(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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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.
@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.
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.
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.
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 !
Looks like the silent majority disagrees with you… Stop convincing yourself of things that aren’t true.
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 !)
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?
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.
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?
Chromite?
Firefox is okay but most websites break on it.
Most? Are you sure you didn’t install some extensions that break your browsing?
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
I don’t see any main website being broken due to firefox
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’ll second the recommendation for GrapheneOS. One of the available options I use is to keep mic, camera, and location off at all times until I need them. That simple toggle ability changes your privacy stance greatly.
No, they don’t: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtfU9AsUmc4
Again, no, they don’t: https://gizmodo.com/these-academics-spent-the-last-year-testing-whether-you-1826961188
If you don’t trust a 4 minute YouTube video or an independent (?) study, try a Reddit comment: https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/q1u71q/comment/hfhynid/
tl;dr: “Strike that, reverse it.”
They can bid all they want to put ads in front of me, I ain’t gonna see them. Of course, they probably know that, too.
no, they don’t
Please be careful with your claims.
In my experience, whenever investigating these claims and refutations we usually find when digging past the pop media headlines into the actual academic claims, that noone has proven it’s not happening. If you know of a conclusive study, please link.
Regarding the article you have linked we don’t even need to dig past the article to the actual academic claims.
The very article you linked states quite clearly:
The researchers weren’t comfortable saying for sure that your phone isn’t secretly listening to you in part because there are some scenarios not covered by their study.
(Genuine question, not trying to be snarky) Will you take a moment to reflect on which factors may have contributed to your eagerness to misrepresent the conclusions of the studies cited in your article?
Of course a researcher is never sure something is 100% ruled out. That’s part of how academic research works.
My eagerness stems from being tired of anecdotes presented as evidence supporting a weird privacy conspiracy. This takes away from the actual issue at hand, which is your digital footprint and how your data is used.
Of course a researcher is never sure something is 100% ruled out. That’s part of how academic research works.
once again, that isn’t what they were reported to have said. [and researchers don’t need to repeat the basic precepts of the scientific method in every paper they write, so perhaps its worthwhile to note what they were reported to say about that, rather than write it off as a generic ‘noone can be 100% certain of anything’] it’s a bit rich to blame someone for lacking rigor while repeatedly misrepresenting what your own article even says.
what the article actually said is
because there are some scenarios not covered by their study
and even within the subset of scenarios they did study, the article notes various caveats of the study:
Their phones were being operated by an automated program, not by actual humans, so they might not have triggered apps the same way a flesh-and-blood user would. And the phones were in a controlled environment, not wandering the world in a way that might trigger them: For the first few months of the study the phones were near students in a lab at Northeastern University and thus surrounded by ambient conversation, but the phones made so much noise, as apps were constantly being played with on them, that they were eventually moved into a closet
there’s so much more research to be done on this topic, we’re FAR FAR from proving it conclusively (to the standards of modern science, not some mythical scientifically impossible certainty).
presenting to the public that is a proven science, when the state of research afaict has made no such claim is muddying the waters.
if you’re as absolutely correct as you claim, why misrepresent whats stated in the sources you cite?
I’ve said this elsewhere but it would be piss easy to prove. I think it’s weird that we’re talking about how something can be true because it hasn’t been disproven, but not that something can’t be true because it hasn’t been proven.
piss easy
many domain experts dedicating significant resources to it’s study
pick one.
when your sources repeatedly don’t say what you claim they say, maybe its time to revisit your claims ;)
It would be piss easy to prove your phone is always listening to you. Stop being obtuse.
always listening
i never claimed always, i specifically advised op to refrain from claiming always.
how can you pretend to represent a sound scientific approach when you misrepresent the scientific claims made in sources you cite
I will watch these later. But recently one of the Facebook’s employee’s chat was leaked saying they listen to customer mics 24/7 via a third party. Google blocked the alleged third party and Facebook has ended ties with them too.
What about it?
It was an ad partner’s pitch deck, not much to do with Facebook itself. And it didn’t really explain how it would be listening anyway.
Besides, if they were recording, processing and / or transferring audio, that would mean there’s data usage, battery usage, etc - stuff that’s easy to prove.
The truth is a lot simpler (and scarier) and you will find that in the links I provided.
A phone can notice when it’s in the hands of a security expert and start acting normal. 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.
on a side note, many viruses and malware detect programming tools and delete themselves if they’re there…
correct.
the level of unsubstantiated cope in this thread is mind boggling. from people many of whom should honestly know better.
I have videos that prove the opposite so like idk
If they actually prove something, I’d be happy to give them a watch. 40 minutes of some dudebro’s podcast with a phone in his hands doesn’t count
Hey, looks like you forgot to post them so we’ll ignore your comment for now until you do!
Listen, mister/miss. I tried it once and the reaction was bad because geopolitical reasons. Do I want to get banned by admin abuse? No. Do I want to start a political fight in a nice thread? Also no.
Most likely the website you pirated your movies from stored cookies in your browser which then were picked up by Google/YouTube.
That’s not how that works. There were likely ads on the page which brings in Google cookies and shows the page the user is on.
OP make sure all third party cookies are blocked. They’re not needed anymore.
There is one more thing I haven’t mentioned here. The device where I pirated the movie is different and is on different Google account and my Google account on which I opened the YouTube was different.
You just mentioned 2 different Google accounts: if your devices are connected to Google accounts they are already getting a lot of information from you that way, and Google knows that those 2 accounts are related.
That’s absurd to think they link two different Google accounts and recommend stuff on YouTube. This is less believable than them listening to mic 24/7.
Also the device I pirated content on, has only one Google account registered.
It’s not absurd at all. They know the IPs, they know those devices use the same network, and they also know where they are located pretty accurately: the Google Street View cars also scan for WiFi networks and map them to their location.
2 devices consistently connected to the same router, to the same network, in the same place… must belong to the same person or to 2 people sharing a home. If cookies set by other websites and seen by Google show similar browsing habits, it’s probably the same person.
This is very much believable, and a thousand times more believable than your phone listening to you to send you ads.
2 accounts consistently reporting the same IP, location and user habits etc being linked is more absurd than nobody ever noticing excessive uploaded data from their phones? It is very easy to monitor the amount of uploaded and downloaded data on a device, lots of people would have noticed by now. The amount of storage, bandwidth and processing power that would be required to monitor the audio from hundreds of millions of android users globally 24/7 would make this the dumbest business decision ever when there are so many easier and efficient ways to track users.
Doesn’t matter, google is well known for tracking related accounts using a variety of methods - be it location data, connected IP, tracking cookies, device proximity, even things like usage habits, etc.
Can confirm. I have a few accounts for keeping different interests separate in YT. I also keep those accounts in different container tabs, but recommendations tend to leak anyway. Google knows what I’m up to.
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.
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.
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.
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)?
Watchdog groups have been monitoring these services for years now and have yet to find the “your phone is listening 24/7” smoking gun.
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.
- A family member might have searched it
- An ad network might have reported on your piracy (especially now with privacy sandbox)
- Your media player might just be doing some tracking and/or insecure searching for metadata
- Siri or something might have popped open
- You googled to get to the piracy website
- You may have just looked up the movie, and the movie was popular with pirates
Don’t get too paranoid
Same thing with microwaves
Food is ready and get a video for “why do microwaves hmm?”
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.
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.
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.
It’s possible that it’s inferred off the digital footprint of you pirating the content, also. People freak out a lot about being listened to, but I’d argue that’s an inefficient spying mechanism they probably don’t lean heavily on if they can avoid it. We’re all living on platforms that are knowably spying on everything you click on or read or do online and feeding that into giant AI models with everything about you. Like just by watching a pirated video on a Google TV device, Google’s hashing that and phoning that data home, possibly even matching that to the specific file, and adding that to an ad profile.