Like, we all know they’re listening , but can we provide proof?
My friend was complaining about all the new super surveillance that will be government required in cars after 2027, and I said to him dude you have a stock android, you use every AI slop feature, you use a smart TV on your unsecured network, and uses x every day. They have everything they could possibly need on him. Oh and he posts questionable things to fb daily under his real name.
AFAIK this is the only evidence: a claim by a marketing company that they’re actually doing it. However, they have some reason to lie about this, bc it makes them sound all-knowing and powerful to their clients.
https://www.404media.co/cmg-cox-media-actually-listening-to-phones-smartspeakers-for-ads-marketing/
It is not the only evidence, as you say, but it is particularly good evidence.
It’s not logically sound, but at this point the burden of proof needs to be on Big Tech if they want to claim they’re not spying. Otherwise we’d have to prove it for each individual model, and that isn’t feasible, and only supports the opposition.
Many years ago this one was done https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBnDWSvaQ1I
And the explanation behind https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kv8gvXPwWjY&t=0
So this proves it. Then his second video was made because the MIB came to his door. Got it.
They’re absolutely listening.
I saw proof one day. I was visiting a welding shop on business, never been there before, didn’t know them. At some point, I’m sitting in the office with about five guys, distracting them from their work, yakking, and I mention a big piece of gear I have to haul around using a cart. One suggests a different kind of cart, and describes it. As we’re talking, one of the other guys gasps, and holds his phone up to show the boss.
While we were talking, this guy opened his phone, and the first ad that popped up was for that odd, obscure equipment cart that we had just been talking about.
It turned out that these guys had been discussing this subject earlier, and now it was confirmed for all of us.
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What ads? My browser blocks ads. My vpn blocks ads. I pay for email so don’t see ads there. I pay for search so I don’t see ads there, either. I self host media. My TV doesn’t connect to the internet.
I seriously never see ads.
👍 Well done there. Using Brave, DDG, Ecosia and Firefox. Got Mulvad, got Tuta. Pay for search? Who with? Moving towards self hosting. Just ditched internet on my TV.
I pay for Kagi search.
Thanks for getting back.👍
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The one that did it for me - I was in the car with my wife and a friend. We were driving down the highway and talking about the clouds we saw. And I said “I wander what kind of clouds those are. Like cumulus? Alto?”
The I take out my phone and type “types of” and the first auto-fill option that came up was “types of cloud” and I was like “there’s no fucking way that just happens to be the highest suggested search prompt”
It won’t be long before we’ll be getting into sexy time with the spouse, and the phone on the nightstand dings with a notification. You pause to check it, and it’s an ad for a new sex lube!
Samsung TV’s have an ai assistant: https://news.samsung.com/global/samsung-redefines-ai-search-on-smart-tvs-with-a-smarter-bixby-voice-assistant
Samsung Ai assistant privacy policy: https://d264isyiyrfhr3.cloudfront.net/storage/tos/usa/2.1.3/1765237389944/eng/usa_eng_pp.html
Other Samsung Scandals if the above wasn’t enough: https://cybernews.com/privacy/samsung-settles-lawsuit-collecting-texans-tv-data/
My Samsung TV is not on the WiFi and I have AdGuard running network-wide because of shit like this.
https://www.howtogeek.com/you-can-still-buy-a-dumb-tv-but-should-you/ This article outlines the situation really well. your two options to not be spied on out of the box are to buy a terrible TV or to buy a commercial one. They dont make “dumb tvs” anymore. I wonder if theres a way to implement one’s own firmware n all that to turn a nice samsung into something more private.
I heard older versions of Android running on older smart TVs can be overwritten with Linux but once it’s updated past a certain 2023 threshold that option is closed.
You could take extreme measures like Louis Rossmann has said he does to his phones.
He said he disassembles his phones and desolders and removes all the microphones. He said if he wants to make or receive a call, he’ll use his Bluetooth headset or earpiece.
I don’t see why the same can’t also be feasible for televisions either, aside from how difficult they can be to properly disassemble and service.
Snowden says he does the same thing.
Technically you can do the same for your TV since the mic is probably in the remote. But that’s not the TVs worst threat. The constant snapshots of your screen no matter what is displayed is the bigger deal. That is a software issue and not being disconnected without an entire custom firmware/OS approach.
Where do you get this information that the microphone is in the remote? That’s about the dumbest shit I’ve heard all year, unless your remote is now Bluetooth or something.
Infrared remotes are output light flashes only, and only work when you point them in the general direction of the television.
Now if I’m mistaken about the most modern ‘smart’ televisions, well just let me know, with reference. Because I’m an infrared hacker, and Hisense and Roku televisions still give to my infrared hacks, output signals only.
Umm, because my Hisense remote has the mic button and a little hole for the mic to collect sound. Which makes sense when a person wants to speak and be heard and have the mic a foot from their mouth vs 6 feet across the room. But I guess your TV is different and listens with infrared.
Umm, then we must have a pre-spyware HiSense/Roku, no microphones to be found here, none that I know of anyways.
Also, no WiFi connection either, so…
Sir, it’s the year 2026.
I mean graphene would be easier for phones.
Theoretically if you never hook a smart TV to the net it shouldn’t be able to spy. I’m sure they do tho
Theoretically if you never hook a smart TV to the net it shouldn’t be able to spy.
I think you are right (today!), but look what happens with cars… the car connects to a wireless network without asking you, to send back telemetry. The cost of doing that is coming down all the time, and there is a big juicy profit stream just waiting to be harvested. I will not be surprised if we see TVs do this eventually, like cars do already.
They could also be designed to simply refuse to function if they can’t connect. I didn’t hear about any like this so far, but it feels like a matter of time. Enshittification comes for everything.
Graphene is still only for Pixel phones right now isn’t it? I heard something about them working to expand out to other model phones eventually, wonder how that’s going and how many more devices it’ll eventually support? 🤔
They announced last week their partnership is with Motorola. I’ll keep using my pixel and see what they roll out and let them work the bugs out of it for a bit first.
Only pixel yes and google is working hard to kill it.
if he wants to make or receive a call, he’ll use his Bluetooth headset or earpiece.
Oh boy he should not look up how insecure Bluetooth is then
Eh, it entirely depends on your threat model. If you’re trying to protect against mass surveillance, it makes sense because you’ll only sometimes have a functional microphone powered on. If you’re trying to protect against a targeted attack against you specifically, then yeah Bluetooth had some problems. You have bigger issues at that point, though. I also think Bluetooth is probably more secure than you think.
If you’re worried about the guy 10 m away from you eavesdropping, BT is not a great option. If you’re worried about the hackers on the other side of the planet, BT should be fine.
No electronic device is secure.
Anecdotal, but I was on a Boy Scout trip as a chaperone where us parents were talking to each other in person about where we’d take our first break en route to the campsite. We decided on a Burger King at one of the towns along the route (it being a small town, the only one there). My phone was in my pocket at the time, powered on but black screen idle.
I got back into my car and pulled up Google Maps. As I typed in the words Burger King, it auto completed with the one we were just talking about that was half a state away in that town. It didn’t pull up the closest one to me, which I would have expected it to do.
Freaked me out.
That one could be attributed to shitty programming. Still.
Then explain to me why nobody has ever proven the phone thing. But they have proven the TV thing and other forms of tracking. Every one is in on the phone industry so they keep it hush. I mean it wouldn’t even be that hard to do. Airplane mode and WiFi. Or fake cell tower and faraday box.
Okay, so here is my story:
I was on holiday with my friends and we were playing a TTRPG. In the RPG our group needed charol tablets. I have never in my life googled or needed something like that.
After the session, I opened up Amazon to buy something I forget to pack and voilà: Amazon suggested me to buy charol tablets.
My smartphone must have listened in and given that data to Amazon.
No Alexa or similar products were in the vacation home.
There’s no need for uploading a constant audio feed or transcript (something that would be easy for researchers to detect in the network logs) to show you an advertisement like that.
Your phone knows all the things you wrote in the post, namely: your location, that you are physically with those friends, the wifi network, the search history of everyone there. Because of all that metadata, advertisers probably know you were playing a TTRPG, maybe even the specific one
I normally have GPS and Bluetooth disabled, so my position would have to be guessed based on cell towers. We were not even on the same WLAN (because the WLAN was down in the vacation home, much to our dissatisfaction).
While I can’t rule out somebody in our group stealthily googling the tablets, phones while playing is generally frowned upon.
So yeah, being on the same cell tower as someone I know who might have searched for it might be the only other explanation.
The adventure itself didn’t have anything to do with the tablets, that was just our group doing strange stuff, like always.
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I and everyone I know have similar stories. They are listening
Conformation bias. You think of something and you see more of it. You don’t realize the 1000’s of other times you have seen that. Do you honestly remember every add you ever see? No but when you have thought about something you are more likely to see more of it. Or do people purchase more or your colour or type of car after you get it? Or is the fact you see more of them more likely because you are now “looking” for them.
Just think about the scale of the surveillance: every smartphone user is being monitored 24/7 in hope to find something to sell them.
If you hate AI because it wastes so much energy, think about the cost for the this: Energy, water, battery life, bandwidth, … And in contrast to AI the ‘users’ don’t get anything in return.
I worry that you’re making AI out as the good option, but really they are both awful, AI is simply less mature. There hasn’t yet been time to inject ads into generated responses (but it’s coming), and the users don’t yet feel the surveillance of each I’d their prompts.
And are you saying users don’t get any functionality from their smartphones? I find my smartphone more helpful than an LLM that spits out statistically likely responses while destroying our water, air, and electricity prices; stealing intellectual property from small artists who can’t fight back; and removing the humanity in peoples’ interactions.
AI capacity isn’t being built to serve users. It’s being used to profile their histories, to unmask their anonymity online so their profiles can be made more accurate.
Why do you think they want everything stored in the cloud? For convenience?
Just another reason they want to build even more data centers!
Aside from devices that acknowledge theyre listening all the time there actually isnt any, for undisclosed data collection via microphone specifically. Research has, to my knowledge, never found that to be the case
Researchers have generally explained that they dont need to listen to what you say with a microphone- they collect so much data about you they can accurately model what you’re likely to have any interest in, and when that happens frequently enough confirmation bias takes over.
That being said, yes, that person is having all of their data collected, by meta directly and through cookies tracking them around the web. By google and android. By ai, and other companies. By the tracking images in the emails they open. Etc. Theres lots of evidence for all of those things
And there is evidence for companies having collected data that people didnt concent to, like when google tracked location data that people opted out of sharing (there was a lawsuit) or meta recently ended up in the news for circumventing the sandboxing around the Facebook app to collect mobile web activity in a way they’re not supposed to be able to.
Aside from devices that acknowledge theyre listening all the time there actually isnt any, for undisclosed data collection via microphone specifically. Research has, to my knowledge, never found that to be the case
Please stop quoting this misinformation.
Microphone hijacking is real, and it is common. The average user has been a victitm of it.
And in addition, Google and Apple effectively admitted to microphone abuse in court.
Did they? I read the article and the conclusion is they got fined but didn’t admit to anything, nor was any proof shown that they did anything. The whole thing was about Siri getting activated by ambient noise.
Neither of those sources really disagree with what I said, though I do appreciate you adding the additional context because those things are worth knowing about
Smart speaker research: Security researchers have documented potential vulnerabilities in smart speakers and voice assistants.
• Mobile security: Documented cases of spyware accessing device microphones have been reported.
• Enterprise security: Organizations have reported incidents involving unauthorized audio access.
• Application permissions: Studies have shown some applications requesting unnecessary microphone access.
None of those are really the widespread, passive, undisclosed listening for advertising data that people imagine there to be and that OP appeared to be asking about. The google and apple lawsuit is about google assistant and siri triggering unintentionally, which is a feature that discloses its always listening which I mentioned at the very beginning
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/04/facebook-doesnt-need-listen-through-your-microphone-serve-you-creepy-ads old article but the eff is pretty reputable
It’s still never been proven despite countless very smart people looking for this exact behaviour for well over a decade now. The first person to actually prove this whole mass spying via microphone to sell ads thing is actually happening, would be world-famous overnight.
For instance on an android phone, it’s not really possible for an app to do something that a determined enough security researcher couldn’t ultimately detect if they were looking for it. When you can build your own version of the operating system and decompile the application easily, there’s not really any other places to hide that won’t give something away.
If you feel like your phone is acting off of a conversation you had without interacting with it, it’s nearly always one of these three:
- The vast majority of people are super predictable most of the time.
- You are not accounting for other people in the conversation, who may well have just googled the thing. These companies know who you spend time with, they don’t need a microphone for that.
- Baader meinhof phenomenon
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve thought surely something fishy was going on plenty of times, but the reality is, until someone can actually prove it (which is entirely possible to do if it’s happening), it’s gotta just be the above. We’re being tracked a crazy amount, but it’s not passively by microphones in our pockets
Note: none of this applies if you’re actually being specifically individually targeted (i.e. by a hostile government). All bets are off in that instance
The first person to actually prove this whole mass spying via microphone to sell ads thing is actually happening, would be world-famous overnight.
The first person that proves that Google, Microsoft, Amazon or Meta are directly doing it, using their hardware vendors privilege - would be famous overnight.
But that won’t happen, because they don’t have to.
(Okay, it might still happen with Meta. I’m not sure those jackasses have any self respect.)
In general, the big vendors don’t need to listen to anyone’s microphone, because the average user installs a free flappy bird clone that runs the microphone continuously, and then sells that to absolutely every single limited liability corporation, coffee shop, or data broker - to correlate for advertising.
Saying “they’re not using the microphone” is splitting hairs to death.
Yes, a few of the biggest players can’t be arsed to directly use the microphone.
Instead they buy the result of malware microphone use indirectly from the malware pushers who do absolutely use the microphone.
Absolutely every tech company, employer and three letter agency is buying the content of your voice recordings through a form of Privacy Washing. They didn’t collect it themselves, and they didn’t look to closely at how it was collected, so it’s okay, right?
For the average user, whose kid installed some stupid little free games, yes, someone is almost certainly “listening” right now, and all the time.
But they’re not using it to decide who to arrest, who to deport, or who to hire or fire (for saying “union”), or whether you really need the salary you requested…unless they are.
And yes, finding out some of that would absolutely make the news, but those are harder to find out, and could go for decades undiscovered.
Yeah, but that malware flappy bird clone does need to ask for the microphone permission, and the clueless user does need to click agree, that yes they want Free Flappy Bird 100% Legit Pro to have access to their microphone. Yes it happens. But that’s not what people mean they say that you should use a flip phone and get the battery out when you are not using it otherwise it’s listening to you. No it’s not listening to you unless you explicitly gave an app permission to listen to you.
Oh Baader Meinhof phenomenon, I’ve been seeing that everywhere recently!
many tv and phone manufacturers will literally say it in their license agreement.
i have read this in many different phones and some tvs.
Phones no one has proven it which I wouldn’t be hard. TV’s definitely do they even can tell what your watching from the video on the screen. I find it funny one is proven one is not but both believed.
Knowing what you’re watching on the screen is different than what you’re saying out loud near the TV or remote. Plus almost all TVs can run without an internet connection too, which renders this concern somewhat null
Disagree. The fact that these devices are both capable of, and would actively, emphatically, attempt to do any level of data harvesting, is a problem. Can they be defeated? Yes. They should not have to be. We deserve better.
The thing I find so funny about all of this is that people would rather believe that their phone is spying on them with the Mic that there is no proof of. Then what is more likely the truth you are not as unique as you think you are and they have so much data on you they have no reason to spy on what you say because they know you better then you know yourself (we lie to ourselves).
But yes it is easier for people to believe the mic is spying on them because thy can’t or won’t accept the more likely option.Thank you. Had to scroll way too far to read this. People on here are not as technical as I thought.
Found the sane comment. What we know for sure is that a combination of browser fingerprinting, de-anonymization (you can take anonymized hashed emails and compare them to hashes of known emails), and the third party broker marketplace that they can predict things with disturbing specificity like pregnancy, and obesity, to hidden patterns you might not even realize are in the data.
Plus there’s enough statistically informed shots in the dark that drive specific ads that, sometimes, they strike with perfect resonance. That’s enough to explain uncanny similarity. And the microphone listening thing is still plausible, but without stone cold proof it’s just a guess, and it overestimates how much data they need to be able to track you and sell you shit.
Apparently the lie I craft for myself is so good it went to medical school because I’ve been getting spam addressed to Dr Me asking about my oncology clinic for years
Regarding TVs, WikiLeaks’ Vault 7 publication in 2017 included “Weeping Angel”, CIA malware for Samsung TVs which streams audio from them while they’re in “fake off” mode.
https://mashable.com/article/cia-samsung-tv-hack-weeping-angel
