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In Leak, Facebook Partner Brags About Listening to Your Phone’s Microphone to Serve Ads for Stuff You Mention (futurism.com)

submitted 2 months ago by return2ozma@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

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[–] conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works 8 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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 14 points 2 months ago (2 children)

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 5 points 2 months ago (2 children)

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

Source? I would like to read about that

[–] conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works 5 points 2 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 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] Blueberrydreamer@lemmynsfw.com 0 points 2 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?

[–] Blueberrydreamer@lemmynsfw.com 1 points 2 months ago

Thanks for the info! I guess that's ultimately what I'm looking for more about: how much do we know about cellular traffic? Obviously with encryption we can't just directly read cell signals to find out what's being sent, so do people just record the volume of data being sent in individual packets and make educated guesses?

It seems plausible to run a simple(non-AI) algorithm to isolate probable conversations and send stripped and compressed audio chunks along with normal data. I assume that's still probably too hard to hide, but if anyone out there knows of someone that's looked for this stuff, I'd love to check it out.