Comment on Hundreds of smartphone apps are monitoring users through their microphones

• LoveSausage@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨18⁩ ⁨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.

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  • 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.

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    • LoveSausage@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Lol. Yea whatever , would cost trillions. Just because you dont understand something dosnt make you right. Your entire argument is shattered in the link I provided you.

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      • CeeBee_Eh@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        Just because you dont understand

        Lol. My dude, I’m a developer who specializes in AI.

        It would cost trillions

        I have no clue how you came to that number. I could (and partially have) whipped up a prototype in a few days.

        half the battery life

        Hardly. Does Google assistant half battery life? No, so why would this? Besides, you would just need to listen to the mic and record audio only if the sound is above a certain volume threshold. Then once every few hours batch process the audio. Then send the resulting text data (in the KBs) up to a server.

        The average ad data that’s downloaded for in-app display is orders of magnitude larger than what would be uploaded.

        there are plenty of people that can find shit in the noise on wireshark

        How are they going to see data that’s encrypted and bundled with other innocuous data?

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