It most likely is
Instead of guessing, you people need to learn to use Wireshark and find out for yourself.
No, they don't just listen all the time with an open mic.
No, they don’t just listen all the time with an open mic and just send all audio to the cloud. Anyone in cybersecurity would definitely notice that and sound the alarm.
How would they though? The mic is already known to be always on, and what the servers/back-end are doing with the mic input data is not viewable/known by us. So how would they know?
If you're monitoring the traffic, and you start speaking, and you suddenly see pac6kers spewing out of a device every time you talk, that's a good indication. There's indirect methods to analyze it without necessarily being able to see the actual data.
Poking around the PCB with an oscilloscope to see electrical signals will probably be useful too.
If you’re monitoring the traffic, and you start speaking, and you suddenly see pac6kers spewing out of a device every time you talk, that’s a good indication. There’s indirect methods to analyze it without necessarily being able to see the actual data.
Its already established that the mic always hot, and that data is always being sent to the sever.
What they do with the data is not seeable by us. That is the point being discussed, do they listen in to non-initiate conversations and market off of that data to us.
Its already established that the mic always hot, and that data is always being sent to the server.
Tell me, how have you established this? What were your methods?
SapientLasagna@lemmy.ca 6 months ago
Wireshark may or may not help you here. The proposed mechanism is abusing the wake words, which are processed locally on the device. Each marketing wake word could be processed, set a flag and go back to sleep with no network activity. Periodically a bit array of flags would be sent to the server with any other regular traffic (checking for notifications, perhaps). The actual audio never gets sent. I’m not saying that Facebook actually does this, but it’s a reasonable explanation for the behaviour seen in the Vice article.