Comment on Social nuke

jeffw@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

• haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  Your phone is in fact listening. Thats proven by a whistleblower from apple. But it doesnt need to, youre correct on that point.

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  • hedgehog@ttrpg.network ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    proven by a whistleblower from apple

    Assuming you have an iPhone. And even then, the whistleblower you’re referencing was part of a team who reviewed utterances by users with the “Hey Siri” wake word feature enabled. If you had Siri disabled entirely or had the wake word feature disabled, you weren’t impacted at all.

    This may have been limited to impacting only users who also had some option like “Improve Siri and Dictation” enabled, but it’s not clear. Today, the Privacy Policy explicitly says that Apple can have employees review your interactions with Siri and Dictation (my understanding is the reason for the settlement is that they were not explicit that human review was occurring). I strongly recommend disabling that setting, particularly if you have a wake word enabled.

    If you have wake words enabled on your phone or device, your phone has to listen to be able to react to them. At that point, of course the phone is listening. Whether it’s sending the info back somewhere is a different story, and there isn’t any evidence that I’m aware of that any major phone company does this.

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    • haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      Exactly. The interesting part is thats what we know. As has been proven countless times by apple and other huge companies. There is always more sinister shit going on that we dont know. I’m not saying all companies are listening and at all times but they are listening in general and given the politicla climate, we should act as if they are listening at all times.

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      • hedgehog@ttrpg.network ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

        It was already known before the whistleblower that:

        1. Siri inputs (all STT at that time, really) were processed off device
        2. Siri had false activations

        The “sinister” thing that we learned was that Apple was reviewing those activations to see if they were false, with the stated intent (as confirmed by the whistleblower) of using them to reduce false activations.

        There are also black box methods to verify that data isn’t being sent and that particular hardware (like the microphone) isn’t being used, and there are people who look for vulnerabilities as a hobby. If the microphones on the most/second most popular phone brand (iPhone, Samsung) were secretly recording all the time, evidence of that would be easy to find and would be a huge scoop - why haven’t we heard about it yet?

        Snowden and Wikileaks dumped a huge amount of info about governments spying, but nothing in there involved always on microphones in our cell phones.

        To be fair, an individual phone is a single compromise away from actually listening to you, so it still makes sense to avoid having sensitive conversations within earshot of a wirelessly connected microphone. But generally that’s not the concern most people should have.

        Advertising tracking is much more sinister and complicated and harder to wrap your head around than “my phone is listening to me” and as a result makes for a much less glamorous story, but there are dozens, if not hundreds or thousands, of stories out there about how invasive advertising companies’ methods are, about how they know too much, etc… Think about what LLMs do with text. The level of prediction that they can do. That’s what ML algorithms can do with your behavior.

        If you’re misattributing what advertisers know about you to the phone listening and reporting back, then you’re not paying attention to what they’re actually doing.

        So yes - be vigilant. Just be vigilant about the right thing.

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  • jeffw@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    Darn, someone else beat me to it, but as they said, this was largely debunked. We already knew that data is collected every time you say “Siri”. That’s not the same as constant and passive data collection without activation.

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    • haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      They absolutely did not debunk that. Its a fact and it stays that.

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      • jeffw@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

        That’s why you stopped replying to the other user lol

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• rainrain@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  Ignore your own experience, trust the authorities.

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