Comment on Hundreds of smartphone apps are monitoring users through their microphones
CeeBee_Eh@lemmy.world 1 day agoYes, but also no. You’re underestimating advertisers’ greed for data.
It’s actually trivial nowadays to build a background service like that.
LoveSausage@discuss.tchncs.de 1 day ago
Which would show up in network traffic , which it doesnt. There is no need for it.
h4lf8yte@lemmy.ml 13 hours ago
You could easily process the audio and filter in on the device and just send the transcribed parts that match your filters for further processing. No need to send a constant audio stream. Eventually it would show up in the battery usage but things like the google song recognition also heavily use the mic and process audio and it doesn’t show up as heavy as you would expect.
CeeBee_Eh@lemmy.world 22 hours ago
Ok, real question: what exactly would show up in network traffic?
LoveSausage@discuss.tchncs.de 19 hours ago
Evidence of voice collection and data transmission. Just hook it up to wireshark and test. It’s been done and zero evidence produced
Btw independent aricle from 2008 heres something a decade fresher androidauthority.com/your-phone-is-not-listening-…
Why would they need to do it anyway? Far easier to just use the telemetry already there. Your phone knows more about you than you think already. No need to use the microphone.
CeeBee_Eh@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
Nevermind the why (I’m not entirely convinced it’s being done), I want to know what exactly would be seen in network traffic.
Ok, you said “voice collection” which I’ll assume is audio recording and then uploading to some server. That’s an astonishingly bonkers and inefficient way of doing it. You run a very small model (using something like Tflite) that’s trained against a few hundred keyboards (brand names, products, or product category) and run it on the background of your service. Phones already do essentially this with assistant activation listening. Then once a few hours of listening, compress the plain text detection data (10 MB of plain text can be compressed to 1 MB) and then just upload the end result. And we wouldn’t be talking about megabytes, we’d be talking single digits kilobytes. An amount that wouldn’t even be a blip on wireshark, especially since phones are so exceedingly chatty nowadays. Have you actually tried to wireshark phone traffic? It’s just constant noise.
It’s entirely possible to do. But that doesn’t mean that it is being done.