As a reminder, this entire story is still only based on the reporting from 404 Media who themselves have been unable to confirm whether any of this technology actually exists or is in use. The journalists investigating this story (not the outlets republishing it with clickbait headlines) are not convinced themselves and have suggested it could also be a case of CMG tech bros trying to hype their company by shipping around proof of concept marketing material to other tech companies. Ford has patented similar technology but again, there is no proof that this is actually being used currently.
I have seen this shit reposted multiple times all over Lemmy as “dEfiNiTiVe pRoOf” but seemingly none of the people who share it or comment have actually read the original articles themselves or listened to anything the 404 Media journalists have said about it. This is not proof, this is a developing story which requires proof for the conspiracy theory to be confirmed as real.
Better article about this story:
Yes, that is a more rational take. Though it is from last year, based on the original 404 Media article (not the update from this year which OP’s article is piggybacking off). I would encourage people to just read the 404 Media articles or, if they can’t do that, listen to the 404 team discuss them on their podcast. When you get away from all the clickbait headlines from people trying to make money off 404’s reporting and actually listen to what is being said by the people who know more about this story than anyone else, it becomes pretty clear that this isn’t the slam dunk so many privacy illiterate people on social media would have you think it is.
I found the update 404 media article, this article is based on: https://www.404media.co/heres-the-pitch-deck-for-active-listening-ad-targeting/
It’s behind a paywall, and I couldn’t found a way to remove it. But from the top screenshot it seems like it’s the same bullshit from the same company… We know from the past that they lie about this, why is it a news that they did the same thing again?
404 are investigative journalists, they don’t just report 'news" - they actually go out and find it. When they published the original story they asked for people to contact them with further information, as investigative journalists do. This isn’t reporting the exact same story again, it’s an update to the original story based on new information they’ve acquired.
There’s nothing new, news sites are just rerunning the same story because it gets clicks.
Until proven otherwise this is nonsense.
No, people are just super predictable, that’s why it feels like it has to be spying sometimes.
No one has ever managed to prove this is actually happening and people have been paranoid of this for over a decade now. Someone would have 100% found some evidence by now.
Admitting by the ad company is for sure not a proof. So what is? If in courts, pleading is good enough for thr court
That’s a bad fact lol
In summary: Google, Amazon and Meta all deny that they directly access your microphone, and all three failed to actually deny purchasing voice data from third party apps that definitely do use your microphone and pair that with your ad targeting profile.
This is getting more attention because an internal slide deck from Cox Media Group was leaked. Based on the nature of leaks, it’s safe to assume that Cox isn’t the only organization up to this, they were just the least careful.
So yeah, they’re listening to anyone who isn’t incredibly careful what apps they install and what permissions they give those apps.
Exactly as we all have suspected for years, while they gaslight us promising that they definitely don’t.
Notice that they’re still denying it, and trust that as you will.
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.
Security researchers would’ve noticed this.
They did notice. Malicious apps that use everything they can to spy on you are old news.
To your point - this isn’t confirmation that any of the big players are listening directly. That would probably have been caught by security researchers, although it would be really difficult in Google’s or Amazon’s case, as they run proprietary software at a very low level.
The news here is two fold;
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Cox got caught buying that data, and when confronted about it, Google, Amazon, and Meta all failed to deny that they also buy that data from those malicious app makers.
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This is strong evidence that someone is routinely collecting that data. That’s news. We’ve suspected for awhile that, at minimum, the malware apps do. Occam’s razor says at minimum, we should now assume many malware apps are using microphone to collect speech and submit it elsewhere for analysis.
The unprovable part of this that smells much worse is: a kid in a basement writing malware does not have the computing power to turn tons of raw voice recordings into useful correlated data.
That kid needs an ally with a lot of computing power. Google, Meta, and Amazon all have a motive here and have the necessary computing power.
And all three worded their denials pretty carefully, I noticed.
Cox got caught buying that data, and when confronted about it, Google, Amazon, and Meta all failed to deny that they also buy that data from those malicious app makers
But what is that based on? This paragraph?
A spokesperson for CMG told Newsweek that “CMG businesses have never listened to any conversations nor had access to anything beyond third-party aggregated, anonymized, and fully encrypted data sets that can be used for ad placement.”
I don’t think that explicitly means they had datasets made up of clandestinely recorded conversations in the wild.
third-party aggregated, anonymized, and fully encrypted data sets that can be used for ad placement.
Really could describe ANY possible set of tracking data… Unless you put this quote into a clickbaitey article and strongly imply it’s something sinister.
You’re not wrong to give the benefit out the doubt and believe their PR person isn’t lying.
But I’m not inclined to give that benefit of the doubt. I don’t trust these folks farther than I can throw them. I don’t, myself, need proof, to believe they would try this crap.
And this is definitely evidence.
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What bug? It’s super easy to do this in an app that already has access to your microphone, like Whatsapp, then extract only keywords from conversations and send them to Meta packed as innocuous numeric codes piggybacking on the overhead of encrypted connections.
A single byte here and there is all you need to know people were talking about cats, or perfume, or shoes etc.
Whatsapp protocol, app and servers are closed source, and Meta apps will download and compile native code upon installation, which escapes normal JVM restrictions and does God knows what.
On certain brands of phones (like Samsung) Meta apps come with a manufacturer-preinstalled system stub that can do pretty much whatever it wants, but is typically used to elevate the rights of Meta apps that were installed via normal means and to collect information from them as well as any app that’s running ads from Meta.
And this is a company that’s a third party to the Android ecosystem — it’s a lot easier for Google themselves, who are datamining the shit out of everything you do on a phone, from second-by-second location to email. And Meta is datamining the shit out of absolutely everything you put on Facebook and Instagram, in spite of any fines and sanctions. And Microsoft are datamining the shit out of everything you do on your PC and they’re openly pushing Recall and Copilot and have been pushing Cortana for so long.
What do you think Cortana and OK Google were listening for?.Hell, Amazon and Google were both caught storing recordings of people’s conversations in the beginning, before they started hiding it better.
So you’re being watched in every way possible in every single thing you do that touches any technology from these companies, we have countless documented instances of them breaking privacy in heinous ways like giving up people to authoritarian governments and to anti-abortion governments in the US and so on…
…and you’re seriously wondering if they’re snooping on your conversations? They have every means at their disposal, they’re using it every second, and you’re wondering if they’re doing that too?
Why wouldn’t they? It’s obvious that we live in a world where it’s ok to ask forgiveness (and you’ll get a slap on the wrist, if that) rather than permission. What would possibly compel them to not do it?
Consequences? What consequences? We already know for a fact they spy on so much stuff and we keep using their tech. There are no consequences.
I’m not interested in conjecture I’m interested in facts. Get me some research papers. Get me some court docs. Something.
Even a tweet from a security professional with a screenshot of Wireshark would be nice for a start.
But without hard evidence I don’t believe random apps are just recording clandestinely in the background.
I certainly do. Malware attempts to record you is old news.
We have always assumed voice was off the table for practical reasons - voice recordings are expensive to decode and correlated usefully.
Cox has particularly deep pockets, which makes this interesting.
I do actually agree, this really could just have been a vendor bullshitting. Normally I would say Occam’s razor points there. But Occam’s razor points the other way, to me, when I consider that basically everyone I know has experienced a voice targeted ad.
The big ugly question is which apps are recording voices?
It might just be name squatting spyware. I haven’t seen confirmation that any do this, and I always assumed it was too expensive. Maybe it still is, but my guess is Cox isn’t the only ones who got that sale offer.
The creepy part is, if you’re not inclined to take Google, Amazon, and Meta at their word, then one wonders what other apps are recording voices…
Here’s the conspiracy part:
- Apps by Meta famously ask for more permissions than they should reasonably need.
- Both Google and Amazon publish operating systems that promise us they are enforcing our permission preferences, while definitely collecting more behavior data than most people would feel comfortable with, if they were aware.
- We know that all three companies thrive on tracking our behavior, and selling what they learn.
- One of the three had to change it’s corporate slogan away from “don’t be evil”.
The conspiracy emerges when we look at these data points and squint a little.
Edit: I think many of y’all are in denial about how much you shouldn’t trust Meta apps on your phones.
We know Meta wants to use things you say to build an ad profile. We have evidence they don’t have any moral qualms about doing it. We know they have unfathomable terms of service and closed source apps.
And now we know there’s been at least one closed door conversation about buying the recordings that supposedly don’t exist.
I don’t have proof but I also don’t have any apps by Meta on my phone.
This is nearly a year old news, and noone ever could prove it.
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.
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Google said “Apps using Android Private Core will not show a mic indicator” or something like that
Thanks for the info.
tl;dr: no. The article shits all over the question. Newsweek is still trash.
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.
It was not just a “leak” this was literally on their website a year ago: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/12/no-a-marketing-firm-isnt-tapping-your-device-to-hear-private-conversations/
Marketing people bullshitting to get investor money. Anyone can imagine non existent technology and lie on the internet, you don’t have to believe everything
I’ve heard and experienced WAY too much supporting anecdote to just wave it off as confirmation bias. Official statements by telecoms and such be damned, this shit is 100% happening.
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.
They have to be listening all the time if you have voice activation. The mic always needs to be open so it knows when you say “hey siri” or “hey google”. How would it know you said that if it didnt already listen to every word. The question is if that stays local on the device.
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”.
yes, they are. it’s been reported so many time, it’s like continuing to ask if narwhals are real.
I like how that is the privacy take or break. Apparently Google collecting everything else was fine.
Just for the record, the only companies that can arbitrarily record audio is Apple and Google and maybe the phone manufacturer. Anything else would need the Microphone permission
Maybe it’s a distraction for cars constantly listening to you. Their privacy policies are horrid and they don’t have a mic listening feature.
Only if you opt for newer cars. I have a older vehicle
Sacrificing between modern safety / environmental standards for privacy it all sucks. If only we could have privacy laws.
Not really. New cars a plastic junk. My old car is much simpler to work on and is a lot less cheap plastic
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