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.
Comment on Social nuke
haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com 1 week agoYour phone is in fact listening. Thats proven by a whistleblower from apple. But it doesnt need to, youre correct on that point.
jeffw@lemmy.world 1 week ago
haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com 1 week ago
They absolutely did not debunk that. Its a fact and it stays that.
jeffw@lemmy.world 1 week ago
That’s why you stopped replying to the other user lol
haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com 1 week ago
Ah, so you’re able to read my intentions. Good for you. I bet you’re very successful in business then.
Jokes aside. I agreed with their point that there are many reasons to be vigilant, independent from the proven fact that phones are listening.
You on the other hand are just trying to pile on something you somehow disagree with. Maybe you wanna rethink that attitude. Good bye.
hedgehog@ttrpg.network 1 week ago
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.
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.
hedgehog@ttrpg.network 1 week ago
It was already known before the whistleblower that:
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.