So, I don’t trust them to have actually done what I’m going to describe, (and honestly I’ve just accepted that even with everything off, they’re still giving me ads based on stuff I’ve only talked about and never clicked or written anything), but:
The programs that recognize specific phrases(Ok Google), are always separate from normal voice recognition (and much much lighter in terms of processing). So, if they weren’t Google, they might have left the “Ok Google” recognition on, but not process anything else that the mic receives.
They’re probably still listening in though.
Not necessarily you or your case, but I’m still convinced that a lot of people just have confirmation bias (only noticing it when it happens and discounting the thousands of otherwise innocent ads). There’s also subconscious ad effects, like you were only talking about it to begin with because your saw it somewhere because it’s been spreading by weird of mouth from people who initially saw an ad
Most of it is people on the same network as you searching for a thing.
It’s not just that either. Google knows who your family is. They know who lives with you because of location data. So any time those people search for anything regardless of whether they’re on your home network, they likely serve ads to whole families at a time when one person searches for something.
This has been my theory as well, Google presumably knows when I meet up with a friend for lunch (I don’t know if they go to such lengths but they certainly have access to the data to figure it out), if my friend then starts searching for something related to our conversation afterwards, Google could serve me ads about it too, just inferring the topic of our conversation based on that
Doesn’t really explain why I was receiving cat litter ads after only speaking with my husband offhand about maybe getting a cat. We didn’t already have a cat, so hadn’t had any reason to look up any cat care goods ever, and I had never searched for anything even remotely cat-related up to that point. But wouldn’t you know it, about 45 minutes later, I was getting kitty litter ads. Very spooky.
Sorry but I want the true story to be that your husband immediately went off and started googling to find a cat to surprise you for Christmas thus you got cat ads (same network like someone else said).
Lmao, I wish but no, no hallmark movie plots here. This was a few years ago, and we now have said cat :) He definitely forgot immediately after I mentioned it until I showed up with a cat one day lol
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That’s the gist of how it likely works; the wake word is detected by an “always on” audio DSP, but a software mode prevents the passing of microphone data back up to the SoC. I’m actually quite familiar with Amazon Echo engineering design, and they implement the “mute” feature in a manner that takes privacy seriously: the LED indicator on that button is hardwired to only turn on when the microphone is literally powered off. Thus, an Echo device can’t even manage such a cheeky response, nor can a software bug or hack enable listening while the mute button is lit.
What you describe is actually how it works. If they actually sent all you say to their servers, it would be trivial to detect with a network analyser.
And if they were found to be sending it all the time, holy fuck the fines would end the company.
Lol, what are you talking about? When was the last time the FTC ended a company over shady privacy practices?
Amazon would get a fine that would amount to like 0.001% of one day’s profits.
I will say that that’s exactly how the google voice api works. Of course it’s all in a black box, but that’s how the documentation describes it and how it functions when making a voice app
Why listen and risk even a slap on the wrist?
As Pole’s computers crawled through the data, he was able to identify about 25 products that, when analyzed together, allowed him to assign each shopper a “pregnancy prediction” score. More important, he could also estimate her due date to within a small window, so Target could send coupons timed to very specific stages of her pregnancy.
One Target employee I spoke to provided a hypothetical example. Take a fictional Target shopper named Jenny Ward, who is 23, lives in Atlanta and in March bought cocoa-butter lotion, a purse large enough to double as a diaper bag, zinc and magnesium supplements and a bright blue rug. There’s, say, an 87 percent chance that she’s pregnant and that her delivery date is sometime in late August.
They’re probably still listening in though.
Maybe? But also I’ve never seen any evidence of them listening with the mic off or without you saying the “wake word”.
The amount of amazon > google grift in the comments as if they’re not both spying on you is so cute :)
These threads are always full of fucking bootlickers and paid shills.
And also full of people unironically using the term bootlickers
Plenty of unironic bootlickers out there, no?
Plenty of people unironically using it believing it’s an actual argument
It’s not. It’s an insult towards people who can’t be argued with, because they just love the boot.
It wasn’t meant to be ironic.
Yes that’s what I said. You unironically using it. Cringe.
Either way your response is useless.
And yours wasn’t? Man, the least you could be is self aware
Lol people like you amaze me.
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Found the boot licker
What a fascinating and insightful reply
personally I think its better to be afraid of real things that are happening than things made up by Facebook boomers.
why this particular issue fools even the most technical of people I’ll never know.
But Facebook can’t spy on me, I repost the “I DO NOT GIVE FACEBOOK PERMISSION” spam every 3 months without fail!
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obviously what you vaguely describe has been around since 1945.
That home assistant devices are constantly listening and feeding back marketing data on every conversation is patent and disproven nonsense.
they have done packet sniffing investigations, they have disassembled the devices, they have run meters on the electrical charges… everything in every way you can imagine.
But even if you just think about it for a second - processing a live audio feed at a rate of 1 second per second indefinitely and correlating that data via voice recognition to your Google profile all to… make your ad personalizations… worse? more inaccurate?
like what the hell is the perceived benefit? That my wife says, “oh my dad found my old barbie house!” while at my neighbors house and my neighbor gets served barbie ads? Why would Google want that?
LOL :)
At some point ever you’re going to realize is that the real things you need to be afraid of are largely caused by the stuff made up by Facebook boomers.
what specifically? vaccines cause autism/monkeypox, the democrats drink baby blood, trump won the last/next election, Putin is good because he’s only killing Nazis in Ukraine, forest fires are caused by Jewish space lasers, LGBTQ+ folks are grooming children and Bill Gates wants to put microchips in your brain?
Like — what are you saying, some misinformation is good?
I’m saying people believe those things. Roughly half of all voters. And those beliefs cause damage, and it will affect you, whether you think it’s stupid or not. You can ignore it and insult it all you want, but it’s not going away. Perhaps you’ve noticed?
Right, so if “gOoGLe iS reCoRdiNg yOu” is false, it makes sense to call that out, no?
K
🤡
This is why we don’t have such devices
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It doesn’t run anything from google. I run lineage os.
You could make the point that the service companies know where you ate all the time but that doesn’t have anything to do with audio that I know of.
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Honestly if you are thinking about your phone listening to you then you probably should look into running something other than stock. (You are not most people)
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It depends. What I would do if you are interested is buy a cheap damaged phone that is still usable and then flash it with Lineage. From there you can break things without causing issues on your main device.
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you should be able to import/export contacts to a file, on most systems i think. also check if theyre stored on the SIM card itself, or in your phone.
I thought lineage os still uses google for stuff like push notifications? It just doesn’t use the “Google apps” by default
You can choose to install gapps or not.
It does not. It is fairly close to AOSP with a few improvements to the stock system.
When I turn my phone’s microphone off and say “hey Google” my phone doesn’t respond in the slightest. Much more comforting.
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If you have/get a Pixel you don’t even need to be tech-savvy. You literally just plug the phone into your PC, navigate to the Graphene webpage and click “install” right in the browser.
I didn’t say that, I said it’s more comforting. Unfortunately I need my phone for work so I can’t run a de-googled rom so it’s good enough for me. And I never see ads referencing things I talk about.
I don’t understand, how does running a degoogled rom stop you from using the phone for work?
I also use my phone for work (company profile, apps, 2fa etc) and it works fine on GrapheneOS.
I LOVE GRAPHENEOS
There are 2 apps I use that won’t work on graphine. I’ve been trying on my second phone and I can’t make it work.
What apps? Some require some compatibility options to be enabled, Waze for example.
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Sound’s like it’s just not sending the data back to Daddy Google. The OK Google/Alexa bit is done on a custom chip on the device. Clearly that bit isn’t being turned off, but anything after that isn’t being sent anywhere.
Probably just saves support calls this way from idiots who turn it off and forget.
“Probably” is a great way to protect your privacy haha
but anything after that isn’t being sent anywhere.
You don’t know that
I can monitor network traffic, I would know if a bunch of devices around my home were constantly streaming audio 24/7
For sure I’m an idiot as well
Voice assistants are money losing products. If they can do something like processing the wakewords on the device before chosing to send to a server they will. These companies are far too stingy to continuously stream audio to their servers
Back in the day when everything had to be processed server-side sure.
Now we have purpose-built hardware helping work this shit out. The devices are basically capable of handling native language resolution locally. They’re no longer need to farm the data out. I still don’t think they’re doing this we would see it in the open source operating systems, but if they wanted to any late model cell phone would be absolutely fine parsing out your interests from your conversations. Hell, I’m sure the contents of this dictation I’m making now are being reduced and added to my social graph at Google.
I think this should be fairly easy to test yourself. Just disconnect from the WAN, say the wake word, and see if the device responds.
Someone can correct me if I’m wrong but home assistant is currently struggling with this and is processing everything on your local box because it can’t do wakewords on the device.
I think they’re choosing to do it that way. Raspberry pi’s easily have that capability to do the wake word recognition on device (i think they are also working on that). Esp’s on the other hand, can only stream audio to the server and not much more. Since esp’s are far cheaper than installing a raspberry in each room, they are focusing to do wake word detection on the server not on device.
Exactly. If it is practical and money can be made doing it, then continuous, ambient sound parsing will be the norm. Currently it seems like it’s not a valuable business. When it is valuable to them, they will add a checkbox somewhere in your account to disable it, and most people will not be bothered enough to look for it.
Yeah what possible use could this company, whose business model relies on surveillance, have for surveiling you
only if phones can be like thinkpads which you can easily remove say the audio card from its motherboard.
Then how would you use it as a phone?
I’d love a “phone” that was just a mobile internet-connected device. I very rarely use it as an actual phone, primarily just for text, email, and web browsing.
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OK boomer
/s
You text like a normal person
Connect a headset via 3.5mm jack or Bluetooth Snowden explains how in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucRWyGKBVzo
suggesting that phones should be made more like that somehow. though from another comment it seems hard to remove hidden hardwares.
why didn’t i see this in my inbox…
Also, why isn’t there a slide cover to physically cover the camera, and why can’t I turn off the mic and camera separately? So I just use one of those black foam stickers to cover the camera.
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Still my phone and still my favourite.
My Lenovo smart display has one and I have never opened it because I don’t need to make video calls with a smart display
If this is a normal Android app, the solution to this is simply to disable the Google app. pretty sure all the voice related shit and google lens and all that crap is tied to the Google app.
if its a closed source googled rom, then you have no way of knowing.
