11 ms·

I still don't think companies serve you ads based on your microphone

210 points by paulcapewell 2y ago

nivertech 2y ago
Many mobile apps use an adtech SDK which does on-device audio keyword spotting. The company making this SDK is super secretive, so not much information about it.
- simonw 2y ago
  If "many mobile apps" use it surely some docs or other details have leaked out somewhere? Or at least a name?
  - nivertech 2y ago
    I won't disclose names. But thinking from the first principles, do you really think that all this phonetic keyword spotting[1] IP developed for defense tech in the late 90s and early 2000s was abandoned once recording entire phone conversations and doing full speech to text on them became technologically possible? I still remember lots of startups who did this stuff openly a decade ago, before Cambridge Analytica scandal[2]. After that it became impossible to get funding or get acquired, so the few that stayed in this field became very secretive. —- [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyword_spotting https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyword_spotting [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Analytica_data_scandal https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_A...
    - rgovostes 2y ago
      You know users have to authorize apps to use the microphone right? That pretty much limits the theoretical exposure to VoIP, camera, and translation apps. On iPhone, activating the microphone causes an icon to appear, which the app can’t hide. I think if the app is in the background, it turns the whole status bar bright red. Secondly, there is power use attribution and it would be very obvious if an app were keeping the device awake and the microphone on based on battery drain and runtime accounting. So you are asking us to accept on faith a shadowy ad SDK that is both widely used but also cannot be named, one that somehow subverts multiple layers of the system security architecture? Ok. We believe you.
      - blurbleblurble 2y ago
        A lot of apps ask for it up front upon installation.
        rgovostes 2y ago
        On iOS apps must provide a reason for requesting it which appears in the prompt. App Review makes sure the reason is justified. A library might be able to opportunistically piggyback on this permission but again the mic indicator would be on. It would more than likely be discovered and the app banned.
  - blurbleblurble 2y ago
    I saw a whole PR release for adtech oriented keyword spotting tech like this one time, I wish I'd saved it... I can't remember the name of that particular company. But read through this doc: https://picovoice.ai/docs/faq/porcupine/ https://picovoice.ai/docs/faq/porcupine/
kylecazar 2y ago
people surf the net so automatically that they forget they are doing it and blame Alexa for snooping.
- jgalt212 2y ago
  I do recall reading the Alex engineers insisting on a physical off switch while the opposite was true for the Google Home product.
- monkpit 2y ago
  I think it’s wild that your counter argument is basically just gaslighting everyone. There are tons of (possibly coincidental) examples of this type of thing happening. Even if it’s a coincidence, it’s not explained away by “maybe everyone just forgot or is not paying attention”.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - kylecazar 2y ago
    It's not gaslighting. I believe people see the ads for things they talk about in the same room as a smart speaker. I also believe people very rarely only speak about a thing -- without there being any digital footprint at all of them engaging with it. I have literally seen this play out with family and traced it back to make a point.
jprete 2y ago
> ...they would need to be feeding those snippets in almost real time into a system which forwards them onto advertising partners who then feed that information into targeting networks... I think this is totally mistaken. An ad seller which also wants to respect privacy keeps this data in-house and does the ad targeting themselves. The advertiser never needs to see personal information for this kind of market to give people ads related to overheard conversations.
- bbor 2y ago
  I mean, many advertisers go through the Google display network without having Google target their ads (AKA run their bidding algorithms). Typically they go through other middlemen agencies, who indeed would need at least some of this data to make use of it, tho perhaps in some derivative form. Still, you’re right that Google could be keeping it all for themselves and feeding it to their black box targeting services. I really strongly doubt that’s happening with incidental assistant snippets much less intentionally-eavesdropped recordings, but it is more plausible than this makes it seem.
- thayne 2y ago
  Also, couldn't a lot of it be done on device? Say, have a set of key phrases to listen for, and if the device hears them, then mark that the user should be targeted by certain kinds of ads. I don't have any evidence either way that that happens, but it seems like a more practical way to accomplish it.
- simonw 2y ago
  We're specifically talking about Apple here, based on Siri wake words. Do you think Apple are running this kind ad of targeting?
  - siliconpotato 2y ago
    why are you limiting your argument to wake words? It's comparatively trivial to serve ads based upon what's spoken after the wake word. And as we know from the lawsuit, it seems that there's been a lot of data gathered accidentally too.
floxy 2y ago
I think the article would be improved if he added a bit about what evidence he would accept.
- simonw 2y ago
  Show me some sniffed network traffic demonstrating an app sending that data back to a server. Discovery in a lawsuit. Credible insider leaks confirming this happens and how.
  - hobs 2y ago
    How about Apple paying 95 million dollars in fines for it? https://edition.cnn.com/2025/01/02/business/apple-siri-privacy-lawsuit/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2025/01/02/business/apple-siri-priva...
    - jere 2y ago
      Most of the post is disputing the point you're making. Did you read it?
      - hobs 2y ago
        Absolutely caught red handed - but I dont think Apple paid out 100m because "eh its easier this way".
        gruez 2y ago
        If you look at the court filings, the only part where they were "caught red handed" was that they knew they were recording audio for inadvertent activations, but didn't take steps to stop it. There's remotely close to proving that they were using it for advertising.
        hobs 2y ago
        I was the one caught red handed fwiw.
dudeinjapan 2y ago
I set my iPhone language to Italian and now I’m getting non-stop ads for Olive Garden.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- brk 2y ago
  What is the correlation? Olive Garden has nothing to do with anything Italian.
  - fasa99 2y ago
    I set mine to Spanish and now it's nothing but Taco Bell ads
eximius 2y ago
I have successfully argued this for at least a certain class of devices. Namely, it practically can't happen _for small devices_. e.g., a TV remote with a voice feature activated by a button simply won't have enough _power_ to constantly be listening, uploading, or processing. Harder to convince folks that _nothing_ does this, but takes an edge off their more paranoid tendencies.
- fasa99 2y ago
  I personally don't believe any argument that says it's not feasible. Transcribing all spoken text and sending it home, sure, not feasible. What if we have 256 keywords, or 65536 keywords, maybe preconfigured for particular products or product classes. Some basic linear predictive coding mechanism ( you know, what powered those '80s chips Stephen Hawking style, speak and spell, etc) - very very low computational overhead. When the word is triggered, queue a message back home at the next reasonable opportunity - user id, timestamp, word. It will only take a couple bytes. It can be slipped in anywhere and obfuscated by any means by nature of being so small, data-wise, even as a watermark of some sort. By using a timestamp and waiting until the next opportunity, maybe minutes, hours, or days away, no time correlation detection is possible either. People say big tech is ethical, fine. Maybe some ad company is sponsoring some free app or game for the phone, and slipping this in there. Now the developer can pay their rent and food costs. Maybe the ad company is then selling that data back to big tech who washes their hands of any wrongdoing. Maybe it's all legal because the fine print of the EULA allows for this. Seems to me though this can be figured out empirically, just have a voice play something like "need to buy adult diapers" or "new tires" etc next to a device, enumerate every device, look for ads on whatever very specific topic, minding along the way to tell nobody and never enter it in any internet-connected keyboard.
  - Arelius 2y ago
    For sure! I mean, my Google pixel has "Now Playing" which is able to passively listen to the microphone for songs it knows, and displays them on the oled lock screen. So, we already know that it is A. completely feasible for a smartphone to do this. B. At least a subset of smartphones have always-on microphones. Maybe not a remote control... But why would you put it in a remote anyways when everyone has a phone?
jere 2y ago
My experience working at one of the companies that gets accused of this a lot is that many colleagues wish we were as evil as claimed because it would be so much easier do their jobs that way than struggling through the reality of it which is endless red tape over the tiniest issues that have even the slightest proximity to privacy. So I've been a bit skeptical too.
- arcmechanica 2y ago
  [dead]
  - alex1138 2y ago
    Citation for Apple?
    - arcmechanica 2y ago
      its on the front page $95m fine
- bbor 2y ago
  Yup - having worked at Google Display Ads (arguably the epicenter of such talk), I personally only ever witnessed people walking the walk, privacy-wise. The threats to our privacy are quite public and not at all illegal; IMO data brokers and 3P browser trackers are at the top of the list, but all of Google’s known ills are there too (location tracking, exchange monopolization, allowing predatory advertisers, gestures broadly at chrome, etc etc etc). They don’t need to be listening to us, and wouldn’t know how to even begin hiding it if they were. Something like that would require tons of compute and thousands of conspirators risking massive backlash, all to prop up a relatively tiny part of their business. > Convincing people of this is basically impossible Absolutely correct IME, btw. This is one of those things a smart engineer learns not to argue online, or at the Christmas dinner table for that matter. People tend to stand their ground on this one and move quickly to accusations of bias and naïveté…
  - jgalt212 2y ago
ch_ase 2y ago
We search for everything we talk about these days…our location services are always on. The times I’ve noticed this I can usually trace it back to a friend had been searching for something and then we (our phones) were in the same place. Even the guy from the lawsuit with the doctor… his phone knows he was at that doctor and that doctor offers that procedure. Seems possible without listening.
- SoftTalker 2y ago
  I keep location services off, but realize that’s probably not completely hiding my location.
- lbotos 2y ago
  Yes, but I think that's the part that feels... unsettling. I watched a Nigerian film on the seat back display on the plane the other day. I looked it up on my laptop when I got home because I didn't finish it. The next day in my Instagram explore page I had a Nigerian meme... Yes, I get it -- could be frequency illusion or some IP address/cookie shenanigans. Still feels weird.
  - Tagbert 2y ago
    “ I looked it up on my laptop when I got home” That is the real mechanism for triggering the ads and memes, not that “your phone is listening to you.” At least feel creepy about the real cause and not some imagined monster under the bed.
  - clovoak 2y ago
    Or more likely: Confirmation bias. I also occasionally get Nigerian memes on IG despite never having searched it. But unlike you I don't have the Nigerian film google search history that would lead me to conclude it was targeted. Put another way, if you googled a Swedish film then saw Swedish memes you would think that was targeted. Then upon viewing the Nigerian memes you would have attributed it to a random video rather than anything targeted.
- monkpit 2y ago
  This is gaslighting. Even if it’s a coincidence, people have numerous examples of situations where they or anyone with them did not search for a thing. I’m not saying the only possible explanation is that the phone is spying on you - but I’m saying, don’t gaslight people and say “you probably searched about it and forgot”.
renewiltord 2y ago
As of 2019 (my last contact with the industry), there was no real-time onboarding solution that could do this. Or if it existed it wasn't good enough to attract any attention. People were saying this in 2014 or so. I remember around 2017 thinking it would be pretty cool (repurpose wake-word detection to do some pre-determined segments or something) but no-one had it working. There's all sorts of stuff going on behind the scenes in ad tech and if https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=manigandham https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=manigandham would probably have something useful to share if he was still around. But it wasn't real. Even back then people would publish "sources" saying it was being done, but I'm telling you that if it worked well people would be doing it and we were in the middle of it all and couldn't find anyone who was. There were smart-devices that acted as beacons to report people to ICE and stuff like that and they used personal data to tie it together. So there was crazy stuff out there (none tied to the respectable ad tech industry HN knows as the "privacy-violators" and so on). But this specific thing wasn't there.
forgotmypw17 2y ago
I suspect that it is emergent behavior that even the ad companies themselves aren't aware of. I have definitely experienced it myself, and have no doubts that it happens.
joshdavham 2y ago
Well clearly HN is listening to my phone because I literally had this exact debate several times last week!
jcoletti 2y ago
I've noticed people often research products, services, medical issues/ailments, etc. using Google (or similar). When they start seeing related ads on social media, they tend to attribute more to having discussed the topic out loud, forgetting about the searches they made from the same device or IP address.
linsomniac 2y ago
They don't need to: they can read your mind. My proof? Yesterday I was driving home and I saw an old Toyota Previa minivan and thought to myself "Oh, a Previa, you don't see those very often these days." When I got home, I started scrolling through my Google News and it showed me an advert for the new Previa. I agree with Simon: you basically aren't going to convince someone that their phone doesn't listen to you and serve you adverts based on it, because they've run into instances where it seems like it.
- kimbernator 2y ago
  I think people are prone to believing that their phone is listening to them out of an instinct to believe they are a lot more unique than they actually are. A clash between western individualism and hyper-efficient consumerism. That's not me taking a stance on whether it's true, though. There would be a lot of fame in it for a whistleblower, but on the other hand if Google or Meta figured out a way to do it with a low chance of it being proven, why wouldn't they?
  - fc417fc802 2y ago
    > out of an instinct to believe they are a lot more unique than they actually are. This is trivializing people in my opinion. The non-trivializing interpretation would be that for whatever reason people are skeptical that a black box that they don't understand very well, don't know how to audit, and don't know how to exert low level control over is doing things that they don't want it to do. When framed that way it is immediately clear that this is an incredibly reasonable stance to take. The default assumption should always be that a third party who has a vested interest is pursuing it. As an example. It is paranoia to assume that a 1970s era vehicle with almost no electronics in it is reporting on me to the manufacturer. It is willful ignorance bordering on delusion to assume that a vehicle manufactured in 2020 is not.
  - mu53 2y ago
    Seriously, a whistleblower in tech? In 2025? “Be part of the richest portion of the middle class and never have to worry about money again orrrrr mysteriously die 6 months from now leaving no identifiable impact”
rgovostes 2y ago
Reuters journalist Jon Stempel repeated the plaintiffs' paranoid and unsubstantiated allegations but did not include a single statement from Apple, just a vacant "did not immediately respond". If only there were years of statements made under oath in the courts to draw from. Siri uses a pseudonymous identifier when communicating with Apple's services. The identifier is not linked to your Apple ID. Therefore Siri does not have access to your iCloud data. When you ask Siri to "call mom", it constructs a search query which is then executed on-device against your contacts database. More of these requests are served entirely on-device. Just ask: how is that consistent with the idea that they are doing ad targeting based on Siri requests? You can request a data export for your Apple account and see that there's no Siri data included in it. If they are caught lying, EU regulators will have a field day. Apple describes their ad targeting here. They list the—frankly boring—signals they use for ad personalization, which does not include anything you say to Siri or have in your personal iCloud data. https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/data/en/apple-advertising/ https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/data/en/apple-advertisin... No one is apologizing for Apple's nontransparent collection of Siri audio for QA purposes, which is what they settled over and made opt-in.
alvah 2y ago
Every time I read some technical description about why this isn't happening, the technical description seems convincing. However... A friend tested the theory a few years ago. He doesn't own a swimming pool, doesn't want to, and has never expressed any desire to. He put his and his wife's phone on the table and said to the wife (loudly), "Why don't we look into pool fencing?". She agreed with him. Shortly after, on both of their phones, on a particular social network, they were inundated with ads for....pool fencing.
- Klonoar 2y ago
  Now tell it over a campfire and maybe shine a flashlight under your face.
  - arduanika 2y ago
    The party told you to recount the evidence of your eyes and ears as a campfire ghost story. It was their final, most essential command.
- nsavage 2y ago
  I have similar anecdotes about this and Yamaha guitars.
- darknavi 2y ago
  Why did they pick a swimming pool? Did they see people in their area installing pools? I think that's often people's best guess, is that the "random" thing people use to test this actually isn't random and subconsciously they already had this topic seeded to them.
  - james_marks 2y ago
    I know my iPhone isn’t listening to me. And I know about my friend’s activity influencing the ads I get served, and my demographic, and location, and all of that. And my random idea for a test word being predictable in a shocking way. But, recently I started thinking about the average user, who will install anything and approve any permissions requested without reading it. And imperfect App Store reviews approving a Trojan horse accidentally. Am I positive someone hasn’t inadvertently allowed mic access to a malicious party? I wonder if that person’s phone may, in fact, be listening to them.
barnabyjones 2y ago
The assumption is that it's either widespread or nonexistent, but I could see it being just a rare instance that gets A/B tested, and maybe by now the companies have decided it's not worth it. But IME all kinds of not quite kosher stuff gets A/B tested, and that would line up with anecdotes where it's too specific to be coincidence, but also uncommon and only affecting certain people.
l0ng1nu5 2y ago
Theres a reason why they put a microphone in every single Internet connected device they can, even when it serves little purpose. My remote has a mic ffs, not to mention oddly specific ads after certain conversations.
in-pursuit 2y ago
I know someone who worked on smart TV software. They explicitly added audio fingerprinting via integrated microphone so they could determine which programs you were watching for ad profiling. When in the history of online ads have advertisers not used available data?
- lelandfe 2y ago
  Automatic content recognition is one of the freakiest kinds of tracking I've heard of. Smart TVs become data collection hubs for the home if they get connected to the internet. Some have microphones for voice recognition. If you go into the privacy policies for them, you'll find that your audio gets sent off to third parties (albeit only when in use). I completely disconnected my TV from the internet, but it still prompts me to connect it to Wi-Fi, to agree to policies, etc. This page is full of horribles: https://www.consumerreports.org/electronics/privacy/how-to-turn-off-smart-tv-snooping-features-a4840102036/ https://www.consumerreports.org/electronics/privacy/how-to-t...
- snowwrestler 2y ago
  Ha, I’m imagining a sort of thriller movie villain reveal where people are intently saying silly things into their phones, while the camera slowly pans over to the smart TV in the corner, which is actually listening.
- bmicraft 2y ago
  I don't get this, why would they use a microphone when they already have the original quality audio stream going to the speakers?
  - in-pursuit 2y ago
    They don’t always have the audio stream, e.g. when someone is using an audio receiver.
porknubbins 2y ago
My wife and I, just being goofy, have an inside joke featuring a relatively uncommon name that we ocasionally yell out, like a few times a week. Two months ago we got junk mail addressed to UNCOMMON NAME + our last name. I don’t think its a coincidence. Something is listening. Its kind of messed up that I am a normally rational, skeptical minded person, fairly knowledgable about information security and in 2024 I can’t even draw any clear lines between a nutty conspiracy theory and reality. I’m sorry but I don’t find this article basically just saying “yeah but what are the chances Apple would do that?” persuasive at all.
- kimbernator 2y ago
  I think it's normal to have a hard time delineating between conspiracy and genuine concern when it comes to this. We're literally carrying around powerful computers with exceptionally reliable connectivity combined with high-resolution cameras and high-fidelity microphones that are frequently used for voice recognition. Not to mention that for 50% of US smartphones, the software is designed by the most prolific advertiser in the world. I had an experience a few years ago where I had talked about a fairly niche product (I can't recall exactly what it was) and the next day I started seeing ads for that product all over the place. I commented about it to two of my coworkers that day, how I had been skeptical about the conspiracy that our phones were listening to us for marketing purposes but that this felt eerie. What shocked me was their response: They had seen the same ad all over the place. Since then I've had a hard time deciding what to be more concerned about: That my phone might be listening, or that I might have been subtly influenced into thinking about this thing; that my whole experience was actually a result of being susceptible to marketing directed at my demographic
- gruez 2y ago
  >My wife and I, just being goofy, have an inside joke featuring a relatively uncommon name that we ocasionally yell out, like a few times a week. Two months ago we got junk mail addressed to UNCOMMON NAME + our last name. Are you sure it's not because of an opsec fail? eg. you used your nickname when registering for some service, and that made it into some sort of mailing list? What you're seemingly implying (ie. that there's some sort of secret listening system that can figure out your nickname, tie it back to your address, and then send spam to that) makes little sense. Your name + address is already readily available. It's in the public records. You freely hand it over to random websites (eg. for online shopping). There's zero benefits in anyone making such a system to figure out people's names using surreptitious listening.
WheelsAtLarge 2y ago
I had this happen to me recently. I was speaking to a friend about a subject that suddenly started to appear in ads after I hung up. It was spooky. But I think it has more to do with the activities related to the people we know. I'm sure because of Android, Gmail and search they have a good understanding of our general association group. I bet my friend did a search on what we were talking about and Google was able to determine that others in the group would be interested in the subject. They don't need the microphone input. They have better (more direct?) ways to get the information.
- sixothree 2y ago
  I actually believe the alternative theories are scarier than the phone actually listening to you. The one thing I keep hearing over and over again from people is that “I talked to so-and-so about this“ and now I’m getting a bunch of ads about it. What’s scary is that it knew you two were in the same room that one of you had a recent interest and that there was a likelihood you discussed it. That seems worse to me than just listening the conversations.
  - Suppafly 2y ago
    >That seems worse to me than just listening the conversations. And that's the one that's actually happening. Listening to your conversations isn't technically possible and is easy to disprove.
  - RGamma 2y ago
    If this parasitic nonsense technology ever turns against us Stasi-style we're gonna wish the ads back.
- neom 2y ago
  What you described is basically how it works. You all get finger printed on the same network, finger printed on google searches, finger printed at the routers, and then associated. 6 guys get together for beer and someone brings up wood chips, 1 guy later googles BBQs, you're all getting BBQ ads for the next week and a half, the 5 other guys think the phone is listening to them because they don't know one of the guys actually googled or triggered something related to BBQs. I once knew my roommate was pregnant before anyone else because I got a bunch of ads for baby shit all of a sudden.
9cb14c1ec0 2y ago
Has he read this: https://www.404media.co/mindsift-brags-about-using-smart-device-microphone-audio-to-target-ads-on-their-podcast/ https://www.404media.co/mindsift-brags-about-using-smart-dev...
- Tagbert 2y ago
  Have you read the early stories and discussions that make that look unlikely? https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/12/no-a-marketing-firm-isnt-tapping-your-device-to-hear-private-conversations/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/12/no-a-marketing-firm-...
MrMcCall 2y ago
My wife has a very new (<2yo) iPhone. We live in public housing, no luxuries. We were talking about getting her some slippes, and I made a joke about her not getting any Gucci slippers. The Gucci ad appeared on her phone within 30 minutes. I sh_t you not. She was a bit gobsmacked. I was neither surprised nor disturbed. That's real anecdata, my friends. It could have been coincidence, and while we have nothing to hide, it's not an optimal situation, whatever the cause. Besides, we ain't buying no Gucci slippers, no way, no how.
- amyames 2y ago
  What social media apps does she have installed? Just curious
  - MrMcCall 2y ago
    None.
- gruez 2y ago
  >We live in public housing, no luxuries. >Gucci Gucci is classified as an "aspirational luxury" brand. In other words, luxury for poor people. It makes total sense that it would be pushed to people in public housing. If you get recommendations for European brands you've never heard of selling $5000 t-shirts, then I'd be worried.
  - MrMcCall 2y ago
    I'm not worried, and thanks for suggesting that advertising would be a viable motive given our geolocation. Good thing Apple doesn't also have means and opportunity, too. Silly me! I guess we should all just blindly trust Apple. Thanks, friend.
    - gruez 2y ago
      >Good thing Apple doesn't also have means and opportunity, too. Silly me! >I guess we should all just blindly trust Apple. Thanks, friend. Never claimed any of those things. Quit putting words in my mouth.
slg 2y ago
One thing that is rarely discussed in relation to this urban myth is that it is widely believe and yet it doesn't actually effect the behavior of most believers. That is one of the major reasons why most companies and many governments don't care about privacy, the public doesn't really care about it either. People will of course choose privacy over no privacy with all else being equal, but privacy is the first thing sacrificed when push comes to shove. If the average person is given the choice of having everything said within earshot of their phone being recorded and sent to Facebook or giving up Instagram, they'll happily choose Instagram and forsake their privacy. If privacy advocates want to start turning the tide in this battle, the first step needs to be convincing the average person why privacy is important on a personal and tangible level. No arguments about future totalitarian regimes or hypothetical ideals. Abstract concepts like that rarely motivate people who have so many more practical political concerns. It needs to be something that is more important to people than having access to Instagram. And I have absolutely no idea how that could be accomplished which makes me concerned that we're already too late.
- simonw 2y ago
  That's the main reason I care about this so much. If people really do believe that their phones are spying on them all the time to show them ads that means that people are basically surrendering to an imagined surveillance state. They shut up and accept it, because they'd rather keep Facebook/Instagram installed than fight back. I find that really depressing. I want people to have more agency than that. We need people to understand the imagined v.s. the actual privacy threats, so they can push for better standards. If they believe in and submit to the conspiracy theories good luck getting anyone to campaign for actual meaningful improvements to the problems that are real.
  - edanm 2y ago
    That's a very good reason to talk about this. I do think that this is a very "lightly held" belief. It's something people kind-of believe, they'll tell this to each other, but it doesn't affect any behavior - not because it's not important IMO, but because people mostly don't really, deep down, believe it. And I do wonder if convincing people this isn't happening will have the opposite effect than we intend. Instead of being more aware of what actual privacy violations are, it'll just make people write off the whole idea of companies invading their privacy. Idk.
noisy_boy 2y ago
To all the people expressing doubt and disbelief, refer to every whistleblower story which was derided as tinfoil hat conspiracy until blown up. If we still haven't learnt that money will make corporations (and people) do despicable things, only we are to blame ourselves.
ChrisArchitect 2y ago
Related: Apple will pay $95M to settle Siri privacy lawsuit https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42579009 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42579009
orev 2y ago
Another option not mentioned is that the thing they’re talking about might have been in their subconscious because of an ad they’d recently seen but didn’t notice. The topic/concept/product eventually bubbles up to consciousness, they talk about it, then start noticing the ads that were already there.
block_dagger 2y ago
What I worry about sometimes is malware sniffing for hardware wallet seed phrases being practiced out loud by users when they think they're alone. I always tell people if they keep crypto on a hardware wallet - NEVER speak your seed phrase aloud. This could also be spied on by laser microphone surveillance.
zw123456 2y ago
OK, but query me this batman. Lately, I have been inundated by ads for anything to do with Kayaks. I do not own a Kayak. I do not want to own a Kayak and have never even spoken the word as far as I can remember. But for some reason, I am seeing ads for a Kayak carrier, a Kayak launcher, roof rack, you name it. It is so weird. I cannot figure out why suddenly these idiots think I am remotely interested in Kayaking. Kayaking, it is just so random. But way back in the 2000s, a friend of mine worked for a web site dev company. Her job was to visit with clients and take pictures of whatever they were hawking, write some copy and the dudes back in her office would turn it into a web page. She would occasionally ask me to come along and stare at whatever crap they were selling and act like I cared about it while she snapped some photos. I joked that meant technically I was a model. But then one time she was doing a web page for a marketing company that did focus groups. That was back before we had smart phones tracking your every move. I posed in a fake focus group with some other people and after that, the dude that ran the place asked me if I wanted to be in real focus group and I agreed. They seemed to think there were certain connections that made no sense. For example, they were sure that they could market adult diapers to nerds that play video games who were to absorbed in their game to get off their ass to take a simple dump. Apparently that is actually a thing? Then I went to this one focus group where they were asking if you own a dog and buy a lot of peanut butter. Read between the lines. So gross. So, I am guessing, some marketing weirdo thinks there is some weird connection between something else in my life an Kayaks. It would be interesting to know what that is. But, I think, a lot of times, they might be right about those weird connections that make you feel like they are reading your mind. Just in this case, whatever it is, maybe that I watch a lot of documentaries and that means I like Kayaking? I guess they only have to be right some percentage of the time. Just not in this case.
- cschep 2y ago
  someone probably googled “kayak” from your wifi?
  - zw123456 2y ago
    Hmmm, I live alone and in a pretty remote area (on an island). I keep my wifi pretty secure, so, that seems pretty unlikely. But who knows, anything is possible I suppose. Maybe because I live on an island.
cloudking 2y ago
Maybe the algorithms simply concluded that you might interested in things your friends are interested in.. that's part of why you're friends? If any of your friends searched for something online, and you're connected to them in a social network, they might show you the same ad by proximity.
kwar13 2y ago
Nice try, Meta.
spl757 2y ago
[flagged]
protocolture 2y ago
I dunno, seems trivial to me. Like if an arduino can reliably carry 1 wakeword, an iphone could carry what? 64 at minimum? Instead of waking up recording the conversation and sending it to the stasi, it could just toggle a bool in your secret advertising profile, then sync that up at random intervals. They dont need context, they just need "Biscuit" "Nappies" "Birthday". Not to say it isn't all made up. It probably is. I just dont think its technically difficult to achieve. It is probably all psychology. But sitting there with a packet capture going as you talk about dogfood isnt necessarily a great test to confirm the negative.
- lantry 2y ago
  But if you're listening for 64, or even 1024 wake words, you won't get to the level of granularity people are claiming to observe, like in the other comment here where they tested "pool fencing". If you were putting together a list of 64 words, would you really include "pool fencing"?
  - protocolture 2y ago
    Its an extreme low side estimate. And the chance that Pool OR Fencing is one is pretty high.
    - SpaceNoodled 2y ago
      A better keyword would be "buy."
  - aarmot 2y ago
    The wakewords could be simply "buy", "cheap", "sale", "price" etc - and then collect the exact words around it. I bet the pool fencing conversation followed with the exchange of ideas where to get equipment.
    - anticensor 2y ago
      10 thousand-ish words make sense when one considers multiple languages.
Ancalagon 2y ago
The author admits the fine for breaking this rule is basically a non-issue compared to the potential earnings. Why wouldn’t the most valuable company on earth see this as a huge, easy win to record and advertise based on those recordings?
- tonfa 2y ago
  Under GDPR don't they risk 10% of worldwide revenue? (Plus for a company like apple trying to be seen as the defender of privacy, the PR and reputational hit)
StanislavPetrov 2y ago
I find it completely plausible that either Google, Facebook or some other installed app is listening to your conversations to develop marketing profiles. What I find amazing is that people don't use ad blockers! I wouldn't be able to tell you if they are harvesting my voice data, because I haven't seen an ad in years! It is trivial to block ads, why do so many people choose to see them?
snowwrestler 2y ago
This doesn’t seem that hard to test? Put a phone on WiFi, run it through a traffic sniffer, and see if it is constantly sending little audio packets to listener1486.facebook.com or whatever. Or heck, open up a phone and stick a probe on the mic lead. See when it is getting power or not.
- _1tem 2y ago
  There are smarter ways to do this without constantly sending all the audio. Wakewords + surrounding snippets for example. In fact if the audio recognition is done on-device then only the text data could be sent which would be indistinguishable from telemetry.
solarkraft 2y ago
Neither do I. There’s no technical way it can be happening without it being easily spotted, not to mention how many would have to conspire. However I am still waiting for a comprehensive explanation for how it is actually happening. There there are many ways to correlate people and their interests, but I wonder how deep it goes. Basic geolocation and public interaction metadata: Sure. But I’ve also heard people believe that it ought to be possible to spot closeness via Wifi and Bluetooth. This is such a culturally relevant topic that there must be some serious knowledge about it somewhere. As for my own tests, I’ve made it a point to mention that I’m considering spending money on a well advertised-for product that I haven’t yet searched for online every time this topic comes up. No ads so far. In the next phase I’ll progressively tell more people to start looking it up.
more_corn 2y ago
You can think whatever you want. When ad companies claim they have that capability and when I see evidence with my own eyes that’s enough for me.
- simonw 2y ago
  That is EXACTLY what I said in my article: "Convincing people of this is basically impossible. It doesn’t matter how good your argument is, if someone has ever seen an ad that relates to their previous voice conversation they are likely convinced and there’s nothing you can do to talk them out of it"
1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago
From a potential culpability or liability perspective, the question of targeted advertising is irrelevant. Intercepting private communications without consent, absent an applicable exception, is still against the law, e.g., the Wiretap Act and/or the California Invasion of Proivacy Act, ads or no ads. Targeted ads would not be used as evidence that private communications have been intercepted. Many years ago, Google was sued for wiretapping and lost. See Joffe v Google More recently Apple was sued for eavesdropping without consent. They just settled for $95 million. See Lopez v Apple
ajma 2y ago
The argument I use to convince people is to ask them how long your battery lasts when you’re running any apps, I’ll then ask how long do you think your battery would last if the apps were listening all day long. I can’t tell if my friends are convinced or if they’re too polite (or disinterested) to argue.
- a_victorp 2y ago
  How would you tell the difference if the apps are listening all the time without you knowing it?
lxgr 2y ago
I used to not believe in confirmation bias, but ever since I started really paying attention to it, it’s suddenly everywhere!
disambiguation 2y ago
Ask HN - let's say hypothetically, our phones are as bad as some think. Face camera taking covert pics, regular screenshots sent back home, microphone recording every conversation, every message, email, and bit of internet traffic scraped and harvested for ads and anything else - how would you change your habits if you knew this was happening? Answer - you wouldn't.
- simonw 2y ago
  I'd write to my representatives about it.
  - disambiguation 2y ago
    Have you? I can't be bothered to cite but all of the above can and does happen in certain contexts - the covert face camera is admittedly a stretch, but all your personal photos are usually whisked away to the cloud without warning, which is just as bad (see the recent apple photos news)
    - simonw 2y ago
      I haven't, and that's an interesting prompt for me to think about real privacy issues that I do think should involve legislation (while avoiding the risk of more cookie banners).
Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe 2y ago
There is something I've always been wondering about companies' privacy policy. When Google says that it does not send user audio data to their server, does that prevent them from sending say whisper embedding of the audio itself? Because technically it would not be audio. It would still include a very rich representation of what the user said. Rich enough to be used to sell things.
tommiegannert 2y ago
The danger with this kind of opinion is that you start out doing some healthy critical thinking, and research. You form an opinion, based on good intentions. Then you spend all your time on explaining your conclusion to others. At that time, people who have the same opinion flock to you, and you don't have time to do more research. This is the problem with experts and politicians. You can make money on either position, but once you have started stating your opinion, it's unlikely you'll do active research to disprove your opinion, as many have already concluded [1]. I'm happy that Simon only sees this as a hobby. [1] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/11/30/salary/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/11/30/salary/
renegat0x0 2y ago
I had a brand of wine in a closed, we were discussing with my life our wedding. Immediately this one brand of wine popped up on my wife user feed, wall. That happens from time to time, so, yeah... I know that it works like this for sure.
on_the_train 2y ago
They do. They absolutely do. Not a week goes by without a blatant case on my phone. I'd wager everything I own on this.
- simonw 2y ago
  What evidence would you accept that they're not doing this in a way that would make this an actionable bet?
  - on_the_train 2y ago
    What evidence would anyone accept that 1+1 is 3? That's a genuine response. The cases are so clear cut (words picked up from conversations that would never fit on whatever profile they have on me; up to specific mentioned brands and things completely alien to be) and so numerous. I still can't believe that anyone even debates it. It's blatant as hell and all of my peers notice it, too
fnqi8ckfek 2y ago
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inemesitaffia 2y ago
I now believe it's happening based on this article. We already know about TV piracy detection leading to bars showing soccer without a license being fined.
o999 2y ago
> 404 Media previously reported Cox Media Group (CMG) was advertising a service that claimed to target ads based on what potential customers said near device microphones. Now, here is the pitch deck CMG sent to prospective companies. Google has kicked CMG off its Partner Program in response. https://www.404media.co/heres-the-pitch-deck-for-active-listening-ad-targeting/ https://www.404media.co/heres-the-pitch-deck-for-active-list...
hollownobody 2y ago
One option is that people you talk to look for the stuff to discuss. E.g. person A talks about bouldering with person B. Person A then continues with their day while person B googles bouldering terms. A and B then receive both bouldering ads. Person By because of the googling and person A because of proximity to person B. Person A then assumes the phone spies what they say, but it doesn't. Location is enough.
xg15 2y ago
The post's arguments can basically be summed up in three categories: 1) "Doing this wouldn't be technically feasible or would require a technical effort wildly out of proportion" 2) "There are lots of psychological biases that lead people to believe something like this happened even if it didn't actually happen" 3) "Apple is such a nice and honest company, they would never do such a thing..." As for 1), there is enough technical discussion in this thread to disprove that point. But just as a reminder: Google build an always-on song recognition service into android, free of charge, without any obvious monetization, just because they can. OpenAI released Whisper last year as open source, a highly precise audio transcription model. By now lots of variants for on-device use exist. All that tech doesn't just exist, it's not even seen as a moat. It's already being commodified. As for 2), yes of course cognitive biases are always a thing. The problem is that you cannot use them to disprove something. They constitute an absence of evidence, not evidence of absence. As for 3), yeah no comment here. Except maybe, remember Snowden. "No one would do such a thing" has already been spectacularly wrong in the past.
- simonw 2y ago
  Did that tech exist prior to 2017 when this conspiracy theory was already widely circulating?
  - xg15 2y ago
    I honestly couldn't care less if that tech existed back then or not, I care about what's possible today. Between 2017 and today, there were massive changes, both in technological development but also in mindset: Surveillance capitalism became much more normalized and generally accepted as a standard part of business. So if you argue that it was a baseless conspiracy theory back then, therefore it automatically must still be a baseless conspiracy theory today, that argument is flawed.
    - simonw 2y ago
      It's true that it is worth considering that things are possible now that were not possible 7 years ago. The reason I keep on bringing up 2017 is that it helps demonstrate the psychological angle here. People are absolutely convinced this is happening today. Many of those people were equally convinced back when this was clearly impossible, convinced based on the exact same reasoning (their own personal anecdotal experiences). So the 2017 thing helps illustrate the lack of credibility of those personal anecdotes, independently of the issue of how possible this might be today compared with the past.
DrillShopper 2y ago
With what credibility does the author of this piece speak? Are they in all of the ad platforms on mobile/tablet?
- simonw 2y ago
  I have nothing to do with ad tech, or selling mobile phones or anything like that. I don't like seeing people fall for obvious conspiracy theories, and I have used my own deductive reasoning to decide that this is an untrue conspiracy theory.
neom 2y ago
The reason I think this isn't happening (other than they have told us it's not happening and technically seems very difficult to do this long without researchers/people figuring it out), is that in my life I've spent millions and millions of dollars on ad budget, we spent so much with twitter they made us custom hoodie, nobody tried to sell this function to me, it's not an enterprise level option, I've seen those, and it's not a button in the ad platform, so how is the key word getting into an ad network getting attributed to my ad profile and my ad served? There is a lot of rich ad enhancement you can buy at the enterprise level, but I've never seen anything like that mentioned even remotely. There are A LOT of ways I can target you, some of them pretty creepy, but using convo snippets from the phone? I can't even think how that would work.
- duskwuff 2y ago
  Or, for that matter: if this functionality exists in phones, surely there were some people involved in developing the software and infrastructure to support it. It seems hard to imagine that none of them would have spoken up, even anonymously, to confirm its existence.
lofaszvanitt 2y ago
It's because the big companies have the simulation's/global consciousness' hacked endpoints as uplinks into their infrastructure. lol
theropost 2y ago
It's hard to tell I can imagine some motivated individuals could utilize all sorts of packaging systems and embed them in third-party applications and so on, and extract pertinent information using this type of surveillance, and then sell this data to data brokers which would sell it to the large ad networks. I mean there's lots of ways to transcribe even most of the whisper models can run all the way down to 150 megabyte file not to mention the quantization versions of these models. I have something that I run on my computer for my server not throughout my house that does real Time transcription and whatnot but I use it for my own purposes, so you know someone who makes money off advertising or even selling insights about people, would certainly find ways to do this. I mean it's simply not regulated is it? https://huggingface.co/spaces/jilangdi/whisper-web https://huggingface.co/spaces/jilangdi/whisper-web
39zde 2y ago
> As one report put it, “Amazon can acquire more comprehensive data on people’s living habits....” The company wants to sell real-world services such as house cleaning, plumbing, and restaurant delivery, but according to some insiders, the vision is more far-reaching: an omniscient voice that knows all experience and anticipates all action! Already, forward-looking Amazon patents include the development of a “voice-sniffer algorithm” integrated into any device and able to respond to hot words such as “bought,” “dislike,” or “love” with product and service offers. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2018) - Zuboff, Shoshana Given that this is form 2018, the rise of voice assistants since then, all the market forces at play and the reward highly outweighing regulatory penalty payments there is little that's supporting that users are not being recorded. The TOS phrasses like 'service improvement', 'may share with third parties', and 'user experience' are common place and are not particularly concise. Simply dismissing anekdotes and honing in on Apple Inc., the only company which does not want/need to sell data, is not convincing. I think people tend to shoot the messenger, when it comes to privacy discussions. Getting told one is being spyed on by a divice, which is so intimt and close to one slef is embarassing. Of course things are more like a spectrum and differ from case to case.
starkparker 2y ago
The alternative is worse: more passive forms of targeting are so good that advertisers don't need to record your every moment in order to make a large number of people genuinely believe that they are. It's relatively comforting to think they'd be so brazen as to care about your every word, as opposed to the fact that they own so much information about you that they can predict your actions and thoughts better than you can.
MemesAndBooze 2y ago
What if the activation of the microphone for marketing purposes occurred not systematically but randomly, making it harder to detect such functionality? And what if this functionality were activated with code loaded remotely at the moment it needs to be used?
carlpeterson359 2y ago
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b0rnwithabeard 2y ago
oddly enough, I compare this conspiracy theory with clout-chasing word-of-god christians on social media: there's an element of "i don't understand how it works, therefore the simplest answer must be correct" if everyday people knew just how much data companies have on them and their habits, they'd be absolutely horrified. There's so much personal attribution data that most companies that know how to market properly are going to get you at some point. You may think you're careful with what you share and what is being recorded, but if you are friends or relatives of someone who does, or if you live in the same street as someone who does, they data on you. I used to work for these kind of companies, and have a lot of friends and family who currently do, and the stuff they track and the patterns they have never fail to surprise me and make me laugh. Sure, if they could, they would absolutely listen in to you, that would make their jobs a hell of a lot easier, but they don't. But the data they have on you so goddamn accurate, it's easy to assume they must be.
bar000n 2y ago
What happens is that you in fact lend part of your brain to all the data that you see on your screen. You don't realize it but your subconscious mind sees senses a lot of stuff your conscious mind is not aware about. Until you see it after you just talked about it thinking it was your idea and panic. What you actually talk about with people (excluding maybe the proffesional stuff) is mundane stuff you see on your screens, newspapers, billboards, etc.
henryart1111 2y ago
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slitznerd 2y ago
listen to me when i say this. we will start killing if we don't have same access to that tech. why kill monster? well I'm dead anyway as a slave to their machine. people better demand equal access or start slitting throats right now.

210 points by paulcapewell 2y ago

Many mobile apps use an adtech SDK which does on-device audio keyword spotting. The company making this SDK is super secretive, so not much information about it.

simonw 2y ago
If "many mobile apps" use it surely some docs or other details have leaked out somewhere? Or at least a name?
- nivertech 2y ago
  I won't disclose names. But thinking from the first principles, do you really think that all this phonetic keyword spotting[1] IP developed for defense tech in the late 90s and early 2000s was abandoned once recording entire phone conversations and doing full speech to text on them became technologically possible? I still remember lots of startups who did this stuff openly a decade ago, before Cambridge Analytica scandal[2]. After that it became impossible to get funding or get acquired, so the few that stayed in this field became very secretive. —- [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyword_spotting https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyword_spotting [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Analytica_data_scandal https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_A...
  - rgovostes 2y ago
    You know users have to authorize apps to use the microphone right? That pretty much limits the theoretical exposure to VoIP, camera, and translation apps. On iPhone, activating the microphone causes an icon to appear, which the app can’t hide. I think if the app is in the background, it turns the whole status bar bright red. Secondly, there is power use attribution and it would be very obvious if an app were keeping the device awake and the microphone on based on battery drain and runtime accounting. So you are asking us to accept on faith a shadowy ad SDK that is both widely used but also cannot be named, one that somehow subverts multiple layers of the system security architecture? Ok. We believe you.
    - blurbleblurble 2y ago
      A lot of apps ask for it up front upon installation.
      - rgovostes 2y ago
        On iOS apps must provide a reason for requesting it which appears in the prompt. App Review makes sure the reason is justified. A library might be able to opportunistically piggyback on this permission but again the mic indicator would be on. It would more than likely be discovered and the app banned.
- blurbleblurble 2y ago
  I saw a whole PR release for adtech oriented keyword spotting tech like this one time, I wish I'd saved it... I can't remember the name of that particular company. But read through this doc: https://picovoice.ai/docs/faq/porcupine/ https://picovoice.ai/docs/faq/porcupine/

kylecazar 2y ago

people surf the net so automatically that they forget they are doing it and blame Alexa for snooping.

jgalt212 2y ago
I do recall reading the Alex engineers insisting on a physical off switch while the opposite was true for the Google Home product.
monkpit 2y ago
I think it’s wild that your counter argument is basically just gaslighting everyone. There are tons of (possibly coincidental) examples of this type of thing happening. Even if it’s a coincidence, it’s not explained away by “maybe everyone just forgot or is not paying attention”.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- kylecazar 2y ago
  It's not gaslighting. I believe people see the ads for things they talk about in the same room as a smart speaker. I also believe people very rarely only speak about a thing -- without there being any digital footprint at all of them engaging with it. I have literally seen this play out with family and traced it back to make a point.

jprete 2y ago

> ...they would need to be feeding those snippets in almost real time into a system which forwards them onto advertising partners who then feed that information into targeting networks... I think this is totally mistaken. An ad seller which also wants to respect privacy keeps this data in-house and does the ad targeting themselves. The advertiser never needs to see personal information for this kind of market to give people ads related to overheard conversations.

bbor 2y ago
I mean, many advertisers go through the Google display network without having Google target their ads (AKA run their bidding algorithms). Typically they go through other middlemen agencies, who indeed would need at least some of this data to make use of it, tho perhaps in some derivative form. Still, you’re right that Google could be keeping it all for themselves and feeding it to their black box targeting services. I really strongly doubt that’s happening with incidental assistant snippets much less intentionally-eavesdropped recordings, but it is more plausible than this makes it seem.
thayne 2y ago
Also, couldn't a lot of it be done on device? Say, have a set of key phrases to listen for, and if the device hears them, then mark that the user should be targeted by certain kinds of ads. I don't have any evidence either way that that happens, but it seems like a more practical way to accomplish it.
simonw 2y ago
We're specifically talking about Apple here, based on Siri wake words. Do you think Apple are running this kind ad of targeting?
- siliconpotato 2y ago
  why are you limiting your argument to wake words? It's comparatively trivial to serve ads based upon what's spoken after the wake word. And as we know from the lawsuit, it seems that there's been a lot of data gathered accidentally too.

floxy 2y ago

I think the article would be improved if he added a bit about what evidence he would accept.

simonw 2y ago
Show me some sniffed network traffic demonstrating an app sending that data back to a server. Discovery in a lawsuit. Credible insider leaks confirming this happens and how.
- hobs 2y ago
  How about Apple paying 95 million dollars in fines for it? https://edition.cnn.com/2025/01/02/business/apple-siri-privacy-lawsuit/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2025/01/02/business/apple-siri-priva...
  - jere 2y ago
    Most of the post is disputing the point you're making. Did you read it?
    - hobs 2y ago
      Absolutely caught red handed - but I dont think Apple paid out 100m because "eh its easier this way".
      - gruez 2y ago
        If you look at the court filings, the only part where they were "caught red handed" was that they knew they were recording audio for inadvertent activations, but didn't take steps to stop it. There's remotely close to proving that they were using it for advertising.
        hobs 2y ago
        I was the one caught red handed fwiw.

dudeinjapan 2y ago

I set my iPhone language to Italian and now I’m getting non-stop ads for Olive Garden.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
brk 2y ago
What is the correlation? Olive Garden has nothing to do with anything Italian.
- fasa99 2y ago
  I set mine to Spanish and now it's nothing but Taco Bell ads

eximius 2y ago

I have successfully argued this for at least a certain class of devices. Namely, it practically can't happen _for small devices_. e.g., a TV remote with a voice feature activated by a button simply won't have enough _power_ to constantly be listening, uploading, or processing. Harder to convince folks that _nothing_ does this, but takes an edge off their more paranoid tendencies.

fasa99 2y ago
I personally don't believe any argument that says it's not feasible. Transcribing all spoken text and sending it home, sure, not feasible. What if we have 256 keywords, or 65536 keywords, maybe preconfigured for particular products or product classes. Some basic linear predictive coding mechanism ( you know, what powered those '80s chips Stephen Hawking style, speak and spell, etc) - very very low computational overhead. When the word is triggered, queue a message back home at the next reasonable opportunity - user id, timestamp, word. It will only take a couple bytes. It can be slipped in anywhere and obfuscated by any means by nature of being so small, data-wise, even as a watermark of some sort. By using a timestamp and waiting until the next opportunity, maybe minutes, hours, or days away, no time correlation detection is possible either. People say big tech is ethical, fine. Maybe some ad company is sponsoring some free app or game for the phone, and slipping this in there. Now the developer can pay their rent and food costs. Maybe the ad company is then selling that data back to big tech who washes their hands of any wrongdoing. Maybe it's all legal because the fine print of the EULA allows for this. Seems to me though this can be figured out empirically, just have a voice play something like "need to buy adult diapers" or "new tires" etc next to a device, enumerate every device, look for ads on whatever very specific topic, minding along the way to tell nobody and never enter it in any internet-connected keyboard.
- Arelius 2y ago
  For sure! I mean, my Google pixel has "Now Playing" which is able to passively listen to the microphone for songs it knows, and displays them on the oled lock screen. So, we already know that it is A. completely feasible for a smartphone to do this. B. At least a subset of smartphones have always-on microphones. Maybe not a remote control... But why would you put it in a remote anyways when everyone has a phone?

jere 2y ago

My experience working at one of the companies that gets accused of this a lot is that many colleagues wish we were as evil as claimed because it would be so much easier do their jobs that way than struggling through the reality of it which is endless red tape over the tiniest issues that have even the slightest proximity to privacy. So I've been a bit skeptical too.

arcmechanica 2y ago
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- alex1138 2y ago
  Citation for Apple?
  - arcmechanica 2y ago
    its on the front page $95m fine
bbor 2y ago
Yup - having worked at Google Display Ads (arguably the epicenter of such talk), I personally only ever witnessed people walking the walk, privacy-wise. The threats to our privacy are quite public and not at all illegal; IMO data brokers and 3P browser trackers are at the top of the list, but all of Google’s known ills are there too (location tracking, exchange monopolization, allowing predatory advertisers, gestures broadly at chrome, etc etc etc). They don’t need to be listening to us, and wouldn’t know how to even begin hiding it if they were. Something like that would require tons of compute and thousands of conspirators risking massive backlash, all to prop up a relatively tiny part of their business. > Convincing people of this is basically impossible Absolutely correct IME, btw. This is one of those things a smart engineer learns not to argue online, or at the Christmas dinner table for that matter. People tend to stand their ground on this one and move quickly to accusations of bias and naïveté…
- jgalt212 2y ago

ch_ase 2y ago

We search for everything we talk about these days…our location services are always on. The times I’ve noticed this I can usually trace it back to a friend had been searching for something and then we (our phones) were in the same place. Even the guy from the lawsuit with the doctor… his phone knows he was at that doctor and that doctor offers that procedure. Seems possible without listening.

SoftTalker 2y ago
I keep location services off, but realize that’s probably not completely hiding my location.
lbotos 2y ago
Yes, but I think that's the part that feels... unsettling. I watched a Nigerian film on the seat back display on the plane the other day. I looked it up on my laptop when I got home because I didn't finish it. The next day in my Instagram explore page I had a Nigerian meme... Yes, I get it -- could be frequency illusion or some IP address/cookie shenanigans. Still feels weird.
- Tagbert 2y ago
  “ I looked it up on my laptop when I got home” That is the real mechanism for triggering the ads and memes, not that “your phone is listening to you.” At least feel creepy about the real cause and not some imagined monster under the bed.
- clovoak 2y ago
  Or more likely: Confirmation bias. I also occasionally get Nigerian memes on IG despite never having searched it. But unlike you I don't have the Nigerian film google search history that would lead me to conclude it was targeted. Put another way, if you googled a Swedish film then saw Swedish memes you would think that was targeted. Then upon viewing the Nigerian memes you would have attributed it to a random video rather than anything targeted.
monkpit 2y ago
This is gaslighting. Even if it’s a coincidence, people have numerous examples of situations where they or anyone with them did not search for a thing. I’m not saying the only possible explanation is that the phone is spying on you - but I’m saying, don’t gaslight people and say “you probably searched about it and forgot”.

renewiltord 2y ago

As of 2019 (my last contact with the industry), there was no real-time onboarding solution that could do this. Or if it existed it wasn't good enough to attract any attention. People were saying this in 2014 or so. I remember around 2017 thinking it would be pretty cool (repurpose wake-word detection to do some pre-determined segments or something) but no-one had it working. There's all sorts of stuff going on behind the scenes in ad tech and if https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=manigandham https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=manigandham would probably have something useful to share if he was still around. But it wasn't real. Even back then people would publish "sources" saying it was being done, but I'm telling you that if it worked well people would be doing it and we were in the middle of it all and couldn't find anyone who was. There were smart-devices that acted as beacons to report people to ICE and stuff like that and they used personal data to tie it together. So there was crazy stuff out there (none tied to the respectable ad tech industry HN knows as the "privacy-violators" and so on). But this specific thing wasn't there.

forgotmypw17 2y ago

I suspect that it is emergent behavior that even the ad companies themselves aren't aware of. I have definitely experienced it myself, and have no doubts that it happens.

joshdavham 2y ago

Well clearly HN is listening to my phone because I literally had this exact debate several times last week!

jcoletti 2y ago

I've noticed people often research products, services, medical issues/ailments, etc. using Google (or similar). When they start seeing related ads on social media, they tend to attribute more to having discussed the topic out loud, forgetting about the searches they made from the same device or IP address.

linsomniac 2y ago

They don't need to: they can read your mind. My proof? Yesterday I was driving home and I saw an old Toyota Previa minivan and thought to myself "Oh, a Previa, you don't see those very often these days." When I got home, I started scrolling through my Google News and it showed me an advert for the new Previa. I agree with Simon: you basically aren't going to convince someone that their phone doesn't listen to you and serve you adverts based on it, because they've run into instances where it seems like it.

kimbernator 2y ago
I think people are prone to believing that their phone is listening to them out of an instinct to believe they are a lot more unique than they actually are. A clash between western individualism and hyper-efficient consumerism. That's not me taking a stance on whether it's true, though. There would be a lot of fame in it for a whistleblower, but on the other hand if Google or Meta figured out a way to do it with a low chance of it being proven, why wouldn't they?
- fc417fc802 2y ago
  > out of an instinct to believe they are a lot more unique than they actually are. This is trivializing people in my opinion. The non-trivializing interpretation would be that for whatever reason people are skeptical that a black box that they don't understand very well, don't know how to audit, and don't know how to exert low level control over is doing things that they don't want it to do. When framed that way it is immediately clear that this is an incredibly reasonable stance to take. The default assumption should always be that a third party who has a vested interest is pursuing it. As an example. It is paranoia to assume that a 1970s era vehicle with almost no electronics in it is reporting on me to the manufacturer. It is willful ignorance bordering on delusion to assume that a vehicle manufactured in 2020 is not.
- mu53 2y ago
  Seriously, a whistleblower in tech? In 2025? “Be part of the richest portion of the middle class and never have to worry about money again orrrrr mysteriously die 6 months from now leaving no identifiable impact”

rgovostes 2y ago

Reuters journalist Jon Stempel repeated the plaintiffs' paranoid and unsubstantiated allegations but did not include a single statement from Apple, just a vacant "did not immediately respond". If only there were years of statements made under oath in the courts to draw from. Siri uses a pseudonymous identifier when communicating with Apple's services. The identifier is not linked to your Apple ID. Therefore Siri does not have access to your iCloud data. When you ask Siri to "call mom", it constructs a search query which is then executed on-device against your contacts database. More of these requests are served entirely on-device. Just ask: how is that consistent with the idea that they are doing ad targeting based on Siri requests? You can request a data export for your Apple account and see that there's no Siri data included in it. If they are caught lying, EU regulators will have a field day. Apple describes their ad targeting here. They list the—frankly boring—signals they use for ad personalization, which does not include anything you say to Siri or have in your personal iCloud data. https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/data/en/apple-advertising/ https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/data/en/apple-advertisin... No one is apologizing for Apple's nontransparent collection of Siri audio for QA purposes, which is what they settled over and made opt-in.

alvah 2y ago

Every time I read some technical description about why this isn't happening, the technical description seems convincing. However... A friend tested the theory a few years ago. He doesn't own a swimming pool, doesn't want to, and has never expressed any desire to. He put his and his wife's phone on the table and said to the wife (loudly), "Why don't we look into pool fencing?". She agreed with him. Shortly after, on both of their phones, on a particular social network, they were inundated with ads for....pool fencing.

Klonoar 2y ago
Now tell it over a campfire and maybe shine a flashlight under your face.
- arduanika 2y ago
  The party told you to recount the evidence of your eyes and ears as a campfire ghost story. It was their final, most essential command.
nsavage 2y ago
I have similar anecdotes about this and Yamaha guitars.
darknavi 2y ago
Why did they pick a swimming pool? Did they see people in their area installing pools? I think that's often people's best guess, is that the "random" thing people use to test this actually isn't random and subconsciously they already had this topic seeded to them.
- james_marks 2y ago
  I know my iPhone isn’t listening to me. And I know about my friend’s activity influencing the ads I get served, and my demographic, and location, and all of that. And my random idea for a test word being predictable in a shocking way. But, recently I started thinking about the average user, who will install anything and approve any permissions requested without reading it. And imperfect App Store reviews approving a Trojan horse accidentally. Am I positive someone hasn’t inadvertently allowed mic access to a malicious party? I wonder if that person’s phone may, in fact, be listening to them.

barnabyjones 2y ago

The assumption is that it's either widespread or nonexistent, but I could see it being just a rare instance that gets A/B tested, and maybe by now the companies have decided it's not worth it. But IME all kinds of not quite kosher stuff gets A/B tested, and that would line up with anecdotes where it's too specific to be coincidence, but also uncommon and only affecting certain people.

l0ng1nu5 2y ago

Theres a reason why they put a microphone in every single Internet connected device they can, even when it serves little purpose. My remote has a mic ffs, not to mention oddly specific ads after certain conversations.

in-pursuit 2y ago

I know someone who worked on smart TV software. They explicitly added audio fingerprinting via integrated microphone so they could determine which programs you were watching for ad profiling. When in the history of online ads have advertisers not used available data?

lelandfe 2y ago
Automatic content recognition is one of the freakiest kinds of tracking I've heard of. Smart TVs become data collection hubs for the home if they get connected to the internet. Some have microphones for voice recognition. If you go into the privacy policies for them, you'll find that your audio gets sent off to third parties (albeit only when in use). I completely disconnected my TV from the internet, but it still prompts me to connect it to Wi-Fi, to agree to policies, etc. This page is full of horribles: https://www.consumerreports.org/electronics/privacy/how-to-turn-off-smart-tv-snooping-features-a4840102036/ https://www.consumerreports.org/electronics/privacy/how-to-t...
snowwrestler 2y ago
Ha, I’m imagining a sort of thriller movie villain reveal where people are intently saying silly things into their phones, while the camera slowly pans over to the smart TV in the corner, which is actually listening.
bmicraft 2y ago
I don't get this, why would they use a microphone when they already have the original quality audio stream going to the speakers?
- in-pursuit 2y ago
  They don’t always have the audio stream, e.g. when someone is using an audio receiver.

porknubbins 2y ago

My wife and I, just being goofy, have an inside joke featuring a relatively uncommon name that we ocasionally yell out, like a few times a week. Two months ago we got junk mail addressed to UNCOMMON NAME + our last name. I don’t think its a coincidence. Something is listening. Its kind of messed up that I am a normally rational, skeptical minded person, fairly knowledgable about information security and in 2024 I can’t even draw any clear lines between a nutty conspiracy theory and reality. I’m sorry but I don’t find this article basically just saying “yeah but what are the chances Apple would do that?” persuasive at all.

kimbernator 2y ago
I think it's normal to have a hard time delineating between conspiracy and genuine concern when it comes to this. We're literally carrying around powerful computers with exceptionally reliable connectivity combined with high-resolution cameras and high-fidelity microphones that are frequently used for voice recognition. Not to mention that for 50% of US smartphones, the software is designed by the most prolific advertiser in the world. I had an experience a few years ago where I had talked about a fairly niche product (I can't recall exactly what it was) and the next day I started seeing ads for that product all over the place. I commented about it to two of my coworkers that day, how I had been skeptical about the conspiracy that our phones were listening to us for marketing purposes but that this felt eerie. What shocked me was their response: They had seen the same ad all over the place. Since then I've had a hard time deciding what to be more concerned about: That my phone might be listening, or that I might have been subtly influenced into thinking about this thing; that my whole experience was actually a result of being susceptible to marketing directed at my demographic
gruez 2y ago
>My wife and I, just being goofy, have an inside joke featuring a relatively uncommon name that we ocasionally yell out, like a few times a week. Two months ago we got junk mail addressed to UNCOMMON NAME + our last name. Are you sure it's not because of an opsec fail? eg. you used your nickname when registering for some service, and that made it into some sort of mailing list? What you're seemingly implying (ie. that there's some sort of secret listening system that can figure out your nickname, tie it back to your address, and then send spam to that) makes little sense. Your name + address is already readily available. It's in the public records. You freely hand it over to random websites (eg. for online shopping). There's zero benefits in anyone making such a system to figure out people's names using surreptitious listening.

WheelsAtLarge 2y ago

I had this happen to me recently. I was speaking to a friend about a subject that suddenly started to appear in ads after I hung up. It was spooky. But I think it has more to do with the activities related to the people we know. I'm sure because of Android, Gmail and search they have a good understanding of our general association group. I bet my friend did a search on what we were talking about and Google was able to determine that others in the group would be interested in the subject. They don't need the microphone input. They have better (more direct?) ways to get the information.

sixothree 2y ago
I actually believe the alternative theories are scarier than the phone actually listening to you. The one thing I keep hearing over and over again from people is that “I talked to so-and-so about this“ and now I’m getting a bunch of ads about it. What’s scary is that it knew you two were in the same room that one of you had a recent interest and that there was a likelihood you discussed it. That seems worse to me than just listening the conversations.
- Suppafly 2y ago
  >That seems worse to me than just listening the conversations. And that's the one that's actually happening. Listening to your conversations isn't technically possible and is easy to disprove.
- RGamma 2y ago
  If this parasitic nonsense technology ever turns against us Stasi-style we're gonna wish the ads back.
neom 2y ago
What you described is basically how it works. You all get finger printed on the same network, finger printed on google searches, finger printed at the routers, and then associated. 6 guys get together for beer and someone brings up wood chips, 1 guy later googles BBQs, you're all getting BBQ ads for the next week and a half, the 5 other guys think the phone is listening to them because they don't know one of the guys actually googled or triggered something related to BBQs. I once knew my roommate was pregnant before anyone else because I got a bunch of ads for baby shit all of a sudden.

9cb14c1ec0 2y ago

Has he read this: https://www.404media.co/mindsift-brags-about-using-smart-device-microphone-audio-to-target-ads-on-their-podcast/ https://www.404media.co/mindsift-brags-about-using-smart-dev...

Tagbert 2y ago
Have you read the early stories and discussions that make that look unlikely? https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/12/no-a-marketing-firm-isnt-tapping-your-device-to-hear-private-conversations/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/12/no-a-marketing-firm-...

MrMcCall 2y ago

My wife has a very new (<2yo) iPhone. We live in public housing, no luxuries. We were talking about getting her some slippes, and I made a joke about her not getting any Gucci slippers. The Gucci ad appeared on her phone within 30 minutes. I sh_t you not. She was a bit gobsmacked. I was neither surprised nor disturbed. That's real anecdata, my friends. It could have been coincidence, and while we have nothing to hide, it's not an optimal situation, whatever the cause. Besides, we ain't buying no Gucci slippers, no way, no how.

amyames 2y ago
What social media apps does she have installed? Just curious
- MrMcCall 2y ago
  None.
gruez 2y ago
>We live in public housing, no luxuries. >Gucci Gucci is classified as an "aspirational luxury" brand. In other words, luxury for poor people. It makes total sense that it would be pushed to people in public housing. If you get recommendations for European brands you've never heard of selling $5000 t-shirts, then I'd be worried.
- MrMcCall 2y ago
  I'm not worried, and thanks for suggesting that advertising would be a viable motive given our geolocation. Good thing Apple doesn't also have means and opportunity, too. Silly me! I guess we should all just blindly trust Apple. Thanks, friend.
  - gruez 2y ago
    >Good thing Apple doesn't also have means and opportunity, too. Silly me! >I guess we should all just blindly trust Apple. Thanks, friend. Never claimed any of those things. Quit putting words in my mouth.

slg 2y ago

One thing that is rarely discussed in relation to this urban myth is that it is widely believe and yet it doesn't actually effect the behavior of most believers. That is one of the major reasons why most companies and many governments don't care about privacy, the public doesn't really care about it either. People will of course choose privacy over no privacy with all else being equal, but privacy is the first thing sacrificed when push comes to shove. If the average person is given the choice of having everything said within earshot of their phone being recorded and sent to Facebook or giving up Instagram, they'll happily choose Instagram and forsake their privacy. If privacy advocates want to start turning the tide in this battle, the first step needs to be convincing the average person why privacy is important on a personal and tangible level. No arguments about future totalitarian regimes or hypothetical ideals. Abstract concepts like that rarely motivate people who have so many more practical political concerns. It needs to be something that is more important to people than having access to Instagram. And I have absolutely no idea how that could be accomplished which makes me concerned that we're already too late.

simonw 2y ago
That's the main reason I care about this so much. If people really do believe that their phones are spying on them all the time to show them ads that means that people are basically surrendering to an imagined surveillance state. They shut up and accept it, because they'd rather keep Facebook/Instagram installed than fight back. I find that really depressing. I want people to have more agency than that. We need people to understand the imagined v.s. the actual privacy threats, so they can push for better standards. If they believe in and submit to the conspiracy theories good luck getting anyone to campaign for actual meaningful improvements to the problems that are real.
- edanm 2y ago
  That's a very good reason to talk about this. I do think that this is a very "lightly held" belief. It's something people kind-of believe, they'll tell this to each other, but it doesn't affect any behavior - not because it's not important IMO, but because people mostly don't really, deep down, believe it. And I do wonder if convincing people this isn't happening will have the opposite effect than we intend. Instead of being more aware of what actual privacy violations are, it'll just make people write off the whole idea of companies invading their privacy. Idk.

noisy_boy 2y ago

To all the people expressing doubt and disbelief, refer to every whistleblower story which was derided as tinfoil hat conspiracy until blown up. If we still haven't learnt that money will make corporations (and people) do despicable things, only we are to blame ourselves.

ChrisArchitect 2y ago

Related: Apple will pay $95M to settle Siri privacy lawsuit https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42579009 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42579009

orev 2y ago

Another option not mentioned is that the thing they’re talking about might have been in their subconscious because of an ad they’d recently seen but didn’t notice. The topic/concept/product eventually bubbles up to consciousness, they talk about it, then start noticing the ads that were already there.

block_dagger 2y ago

What I worry about sometimes is malware sniffing for hardware wallet seed phrases being practiced out loud by users when they think they're alone. I always tell people if they keep crypto on a hardware wallet - NEVER speak your seed phrase aloud. This could also be spied on by laser microphone surveillance.

zw123456 2y ago

OK, but query me this batman. Lately, I have been inundated by ads for anything to do with Kayaks. I do not own a Kayak. I do not want to own a Kayak and have never even spoken the word as far as I can remember. But for some reason, I am seeing ads for a Kayak carrier, a Kayak launcher, roof rack, you name it. It is so weird. I cannot figure out why suddenly these idiots think I am remotely interested in Kayaking. Kayaking, it is just so random. But way back in the 2000s, a friend of mine worked for a web site dev company. Her job was to visit with clients and take pictures of whatever they were hawking, write some copy and the dudes back in her office would turn it into a web page. She would occasionally ask me to come along and stare at whatever crap they were selling and act like I cared about it while she snapped some photos. I joked that meant technically I was a model. But then one time she was doing a web page for a marketing company that did focus groups. That was back before we had smart phones tracking your every move. I posed in a fake focus group with some other people and after that, the dude that ran the place asked me if I wanted to be in real focus group and I agreed. They seemed to think there were certain connections that made no sense. For example, they were sure that they could market adult diapers to nerds that play video games who were to absorbed in their game to get off their ass to take a simple dump. Apparently that is actually a thing? Then I went to this one focus group where they were asking if you own a dog and buy a lot of peanut butter. Read between the lines. So gross. So, I am guessing, some marketing weirdo thinks there is some weird connection between something else in my life an Kayaks. It would be interesting to know what that is. But, I think, a lot of times, they might be right about those weird connections that make you feel like they are reading your mind. Just in this case, whatever it is, maybe that I watch a lot of documentaries and that means I like Kayaking? I guess they only have to be right some percentage of the time. Just not in this case.

cschep 2y ago
someone probably googled “kayak” from your wifi?
- zw123456 2y ago
  Hmmm, I live alone and in a pretty remote area (on an island). I keep my wifi pretty secure, so, that seems pretty unlikely. But who knows, anything is possible I suppose. Maybe because I live on an island.

cloudking 2y ago

Maybe the algorithms simply concluded that you might interested in things your friends are interested in.. that's part of why you're friends? If any of your friends searched for something online, and you're connected to them in a social network, they might show you the same ad by proximity.

kwar13 2y ago

Nice try, Meta.

spl757 2y ago

[flagged]

protocolture 2y ago

I dunno, seems trivial to me. Like if an arduino can reliably carry 1 wakeword, an iphone could carry what? 64 at minimum? Instead of waking up recording the conversation and sending it to the stasi, it could just toggle a bool in your secret advertising profile, then sync that up at random intervals. They dont need context, they just need "Biscuit" "Nappies" "Birthday". Not to say it isn't all made up. It probably is. I just dont think its technically difficult to achieve. It is probably all psychology. But sitting there with a packet capture going as you talk about dogfood isnt necessarily a great test to confirm the negative.

lantry 2y ago
But if you're listening for 64, or even 1024 wake words, you won't get to the level of granularity people are claiming to observe, like in the other comment here where they tested "pool fencing". If you were putting together a list of 64 words, would you really include "pool fencing"?
- protocolture 2y ago
  Its an extreme low side estimate. And the chance that Pool OR Fencing is one is pretty high.
  - SpaceNoodled 2y ago
    A better keyword would be "buy."
- aarmot 2y ago
  The wakewords could be simply "buy", "cheap", "sale", "price" etc - and then collect the exact words around it. I bet the pool fencing conversation followed with the exchange of ideas where to get equipment.
  - anticensor 2y ago
    10 thousand-ish words make sense when one considers multiple languages.

Ancalagon 2y ago

The author admits the fine for breaking this rule is basically a non-issue compared to the potential earnings. Why wouldn’t the most valuable company on earth see this as a huge, easy win to record and advertise based on those recordings?

tonfa 2y ago
Under GDPR don't they risk 10% of worldwide revenue? (Plus for a company like apple trying to be seen as the defender of privacy, the PR and reputational hit)

StanislavPetrov 2y ago

I find it completely plausible that either Google, Facebook or some other installed app is listening to your conversations to develop marketing profiles. What I find amazing is that people don't use ad blockers! I wouldn't be able to tell you if they are harvesting my voice data, because I haven't seen an ad in years! It is trivial to block ads, why do so many people choose to see them?

snowwrestler 2y ago

This doesn’t seem that hard to test? Put a phone on WiFi, run it through a traffic sniffer, and see if it is constantly sending little audio packets to listener1486.facebook.com or whatever. Or heck, open up a phone and stick a probe on the mic lead. See when it is getting power or not.

_1tem 2y ago
There are smarter ways to do this without constantly sending all the audio. Wakewords + surrounding snippets for example. In fact if the audio recognition is done on-device then only the text data could be sent which would be indistinguishable from telemetry.

solarkraft 2y ago

Neither do I. There’s no technical way it can be happening without it being easily spotted, not to mention how many would have to conspire. However I am still waiting for a comprehensive explanation for how it is actually happening. There there are many ways to correlate people and their interests, but I wonder how deep it goes. Basic geolocation and public interaction metadata: Sure. But I’ve also heard people believe that it ought to be possible to spot closeness via Wifi and Bluetooth. This is such a culturally relevant topic that there must be some serious knowledge about it somewhere. As for my own tests, I’ve made it a point to mention that I’m considering spending money on a well advertised-for product that I haven’t yet searched for online every time this topic comes up. No ads so far. In the next phase I’ll progressively tell more people to start looking it up.

more_corn 2y ago

You can think whatever you want. When ad companies claim they have that capability and when I see evidence with my own eyes that’s enough for me.

simonw 2y ago
That is EXACTLY what I said in my article: "Convincing people of this is basically impossible. It doesn’t matter how good your argument is, if someone has ever seen an ad that relates to their previous voice conversation they are likely convinced and there’s nothing you can do to talk them out of it"

1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago

From a potential culpability or liability perspective, the question of targeted advertising is irrelevant. Intercepting private communications without consent, absent an applicable exception, is still against the law, e.g., the Wiretap Act and/or the California Invasion of Proivacy Act, ads or no ads. Targeted ads would not be used as evidence that private communications have been intercepted. Many years ago, Google was sued for wiretapping and lost. See Joffe v Google More recently Apple was sued for eavesdropping without consent. They just settled for $95 million. See Lopez v Apple

ajma 2y ago

The argument I use to convince people is to ask them how long your battery lasts when you’re running any apps, I’ll then ask how long do you think your battery would last if the apps were listening all day long. I can’t tell if my friends are convinced or if they’re too polite (or disinterested) to argue.

a_victorp 2y ago
How would you tell the difference if the apps are listening all the time without you knowing it?

lxgr 2y ago

I used to not believe in confirmation bias, but ever since I started really paying attention to it, it’s suddenly everywhere!

disambiguation 2y ago

Ask HN - let's say hypothetically, our phones are as bad as some think. Face camera taking covert pics, regular screenshots sent back home, microphone recording every conversation, every message, email, and bit of internet traffic scraped and harvested for ads and anything else - how would you change your habits if you knew this was happening? Answer - you wouldn't.

simonw 2y ago
I'd write to my representatives about it.
- disambiguation 2y ago
  Have you? I can't be bothered to cite but all of the above can and does happen in certain contexts - the covert face camera is admittedly a stretch, but all your personal photos are usually whisked away to the cloud without warning, which is just as bad (see the recent apple photos news)
  - simonw 2y ago
    I haven't, and that's an interesting prompt for me to think about real privacy issues that I do think should involve legislation (while avoiding the risk of more cookie banners).

Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe 2y ago

There is something I've always been wondering about companies' privacy policy. When Google says that it does not send user audio data to their server, does that prevent them from sending say whisper embedding of the audio itself? Because technically it would not be audio. It would still include a very rich representation of what the user said. Rich enough to be used to sell things.

tommiegannert 2y ago

The danger with this kind of opinion is that you start out doing some healthy critical thinking, and research. You form an opinion, based on good intentions. Then you spend all your time on explaining your conclusion to others. At that time, people who have the same opinion flock to you, and you don't have time to do more research. This is the problem with experts and politicians. You can make money on either position, but once you have started stating your opinion, it's unlikely you'll do active research to disprove your opinion, as many have already concluded [1]. I'm happy that Simon only sees this as a hobby. [1] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/11/30/salary/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/11/30/salary/

renegat0x0 2y ago

I had a brand of wine in a closed, we were discussing with my life our wedding. Immediately this one brand of wine popped up on my wife user feed, wall. That happens from time to time, so, yeah... I know that it works like this for sure.

on_the_train 2y ago

They do. They absolutely do. Not a week goes by without a blatant case on my phone. I'd wager everything I own on this.

simonw 2y ago
What evidence would you accept that they're not doing this in a way that would make this an actionable bet?
- on_the_train 2y ago
  What evidence would anyone accept that 1+1 is 3? That's a genuine response. The cases are so clear cut (words picked up from conversations that would never fit on whatever profile they have on me; up to specific mentioned brands and things completely alien to be) and so numerous. I still can't believe that anyone even debates it. It's blatant as hell and all of my peers notice it, too

fnqi8ckfek 2y ago

[dead]

inemesitaffia 2y ago

I now believe it's happening based on this article. We already know about TV piracy detection leading to bars showing soccer without a license being fined.

o999 2y ago

> 404 Media previously reported Cox Media Group (CMG) was advertising a service that claimed to target ads based on what potential customers said near device microphones. Now, here is the pitch deck CMG sent to prospective companies. Google has kicked CMG off its Partner Program in response. https://www.404media.co/heres-the-pitch-deck-for-active-listening-ad-targeting/ https://www.404media.co/heres-the-pitch-deck-for-active-list...

hollownobody 2y ago

One option is that people you talk to look for the stuff to discuss. E.g. person A talks about bouldering with person B. Person A then continues with their day while person B googles bouldering terms. A and B then receive both bouldering ads. Person By because of the googling and person A because of proximity to person B. Person A then assumes the phone spies what they say, but it doesn't. Location is enough.

xg15 2y ago

The post's arguments can basically be summed up in three categories: 1) "Doing this wouldn't be technically feasible or would require a technical effort wildly out of proportion" 2) "There are lots of psychological biases that lead people to believe something like this happened even if it didn't actually happen" 3) "Apple is such a nice and honest company, they would never do such a thing..." As for 1), there is enough technical discussion in this thread to disprove that point. But just as a reminder: Google build an always-on song recognition service into android, free of charge, without any obvious monetization, just because they can. OpenAI released Whisper last year as open source, a highly precise audio transcription model. By now lots of variants for on-device use exist. All that tech doesn't just exist, it's not even seen as a moat. It's already being commodified. As for 2), yes of course cognitive biases are always a thing. The problem is that you cannot use them to disprove something. They constitute an absence of evidence, not evidence of absence. As for 3), yeah no comment here. Except maybe, remember Snowden. "No one would do such a thing" has already been spectacularly wrong in the past.

simonw 2y ago
Did that tech exist prior to 2017 when this conspiracy theory was already widely circulating?
- xg15 2y ago
  I honestly couldn't care less if that tech existed back then or not, I care about what's possible today. Between 2017 and today, there were massive changes, both in technological development but also in mindset: Surveillance capitalism became much more normalized and generally accepted as a standard part of business. So if you argue that it was a baseless conspiracy theory back then, therefore it automatically must still be a baseless conspiracy theory today, that argument is flawed.
  - simonw 2y ago
    It's true that it is worth considering that things are possible now that were not possible 7 years ago. The reason I keep on bringing up 2017 is that it helps demonstrate the psychological angle here. People are absolutely convinced this is happening today. Many of those people were equally convinced back when this was clearly impossible, convinced based on the exact same reasoning (their own personal anecdotal experiences). So the 2017 thing helps illustrate the lack of credibility of those personal anecdotes, independently of the issue of how possible this might be today compared with the past.

DrillShopper 2y ago

With what credibility does the author of this piece speak? Are they in all of the ad platforms on mobile/tablet?

simonw 2y ago
I have nothing to do with ad tech, or selling mobile phones or anything like that. I don't like seeing people fall for obvious conspiracy theories, and I have used my own deductive reasoning to decide that this is an untrue conspiracy theory.

neom 2y ago

The reason I think this isn't happening (other than they have told us it's not happening and technically seems very difficult to do this long without researchers/people figuring it out), is that in my life I've spent millions and millions of dollars on ad budget, we spent so much with twitter they made us custom hoodie, nobody tried to sell this function to me, it's not an enterprise level option, I've seen those, and it's not a button in the ad platform, so how is the key word getting into an ad network getting attributed to my ad profile and my ad served? There is a lot of rich ad enhancement you can buy at the enterprise level, but I've never seen anything like that mentioned even remotely. There are A LOT of ways I can target you, some of them pretty creepy, but using convo snippets from the phone? I can't even think how that would work.

duskwuff 2y ago
Or, for that matter: if this functionality exists in phones, surely there were some people involved in developing the software and infrastructure to support it. It seems hard to imagine that none of them would have spoken up, even anonymously, to confirm its existence.

lofaszvanitt 2y ago

It's because the big companies have the simulation's/global consciousness' hacked endpoints as uplinks into their infrastructure. lol

theropost 2y ago

It's hard to tell I can imagine some motivated individuals could utilize all sorts of packaging systems and embed them in third-party applications and so on, and extract pertinent information using this type of surveillance, and then sell this data to data brokers which would sell it to the large ad networks. I mean there's lots of ways to transcribe even most of the whisper models can run all the way down to 150 megabyte file not to mention the quantization versions of these models. I have something that I run on my computer for my server not throughout my house that does real Time transcription and whatnot but I use it for my own purposes, so you know someone who makes money off advertising or even selling insights about people, would certainly find ways to do this. I mean it's simply not regulated is it? https://huggingface.co/spaces/jilangdi/whisper-web https://huggingface.co/spaces/jilangdi/whisper-web

39zde 2y ago

> As one report put it, “Amazon can acquire more comprehensive data on people’s living habits....” The company wants to sell real-world services such as house cleaning, plumbing, and restaurant delivery, but according to some insiders, the vision is more far-reaching: an omniscient voice that knows all experience and anticipates all action! Already, forward-looking Amazon patents include the development of a “voice-sniffer algorithm” integrated into any device and able to respond to hot words such as “bought,” “dislike,” or “love” with product and service offers. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2018) - Zuboff, Shoshana Given that this is form 2018, the rise of voice assistants since then, all the market forces at play and the reward highly outweighing regulatory penalty payments there is little that's supporting that users are not being recorded. The TOS phrasses like 'service improvement', 'may share with third parties', and 'user experience' are common place and are not particularly concise. Simply dismissing anekdotes and honing in on Apple Inc., the only company which does not want/need to sell data, is not convincing. I think people tend to shoot the messenger, when it comes to privacy discussions. Getting told one is being spyed on by a divice, which is so intimt and close to one slef is embarassing. Of course things are more like a spectrum and differ from case to case.

starkparker 2y ago

The alternative is worse: more passive forms of targeting are so good that advertisers don't need to record your every moment in order to make a large number of people genuinely believe that they are. It's relatively comforting to think they'd be so brazen as to care about your every word, as opposed to the fact that they own so much information about you that they can predict your actions and thoughts better than you can.

MemesAndBooze 2y ago

What if the activation of the microphone for marketing purposes occurred not systematically but randomly, making it harder to detect such functionality? And what if this functionality were activated with code loaded remotely at the moment it needs to be used?

carlpeterson359 2y ago

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b0rnwithabeard 2y ago

oddly enough, I compare this conspiracy theory with clout-chasing word-of-god christians on social media: there's an element of "i don't understand how it works, therefore the simplest answer must be correct" if everyday people knew just how much data companies have on them and their habits, they'd be absolutely horrified. There's so much personal attribution data that most companies that know how to market properly are going to get you at some point. You may think you're careful with what you share and what is being recorded, but if you are friends or relatives of someone who does, or if you live in the same street as someone who does, they data on you. I used to work for these kind of companies, and have a lot of friends and family who currently do, and the stuff they track and the patterns they have never fail to surprise me and make me laugh. Sure, if they could, they would absolutely listen in to you, that would make their jobs a hell of a lot easier, but they don't. But the data they have on you so goddamn accurate, it's easy to assume they must be.

bar000n 2y ago

What happens is that you in fact lend part of your brain to all the data that you see on your screen. You don't realize it but your subconscious mind sees senses a lot of stuff your conscious mind is not aware about. Until you see it after you just talked about it thinking it was your idea and panic. What you actually talk about with people (excluding maybe the proffesional stuff) is mundane stuff you see on your screens, newspapers, billboards, etc.

henryart1111 2y ago

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slitznerd 2y ago

listen to me when i say this. we will start killing if we don't have same access to that tech. why kill monster? well I'm dead anyway as a slave to their machine. people better demand equal access or start slitting throats right now.