
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      9 months ago

      As someone relatively ignorant about the mechanics of something like this, would it not make more sense that the app would be getting this data from the Android OS, with Google’s knowledge and cooperation?

      The place I see the most unsettling ads (that seem to be driven by overheard conversation) tends to be the google feed itself, so it seems reasonable to me that they could be using and selling that information to others as well, and merely disguising how the data were acquired.

      • otp@sh.itjust.works
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        9 months ago

        The place I see the most unsettling ads (that seem to be driven by overheard conversation)

        There’s a simpler explanation – you’re in the same geospatial region or you’re connected to the same networks as the people you’re having conversations with, and those people also looked up the things they have conversations about.

        If you have GPS, Wi-Fi, or (possibly) Bluetooth, then that’s how they can pretty easily associate you to those people.

        • Blueberrydreamer@lemmynsfw.com
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          9 months ago

          It’s a reasonable explanation, and what I typically assume to be true. Still, I’m curious about the actual mechanics, and if it potentially could be being done by Google without the larger tech industry being aware of it.

          • otp@sh.itjust.works
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            9 months ago

            I believe technically-inclined people could monitor the traffic that exits the phone, or at least passes through the router.

            Audio recordings would be larger than the kinds of stuff that’s just sent passively.

      • conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works
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        9 months ago

        It would take a lot of data. On device voice processing is not very advanced. That’s why most voice stuff doesn’t work without a signal.

        • Blueberrydreamer@lemmynsfw.com
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          9 months ago

          That makes sense, but isn’t it assuming they’re processing data on the device? I would expect them to send raw audio back to be processed by Google ad services. Obviously it wouldn’t work without signal either, but that’s hardly a limitation.

          As someone else pointed out, how does the google song recognition work? That’s active without triggering the light indicating audio recording, and is at least processing enough audio data to identify songs.

          • conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works
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            9 months ago

            If they were sending that much audio back, people would see the traffic. You could record it and send it at a different time, but the traffic would exist somewhere. People have looked and failed to find any evidence of such traffic.

            It’s something that could happen on device in the nearish future if there’s not anything now, but it would probably still be hard to hide.

            • akwd169@sh.itjust.works
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              9 months ago

              People have looked and failed to find any evidence of such traffic

              Source? I would like to read about that

              • conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works
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                9 months ago

                Sorry, it’s been long enough and I haven’t saved any of the links, and the keywords are polluted as hell with garbage results. I can’t find anything specific.

              • catloaf@lemm.ee
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                9 months ago

                You probably won’t find a source about something not happening.

                • Blueberrydreamer@lemmynsfw.com
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                  9 months ago

                  It’s almost like they were asking about sources for people looking or something.

                  If you’re not going to contribute, why are you wasting people’s time?

  • dan@upvote.au
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    9 months ago

    Title is basically clickbait given it’s Cox Media Group doing this, not Facebook. They’re partnered with a bunch of companies.

  • menas@lemmy.wtf
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    9 months ago

    What ? A corporation that earn money in selling personal data, that don’t want to share its code that run on a device with a microphone, actually use it ? I’m shocked

  • gcheliotis@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    A market agency claiming they do something of the sort isn’t proof that conversations are being monitored en masse. Security researchers can and probably have tested for this and found no clear, verifiable evidence, otherwise we would have known. Also, this stuff can be blocked at the OS level and I find it hard to imagine (esp. without solid proof) that Google or Apple would jeopardize their reputations to this extent by enabling such unauthorized listening in on users’ conversations.

    Of course it’s good to keep watching this space but we shouldn’t jump to conclusions.

      • dev_null@lemmy.ml
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        9 months ago

        By paying people $20 / month in exchange for installing a VPN that will snoop on your data so they can market research their competitors.

        It is unacceptable, but it wasn’t in secret from the users. They agreed to get paid in exchange for the usage data of competitor apps.

        So it’s a completely different situation to any “secretly spying” claim. The users had to go out of their way to get it setup.

            • InternetPerson@lemmings.world
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              9 months ago

              The evidence is: among other things, facebook has repeatedly violated user’s privacy. It would be no surprise if they would also monitor conversations via the microphone. Sure, currently there seems to be no evidence for that. But I wouldn’t be so naive to just trust them on that.

              • helenslunch@feddit.nl
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                9 months ago

                The evidence is: among other things, facebook has repeatedly violated user’s privacy

                This is not evidence that they’re using your microphone, and you know it’s not.

                It would be no surprise if they would also monitor conversations via the microphone.

                Honestly, I would be very surprised. Not that they would, but that they were able to. And that they were able to without ever being caught, somehow bypassing Google and Apple’s mic usage notifications.

                But I wouldn’t be so naive to just trust them on that.

                I don’t know why you keep coming back to trust. I’ve already addressed this. No one is suggesting that you should trust them. You shouldn’t trust them. And you shouldn’t use their services. That’s not the point.

                • InternetPerson@lemmings.world
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                  9 months ago

                  This is not evidence that they’re using your microphone, and you know it’s not.

                  I didn’t claim it to be evidence for that.

                  somehow bypassing Google and Apple’s mic usage notifications

                  Unless some form of hardware notification is hardwired into the device, which indicates cam or mic usage, I’m on the rather paranoid side regarding software notifications. Software is usually much easier to break. I’m leaning a lot out of the window now, as I don’t know how secure those notifications are implemented. However, even then there is reason for concern, given that facebook had / has questionable deals with device manufacturers. If they were willing to share personal data with device manufacturers, there is reason to suspect this went or can go the other way around as well.

                  I don’t know why you keep coming back to trust. […] That’s not the point.

                  It is mine. Even though there is no evidence for a surveillance using device microphones itself yet and it could be surprising if they were able to, given the history of facebook, they participated in a lot of rather surprising shit.

    • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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      9 months ago

      They have it’s very easy there are free programs that monitor all data traffic.

      This claim that Facebook listens to you on your phone has been around for years. It has been investigated numerous times and has never turned out to be true. Until recently the processing capacity required would have been insane and you would have an incredibly high noise to signal ratio. It’s just not an economical way of gathering data for advertising.

      Why bother anyway when people put their entire lives on Facebook, for free, in easily processable text?

      • homicidalrobot@lemm.ee
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        9 months ago

        Your phone/plan carrier using voice data to make a marketing profile is well documented actually. This data is purchased and verified and resold by meta, or in some cases bought and used by alphabet for GAS. Cacti can show you outgoing data for every device on a network, and you can see data being sent from a phone in signed packets going to your carrier when you’re not “actively using” it. It seems like you know about network monitoring tools but you haven’t actually used them, just talked about them in reference to data collection.

        “Why buy the cow” here is also easily answered: not everyone uses Facebook, a fair number of users will deactivate their facebook page but continue to use messenger.

            • dev_null@lemmy.ml
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              9 months ago

              Yeah, with lots of leaked customer data. Nothing about using voice data to make a marketing profile. Unless there is a second leak I don’t know about.

              But judging by your inability to link it you just made it up.

        • Xatolos@reddthat.com
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          9 months ago

          So what you’re saying is the biggest companies like Amazon, Google, ChatGPT, etc… can’t perfect voice dictation when I’m talking directly and clearly to my device, but this company has been able to figure it out. And doing it while hiding from the smartphone OS that it’s doing it. While the device is at a distance/hidden in my pocket. And is using it just to sell ads.

          👍

        • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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          9 months ago

          And you have yet to provide any evidence for your belief.

          I want evidence please provide me evidence or shut the hell up because all you’re doing is perpetuating a prejudice against Facebook, which isn’t unjustified, but is totally without any kind of basis in reality.

      • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        9 months ago

        Because people’s (presumed private) conversations on Messenger are not the same thing as things people post publicly.

        Personally, I would never install that malware on my phone. But if you even have FB Messenger installed on your device, chances are that it’s constantly sending your data to Facebook. Go take a look at what permissions it “needs.”

        • Warl0k3@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          We can see what it’s sending to facebook though, and it’s not constant. There’s a bunch that it does send and receive, but this isn’t hypothetical speculation, like, we can just see that it’s not using your microphone for that, or sending anything like audio data. You can check this yourself, wireshark is free and packet specifications are available.

    • Blackmist@feddit.uk
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      9 months ago

      Anybody that’s ever spoken to a salesperson knows that they’re talking out of their arse most of the time, and I doubt this is an exception.

      He’s said this because he thinks that the people he’s talking to will give him more money if he does.

      If it was happening at all you’d have seen proof by now. Like people pulling apps apart and finding proof, not just “I spoke to Bob last week about cameras and now I’m seeing ads for cameras”.

      The truly terrifying part is they don’t need to listen to your conversations to know what you want.

  • ShinkanTrain@lemmy.ml
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    9 months ago

    Techbros really went full police state just to deliver ads I wouldn’t click on straight into my adblocker

      • MeatsOfRage@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        It’s about to be a lot more with the chrome manifest update. I got my dad into chrome some 15 years ago and explaining why he should switch to Firefox is completely confusing for him. He thinks his own business listing on Google won’t work if he’s not using Chrome.

      • M137@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        Even people you’d really expect to use adblockers. A good example is right here on Lemmy, people here are generally pretty tech-savvy yet you get threads with lots of people complaining about ads. This has been a weird lesson as I get older, seeing that most people somehow don’t even think about lifting a finger to fix things they see as problems, they really just complain and then do absolutely nothing to help themselves. It’s the same with if someone mentions something they don’t know what it is, instead of taking 5 seconds to just look it up they comment to ask about it and then never reply to people answering their question. I’m certain that it’s very common to have some weird need to make others do work for you, they don’t actually care about finding out what something is or how to do something to fix a problem, they just care about making others spend any kind of effort for them.

        • anhydrous@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          I work as a software engineer with other software engineers. Even software engineers and UX designers using the internet that way. Talented ones. Many of them - maybe the majority. It takes me a second to get over my astonishment when they share their screens. Not only astonishment at how overboard ads have gotten w/o an adblocker, but also that this particular person doesn’t use an adblocker.

          So many people aren’t well-informed about what ad networks or doing, or how different the web experience could be.

          • shneancy@lemmy.world
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            9 months ago

            if someone is like, half of the described vampire i don’t mind. Honestly it feels strange to have our ancient way of finding things out (asking your friends if they know) be somehow seen as wrong nowadays. I want to learn from other human being, not disembodied pieces of information oftentimes tied to ads for driver updating software

          • gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works
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            9 months ago

            I encountered a user a week or two ago who was confused by the inaccurate output of an LLM, didn’t/couldn’t understand that it’s more or less just fancy autocomplete, who then tried to interact with the post replies as if the users were also an LLM. I had a great time calling that out. It was kinda hilarious, tbh.

      • Blaster M@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        I’ve had people that refuse to use an adblocker because “the creators deserve to get paid”. Well, your funeral if you get malvertising…

      • Lucidlethargy@sh.itjust.works
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        9 months ago

        I have a friend that pays Google a YouTube tax every month… He tells me he wants to support the creators.

        I’m just kind of sad for him… I tried to explain direct donations were a million times more effective, but he clearly just doesn’t want to learn how to use an adblocker.

        This guy is like 30 years old.

        • tyler@programming.dev
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          9 months ago

          Why in the world would you think that someone paying to use a service is a problem? Sure direct donations are more helpful, but that doesn’t run servers to actually distribute the content you’re viewing. Your problem is completely different than what we are discussing about ad blockers.

        • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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          9 months ago

          Do you mean YouTube premium? Old YouTube music because they’re different things I think premium includes music actually but you can just have the music subscription.

          Youtube music is actually better than something like Spotify for creators, so it’s not the worst justification in the world.

  • cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de
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    9 months ago

    Recent versions of Android make it much more difficult for a background app to access the microphone. There will be a notification if any background app is using the mic or camera.

    • CaptainSpaceman@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      Supposedly more difficult.

      Android likes selling ads too, why would google want to stop ad blocking microphne access?

    • ChillPill@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      Google’s “Now playing” feature constantly listens to what’s going on in the background to show you what songs are playing. They claim this is done with a local database of song “fingerprints”. The feature does not show the microphone indicator because: “…Now Playing is protected by Android’s Private Compute Core…”

      I’m not saying that other, non-google, app do this to my knowledge; but the fact that this is a thing is honestly a bit scary.

        • ChillPill@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          What other apps use Google’s “Android Private Compute Core” and therefore don’t show mic or camera usage notifications? Not trying to sound all tinfoil hat here, but seriously: can apps other than those from Google use the “Android Private Compute Core”? Even if only Google’s own apps can use the “Android Private Compute Core”, we can’t see the source code for Google’s apps as (far as I know, anyway) they are not open source. If an app is not open source, we do not really know what the app is doing in the background; we’ll just have to take them at their word.

          • ChapulinColorado@lemmy.world
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            9 months ago

            Not to mention companies and their software (especially older versions) are commonly hacked. If there was a vulnerability, how long did my phone provide the hackers with unlimited access to those features to have them possibly try to extort me in real life.

      • Pichu0102@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        For what it’s worth, I did just test it with airplane mode and it still correctly identified the song playing. So at the very least, it’s not lying about using a local database to identify songs, at least when it is offline.

        • Im_Cool_I_Promise@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          It also uses a cloud fingerprint database apparently according to the second paragraph:

          If you turn on “Show search button on lock screen”, each time you tap to search Google receives a short, digital audio fingerprint to identify what’s playing.

          • Pichu0102@lemmy.world
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            9 months ago

            Oh, I didn’t notice this, my apologies. Turning on identify songs nearby reveals two new options, notifications and show search button. That show search button option must be new; I had identify nearby music on already since my last phone. Guess they added something new. My bad.

      • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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        9 months ago

        The thing is I really can’t see Google allowing anyone else access. They don’t even allow Android OEMs to have access

      • kratoz29@lemm.ee
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        9 months ago

        I have seen said feature being mentioned or brought to other android versions whether with apps or modules, do they work the same way?

        • ChillPill@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          I’m not sure how other apps or android versions work. This is a flaw with the closed source software ecosystem.

    • Blackmist@feddit.uk
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      9 months ago

      Yeah, this sounds like a shareholder soapy titwank speech to me.

      They’re bullshitting everyone including the people we hate.

    • dev_null@lemmy.ml
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      9 months ago

      It’s the reverse. Non tech people believe the snake oil, tech people know this is snake oil.

    • Blackdoomax@sh.itjust.works
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      9 months ago

      But before that, when it was not acknowledged by social media, it was more like ’ you’re paranoid. And you think you’re that important that they listen to you? Common, get back to reality ’

      • JovialMicrobial@lemm.ee
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        9 months ago

        I feel like we’ve been gaslighted so bad about this that we were even denying each other’s reality.

        I knew they had to be doing this so I turned off all mic permissions. One day it pissed me off so much I started keeping my phone off completely unless I needed to use it.

        The only good thing that came out of it was I learned about ad blockers. Fine, listen to me since I can’t fucking stop you(keeping phone off was inconvenient), but it’s futile now and you wasted money since I won’t see your stupid fucking ads anyway now.

        • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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          9 months ago

          I knew they had to be doing this so I turned off all mic permissions. One day it pissed me off so much I started keeping my phone off completely unless I needed to use it

          It might be an easy to just stop using Facebook really.

          I’ve had enough time to work out which of my relatives are racist, so I don’t really need it anymore.

          • JovialMicrobial@lemm.ee
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            9 months ago

            I don’t have fb or the youtube app and haven’t for years… so I’m not sure what was doing it. I have ublock origin now, so if it’s still happening I wouldn’t know.

            Honestly the thought of them pouring that much money into r&d and launching that spyware just to have us plebs block the end result(ads) does feel kinda good at least.

      • endofline@lemmy.ca
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        9 months ago

        Yeah, being not paranoid is hard in XXI century.

        TBH the same scenario has been mentioned in the “ex machina” movie from 2014 when colleb has been asking how the humanoid robots work. The deep blue was AI of search engine taking data from listening to the phone calls

  • oweka@sh.itjust.works
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    9 months ago

    For everyone saying apps need permission to use your mic I want to point you to “play services”. The permissions protections only apply to user space apps not system apps. Thats how u can say “OK google” and get the chat ai to pop up even tho its “not listening” according to the OS.

    Also if you read the website they are not piping audio to their servers. They push triggers (keywords, etc) to the local ai on your phone that listens for things like “OK google” and then sends those reports back.

    Meta apps would need permission to to mic but I think if y’all check your big tech apps u will be surprised how many have that permission.

    I can’t speak to iOS because its closed source but it probably has similar backdoors for apple.

  • Suavevillain@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    This is why I don’t like the push of everything needing an app. I sure do wish people in congress cared about this type of privacy issues the way they did Tiktok.

  • Jezebelley@lemm.ee
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    9 months ago

    “Yeah but the marketplace!” “Yeah but my friends use Messenger!”

    Normies don’t care about anything. They’ll keep using that piece of crap social app.

    • shneancy@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      call me a normie but I do like having contact with my family. And though I’d love to move somewhere where my privacy is respected - there’s no point in using a messaging app if you’re the only one there

      and no I can’t convince my 76 year old grandma to move to signal, she barely wrapped her head around Facebook

      • RaoulDook@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        That’s a BS reason. I have 2 members of the Baby Boomer generation in my Signal contacts, they use it all the time with no problems. It’s no harder than iMessage to use. They would like it better when they see that Signal doesn’t gimp the image quality between Android and iOS phones unlike iMessage

        • TheChargedCreeper864@lemmy.ml
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          9 months ago

          It isn’t. I’ve personally had it happen where a relative who went to some country that bans video calling and VoIP (except for the unencrypted/honey pots of course) and used Signal to call people back home (only because I told them it would be unblocked due to censorship circumvention). Despite everyone in my household being familiar with WhatsApp, I was the only who did video calls with them and had to share my device so others could also call them. Even when I’d set up Signal on one of their devices, they still complained it was to difficult to use, insisted I’d uninstall it when the trip was over and used it a grand total of once.

          I honestly think it’s partly to do with the nerd factor. This same relative turned out to also have installed the backdoored unencrypted app to chat with others, but hid it from us due to me being vocal about not using that. These other households, also WhatsApp based, managed to install, sign up and use that just fine. They also couldn’t be bothered to set up Signal for some reason, yet gladly accepted the suggestion to use the honey pot.
          I think that these people in my circle don’t care about security at all and only care about the platform. If it’s “secure”, “private” and “censorship resistant” and they haven’t heard of it until I, the “techie”, explain the technological benefits of it, they’ll think it’s a niche “techie” thing they’re not nerdy enough to understand. If I get them to use it, they’ll keep thinking this whenever something is slightly different than WhatsApp and be frustrated. Meanwhile they can get behind the honey pot because “WhatsApp doesn’t work there, this is just what people in that country use”. It appears normal because “normal people” use it all the time, and they’ll solve any inconvenience themselves because “normal people (can) use this, and I’m normal too”.

        • shneancy@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          Well i’m very happy for you and for them, but my 76 year old Polish grandmother - who got her first mobile phone at the age of 60ish, probably doesn’t even know what image quality is, definitely doesn’t know the difference between android and iOS, and has recently called me panicked to ask why all her photos were on Facebook, they weren’t, she was looking at her gallery preview through the Facebook app - is not going to be very enthusiastic about learning to use an app only her grandson uses.

          so I’ll just stick to messenger

  • Chris@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    I am so numb to outrage that this just seems… Meh. What happened to me.

    • AJ1@lemmy.ca
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      9 months ago

      yeah like tell me something I don’t know.

      “This just in: to the surprise of no one, your phone has, in fact, been spying on you from day 1. Now we go to Jim with sports. Jim?”

      • Mr_Blott@feddit.uk
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        9 months ago

        tell me something I don’t know

        My grandad said “It’s really humid today isn’t it?”

        I said “Tell me something I don’t know!”

        He said “Err… Ok… I can fit my whole fist up yer gran’s arse”