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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • Yeah they’d have to it seems, but real time transcription isn’t free. Even late model devices with better inference hardware have limited battery and energy monitoring. I imagine it’d be hard to conceal that behavior especially for an app recording in the background.

    WetBeardHairs@lemmy.ml mentioned that mobile devices use the same hardware coprocessing used for wake word behavior to target specific key phrases. I don’t know anything about that, but it’s one way they could work around the technical limitations.

    Of course, that’s a relatively bespoke hardware solution that might also be difficult to fully conceal, and it would come with its own limitations. Like in that case, there’s a preset list of high value key words that you can tally, in order to send company servers a small “score card” rather than a heavy audio clip. But the data would be far less rich than what people usually think of with these flashy headlines (your private conversations, your bowel movements, your penchant for musical theater, whatever).



  • Agreed, though I think it’s possible to use smart devices safely. For Android it can be difficult outside custom roms. The OEM flavors tend to have spyware baked in that takes time and root to fully undo, and even then I’m never sure I got it all. These are the most common phones, however, especially in economy price brackets, which is why I’d agree that for the average user most phones are spyware.

    Flashing is not useful advice to most. “Just root it bro” doesn’t help your nontechnical relatives who can’t stop downloading toolbars and VPN installers. But with OEM variants undermining privacy at the system level, it feels like a losing battle.

    I’d give credit to Apple for their privacy enablement, especially with E2EE, device lockdown, granular access permission control and audits. Unfortunately their devices are not as affordable and I’m not sure how to advise the average Android user beyond general opt-out vigilance.


  • I usually wear the tin foil hat in these debates, but I must concede in this case: the eavesdropping phone theory in particular is difficult to substantiate, from a technical standpoint.

    For one, a user can check this themselves today with basic local network traffic monitors or packet sniffing tools. Even heavily compressed audio data will stand out in the log, no matter how it’s encrypted, streamed, batched or what have you.

    To get a sense of what I mean, run wireshark and give a wake phrase command to see what that looks like. Now imagine trying to obfuscate that type of transmission for audio longer than 2 seconds, and repeatedly throughout a day.

    Even assuming local audio inference and processing on a completely compromised device (rooted/jailbroken, disabled sandboxing/SIP, unrestricted platform access, the works) most phones will just struggle to do that recording and processing indeterminately without a noticeable impact on energy and data use.

    I’m sure advertising companies would love to collect that much raw candid data. It would seem quite a challenge to do so quietly, however, and given the apparent lack of evidence, is thus unlikely to have been implemented at any kind of scale.