Techbros really went full police state just to deliver ads I wouldn’t click on straight into my adblocker
You’d be surprised how many people raw dog the internet.
It’s terrifying
Even people you’d really expect to use adblockers. A good example is right here on Lemmy, people here are generally pretty tech-savvy yet you get threads with lots of people complaining about ads. This has been a weird lesson as I get older, seeing that most people somehow don’t even think about lifting a finger to fix things they see as problems, they really just complain and then do absolutely nothing to help themselves. It’s the same with if someone mentions something they don’t know what it is, instead of taking 5 seconds to just look it up they comment to ask about it and then never reply to people answering their question. I’m certain that it’s very common to have some weird need to make others do work for you, they don’t actually care about finding out what something is or how to do something to fix a problem, they just care about making others spend any kind of effort for them.
They’re called help vampires in the programming world.
Dude. Paragraphs.
I mean, five sentences is a paragraph.
I see people doing it and its terrifying.
Recent versions of Android make it much more difficult for a background app to access the microphone. There will be a notification if any background app is using the mic or camera.
Google’s “Now playing” feature constantly listens to what’s going on in the background to show you what songs are playing. They claim this is done with a local database of song “fingerprints”. The feature does not show the microphone indicator because: “…Now Playing is protected by Android’s Private Compute Core…”
I’m not saying that other, non-google, app do this to my knowledge; but the fact that this is a thing is honestly a bit scary.
Edit: screenshot of the “Now Playing” feature
I have seen said feature being mentioned or brought to other android versions whether with apps or modules, do they work the same way?
I’m not sure how other apps or android versions work. This is a flaw with the closed source software ecosystem.
Why is that scary to you?
What other apps use Google’s “Android Private Compute Core” and therefore don’t show mic or camera usage notifications? Not trying to sound all tinfoil hat here, but seriously: can apps other than those from Google use the “Android Private Compute Core”? Even if only Google’s own apps can use the “Android Private Compute Core”, we can’t see the source code for Google’s apps as (far as I know, anyway) they are not open source. If an app is not open source, we do not really know what the app is doing in the background; we’ll just have to take them at their word.
Yup, the green dot top right
Now if there was only an easy way to get to the offending app to identify it
Pull open quick settings and tap the dot.
Supposedly more difficult.
Android likes selling ads too, why would google want to stop ad blocking microphne access?
“Meta does not use your phone’s microphone for ads and we’ve been public about this for years,” the statement read.
Meanwhile:
Not defending Facebook, but if you record a video with sound, then the FB app has to have permission to record your audio.
That said, delete Facebook. Fuck Zuck.
if you record a video with sound, then the FB app has to have permission to record your audio.
I can’t tell if you’re trying to explain how it currently works (which I know very well, thanks) or asserting that the current behavior is necessary in order to record with sound.
It really doesn’t have to be as it is. The OS can provide a record-video API, complete with a user-controlled kill switch and an activity indicator, and the app can call it. The app doesn’t need direct access to the microphone to allow the user to create a file with sound.
Edit to clarify: I’m not saying that the “permission” doesn’t work as advertised. I’m saying that recording an audio file doesn’t have to require a permission system as coarse and disempowering to users as it is today. I guess the people clicking the downvote button misunderstood.
Pretty sure that qualifies for that permission.
But the whole point of doing so is to use it in the app, and you for sure can’t do that without the permission.
I think this is more a teleological argument he is making and I agree. We’ve become numb to these permission warnings. Oh this app needs access to my camera because I need to take a photo of something once at registration. Why can’t it link to my default trusted photo app and that app can send a one time transfer to it? I hardly question these permissions anymore since many apps need permissions for rare one off functions. The only thing I deny every single time is my contact list.
teleological
I will thank you
about a million words from now
I don’t give anything mic or camera access on iOS. It’s really not an inconvenience, and anything that demands it is something I don’t want on my phone anyways.
You don’t use the camera or phone?
Come on man, you know they didn’t mean it literally 💀
I’m very obviously not talking about system apps.
You don’t have to give third party apps permissions they don’t need.
Pretty sure that qualifies for that permission.
I don’t know what you mean. Existing behavior does not provide the control or visibility that I described.
One important difference is that the “permissions” in the screen shot are effectively all-or-nothing: if you don’t agree to all of them, then you don’t get to install the app. They’re not permissions so much as demands.
(Some OS do have settings that will let you turn them off individually after installation, but this is not universally available, is often buried in an advanced configuration panel, leaves a window of time where they are still allowed, and in some cases have been known to cause apps to crash. Things are improving on this front with new OS versions, but doing so in microscopic steps that move at a glacial pace.)
If your app touches the camera and mic, it will show up on that screen that it does so. “Using the API” (which is just how the OS works) doesn’t prevent it from appearing on that screen, especially when you’re doing so for the purpose of putting video and audio in posts.
If your app touches the camera and mic, it will show up on that screen that it does so.
Showing up on that screen is no substitute for what is actually needed:
- Individual control (an easy and obvious way to allow or deny each thing separately)
- Minimal access (a way to create a sound file without giving Facebook access to an open mic)
- Visibility (a clear indication by the OS when Facebook is capturing or has captured data)
All of those things are implemented in modern Android. Well, almost.
- Whenever the app wants to use microphone an OS popup asks you if you want to give the app permission to use the feature. The options are “when using app”, “only this time” (it will give the app one-time-use access to the mic) and “never”. If you click the 1st or 3rd options, you wouldn’t see the popup again and you’ll have to change the permission from settings. If you choose the 2nd option, you can manually choose to give permission each time it’s requested.
- This is impossible? The OS can either let the app use the mic or not, it can’t tell what the app is doing with the mic. Unless you mean give a one-time permission this time, but not in the future, then we covered that in previous point.
- Android always shows a green indicator on screen (upper right corner) when any app is using the microphone or camera API. Well, almost always, some system apps might not trigger it. But if you want to see which app is using mic/camera you can tap the indicator.
I downvoted because of the snark in first paragraph.
No snark intended. Do you run into that so often that you’ve come to expect it?
Intention vs. Impact, look it up.
Ooh, I spy more snark!
That rudely condescending comment lends nothing useful to the discussion, and has just earned my only downvote of the day. Enjoy. Bye.
I downvoted because of the snark in first paragraph.
That is not the same thing as listening in the background.
Nobody said it was the same thing as listening in the background. It’s still relevant and important.
I trust that most adults understand the implications of an exploitable permission and a strong incentive to abuse it, as well as the track record of corporate denials.
Using the permission to record audio triggers an on-screen indicator that the mic is recording. Someone would probably notice it on 24/7 recording. Someone would have also by now found the constant stream of network traffic to send the audio to be analyzed, because they also aren’t doing that on-device.
Meta said it does not, but what about 3rd parties…
What a horrifying list of data collection. Fuck all that hahaha
“Meta does not use your phone’s microphone for ads and we’ve been public about this for years,” the statement read. “We are reaching out to CMG to get them to clarify that their program is not based on Meta data.”
Ah, yes. The tried and true defense of “we’ve denied it for years and continue to deny it” must be credible coming from a source as trustworthy as Facebook. I hear they’re planning on holding a press conference to pinky swear they’re not listening to the microphone they demand access to in order to show you ads that make them money.
FWIW, this was debunked when CMG originally made the claim. It was a marketing guy overselling their product and they had to correct their statement. They use the same info data brokers collect, and phones actively listening to you is not true.
Even what they said could be true without applying to phones. They said “smart devices” a lot. They never said “smart phone”.
There are a lot of IoT devices, some of which have microphones, a lot less secure than either iPhone or Android.
I highly doubt that they actually managed to do this, at least any time recently.
As another commenter noted, Android alerts you when an app is accessing the microphone in the background, and it would also absolutely destroy the phones battery life more than the FB app currently does. The only way that we have the “Hey Google/Siri” command prompts active all the time is with custom hardware not available to the apps, and certainly not without Android knowing about it.
Maybe they actively listen while the app is open, but even then I think recent Android/iOS would let you know about that.
As someone relatively ignorant about the mechanics of something like this, would it not make more sense that the app would be getting this data from the Android OS, with Google’s knowledge and cooperation?
The place I see the most unsettling ads (that seem to be driven by overheard conversation) tends to be the google feed itself, so it seems reasonable to me that they could be using and selling that information to others as well, and merely disguising how the data were acquired.
The place I see the most unsettling ads (that seem to be driven by overheard conversation)
There’s a simpler explanation – you’re in the same geospatial region or you’re connected to the same networks as the people you’re having conversations with, and those people also looked up the things they have conversations about.
If you have GPS, Wi-Fi, or (possibly) Bluetooth, then that’s how they can pretty easily associate you to those people.
It’s a reasonable explanation, and what I typically assume to be true. Still, I’m curious about the actual mechanics, and if it potentially could be being done by Google without the larger tech industry being aware of it.
I believe technically-inclined people could monitor the traffic that exits the phone, or at least passes through the router.
Audio recordings would be larger than the kinds of stuff that’s just sent passively.
They can and do. Nobody has shown evidence of this happening.
It would take a lot of data. On device voice processing is not very advanced. That’s why most voice stuff doesn’t work without a signal.
That makes sense, but isn’t it assuming they’re processing data on the device? I would expect them to send raw audio back to be processed by Google ad services. Obviously it wouldn’t work without signal either, but that’s hardly a limitation.
As someone else pointed out, how does the google song recognition work? That’s active without triggering the light indicating audio recording, and is at least processing enough audio data to identify songs.
If they were sending that much audio back, people would see the traffic. You could record it and send it at a different time, but the traffic would exist somewhere. People have looked and failed to find any evidence of such traffic.
It’s something that could happen on device in the nearish future if there’s not anything now, but it would probably still be hard to hide.
People have looked and failed to find any evidence of such traffic
Source? I would like to read about that
You probably won’t find a source about something not happening.
It’s almost like they were asking about sources for people looking or something.
If you’re not going to contribute, why are you wasting people’s time?
Sorry, it’s been long enough and I haven’t saved any of the links, and the keywords are polluted as hell with garbage results. I can’t find anything specific.
Thanks for the info! I guess that’s ultimately what I’m looking for more about: how much do we know about cellular traffic? Obviously with encryption we can’t just directly read cell signals to find out what’s being sent, so do people just record the volume of data being sent in individual packets and make educated guesses?
It seems plausible to run a simple(non-AI) algorithm to isolate probable conversations and send stripped and compressed audio chunks along with normal data. I assume that’s still probably too hard to hide, but if anyone out there knows of someone that’s looked for this stuff, I’d love to check it out.
Google’s “Now playing” feature constantly listens to what’s going on in the background to show you what songs are playing. They claim this is done with a local database of song “fingerprints”. The feature does not show the microphone indicator because: “…Now Playing is protected by Android’s Private Compute Core…”
I’m not saying that other, non-google, app do this to my knowledge; but the fact that this is a thing is honestly a bit scary.
Dildos, lots of dildos! I’m just gonna repeat that while I’m driving to see if I start getting Google ads for dildos.
Keep us updated!
It remains funny to me that futurism.com became mostly about covering the dystopia we live in.
I am so numb to outrage that this just seems… Meh. What happened to me.
yeah like tell me something I don’t know.
“This just in: to the surprise of no one, your phone has, in fact, been spying on you from day 1. Now we go to Jim with sports. Jim?”
Isn’t this an old article?
This is why I don’t have the Facebook app installed. However, what about messenger? Did the collect the data from messenger?
Any closed-source software is a potential privacy threat. You are always at the mercy of big tech in that case. If the product is free, you are the product
Think about it.
I remember reading some time ago that “the idea (of phones listening to everything you say to serve ads) makes no economic sense, because it’d be too expensive to run”
Looks like it actually isn’t “too expensive” to run in the end.
Yep, and it’s not just Facebook, not just microphone. My lappie recently started serving ads for something I searched on a device not linked to it. I’m guessing it’s my ISP engaging in these sneak tactics.
Depemds if you are logged i to google services on your phone and on you pc browser. If you log into anything google on your browser it retains that log in across all the apps
Oh you know what? Gmail!
I think they’re lying. Apps can’t access the microphone, on an OS level, without explicit permission from the user. Unpess Facebook found and used insane exploits in both Android and iOS, I’m calling bullshit. They’re just bragging about something they can’t possibly do.
Wouldn’t want to be mean to Facebook users, but the vast majority of them probably has micophone access enabled for Messenger at least, if not Facebook.
This comment inspired me to go turn off microphone, camera, Bluetooth, and local network access for every app. I’ll reenable as necessary.
Just leave it on for whatever runs your phone calls. I emabarrasingly discovered that the phone app NEEDS microphone access lol.
Thought this was common knowledge by now
Can something that’s not true be common knowledge?
god?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Obsolete_medical_theories
And that’s just in medicine.
Yeah, there was a viral video years back about a couple that thought this was happening to them, so they started talking about cat litter for 1 day, only inside their house, and then within 2 days they were being served cat litter ads for the first time in their lives.
They didnt own a cat.
Did they mention cat litter in any messaging app? Upload a video announcing their plan?
I’m skeptical, lol
How many other novel ads did they see that they didn’t talk about?
I’d be incredibly skeptical of the claim that they’ve never been served a cat litter ad. Everybody gets served ads that are misses. They’re obviously easy to ignore which makes it difficult to recall what they were about. But I have no doubt that they would’ve been served cat-related ads plenty of times before. Cats are, after all, one of the most common pets.
I’m not saying they didn’t get an ad for cat litter. I’m saying they probably also got ads for other random products that they didn’t talk about, but they didn’t pay attention to those because they weren’t talking about them. It’s not a valid experiment design.
Yea they can deny it all they want, but I’ve had similar happen to me countless times.
Even better, last time I tried to buy something from one of their adds it turned out to be a scam. I reported the post (add) and they said they wouldn’t remove it because it didn’t break any policies. lol.
I used to pick up things for a friend at the supermarket and they moved over five years ago. To this day, I still use the savings card, and still get coupons for baby formula and diapers. Even if I had an infant at the time, does the supermarket think my now six year old would still be using formula and diapers?
