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.
The thing is I really can’t see Google allowing anyone else access. They don’t even allow Android OEMs to have access
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.
Not to mention companies and their software (especially older versions) are commonly hacked. If there was a vulnerability, how long did my phone provide the hackers with unlimited access to those features to have them possibly try to extort me in real life.
For what it’s worth, I did just test it with airplane mode and it still correctly identified the song playing. So at the very least, it’s not lying about using a local database to identify songs, at least when it is offline.
It also uses a cloud fingerprint database apparently according to the second paragraph:
If you turn on “Show search button on lock screen”, each time you tap to search Google receives a short, digital audio fingerprint to identify what’s playing.
Oh, I didn’t notice this, my apologies. Turning on identify songs nearby reveals two new options, notifications and show search button. That show search button option must be new; I had identify nearby music on already since my last phone. Guess they added something new. My bad.
Supposedly more difficult.
Android likes selling ads too, why would google want to stop ad blocking microphne access?
Yeah, this sounds like a shareholder soapy titwank speech to me.
They’re bullshitting everyone including the people we hate.
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.
Really? Thank you!
For Samsung at least, tapping the dot will tell you what’s accessing what. I can’t confirm if it works on other flavors of Android unfortunately.
This is why I don’t like the push of everything needing an app. I sure do wish people in congress cared about this type of privacy issues the way they did Tiktok.
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
easy to test. men can say “tampons glitter lotion” several times a day. women say “garage exhaust cable”.
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
You don’t even have to be logged in, or even go to the same website. There are a number of companies that offer free analytics tools to websites. A completely innocent website that just wants to know how many people have visited their page might use a free people counting widget from Google, Facebook, or wherever. Now every time that webpage gets loaded by a browser so does that widget. The widget itself doesn’t even have to report back to the original creators. If it includes something hosted by the original creators, then they can track the destination IP and browser tags.
Oh you know what? Gmail!
That’ll do it 😀
Yeah, a marketing agency selling snake oil to people that actually think they can do it is not expensive. Of course they never actually built the tech.
It’s not when it’s your device doing the computing. All electronic devices should have visible hardware indicators for when their camara or microphone is on, but that’s a consumer rights issue most people are dismissive of, so it’s not happening. Some people even always want it on for the assistant functionality.
The mic is always on for android phones anway, thats how it hears “Hey Google”
Not how it works.
They have an ultra low power processor that listens for the “hey Google” keyword, then that wakes up the main audio processor. But the main microphone is not actually on, and that small processor isn’t capable of recording audio it’s just looking for a certain matching sound wave and then triggering.
That’s why it sometimes triggers if you just go “hurr ner dorrll” because those random sounds are close enough to what it’s looking for.
That is why some older devices can’t actually install the assistant software. They lack the necessary hardware to do it in a power efficient manner.
my Samsung has a green light in the task bar when my camera is on
Except Facebook never used it this was a 3rd party trying to hype up investors. Many audits have been run on these apps and there is no way they use your microphone. It’s way cheaper to just look at your search history.
Even then, you have local voice recognition. You don’t need to stream all microphone recordings to some central server for processing, you just do voice recognition and keep a log of say the last 100 nouns and a high priority log for the last twenty nouns used near verbs like purchase, buy or get. Then send those lists to the ad provider as context. All the hard work is done on the client device and the same backend used for ad context on web pages can be used for this as well.
Then hide it encrypted in an image upload or some other packet. Listen for ‘buy a <something>’ encrypt its text version, wait for something to cargo it with in a data transmission so people looking at data transmissions aren’t any the wiser, hide it in some obscure way that would look normal otherwise, it’s intercepted, sends off to advertisers. Adtech is cyber terrorism.
You don’t think security experts know about stereonography techniques? It’s like the first thing you learn about in uni for it. Like the first week.
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?”
tell me something I don’t know
My grandad said “It’s really humid today isn’t it?”
I said “Tell me something I don’t know!”
He said “Err… Ok… I can fit my whole fist up yer gran’s arse”
It’s the world we live in. It’s very much intentionally designed to make you complacent.
They spent decades gaslighting you so you thought you were crazy for even imagining it.
Normative nihilism is going to get us all.
“Yeah but the marketplace!” “Yeah but my friends use Messenger!”
Normies don’t care about anything. They’ll keep using that piece of crap social app.
call me a normie but I do like having contact with my family. And though I’d love to move somewhere where my privacy is respected - there’s no point in using a messaging app if you’re the only one there
and no I can’t convince my 76 year old grandma to move to signal, she barely wrapped her head around Facebook
Just use fucking sms. I’ll never understand this.
That’s a BS reason. I have 2 members of the Baby Boomer generation in my Signal contacts, they use it all the time with no problems. It’s no harder than iMessage to use. They would like it better when they see that Signal doesn’t gimp the image quality between Android and iOS phones unlike iMessage
It isn’t. I’ve personally had it happen where a relative who went to some country that bans video calling and VoIP (except for the unencrypted/honey pots of course) and used Signal to call people back home (only because I told them it would be unblocked due to censorship circumvention). Despite everyone in my household being familiar with WhatsApp, I was the only who did video calls with them and had to share my device so others could also call them. Even when I’d set up Signal on one of their devices, they still complained it was to difficult to use, insisted I’d uninstall it when the trip was over and used it a grand total of once.
I honestly think it’s partly to do with the nerd factor. This same relative turned out to also have installed the backdoored unencrypted app to chat with others, but hid it from us due to me being vocal about not using that. These other households, also WhatsApp based, managed to install, sign up and use that just fine. They also couldn’t be bothered to set up Signal for some reason, yet gladly accepted the suggestion to use the honey pot.
I think that these people in my circle don’t care about security at all and only care about the platform. If it’s “secure”, “private” and “censorship resistant” and they haven’t heard of it until I, the “techie”, explain the technological benefits of it, they’ll think it’s a niche “techie” thing they’re not nerdy enough to understand. If I get them to use it, they’ll keep thinking this whenever something is slightly different than WhatsApp and be frustrated. Meanwhile they can get behind the honey pot because “WhatsApp doesn’t work there, this is just what people in that country use”. It appears normal because “normal people” use it all the time, and they’ll solve any inconvenience themselves because “normal people (can) use this, and I’m normal too”.Well i’m very happy for you and for them, but my 76 year old Polish grandmother - who got her first mobile phone at the age of 60ish, probably doesn’t even know what image quality is, definitely doesn’t know the difference between android and iOS, and has recently called me panicked to ask why all her photos were on Facebook, they weren’t, she was looking at her gallery preview through the Facebook app - is not going to be very enthusiastic about learning to use an app only her grandson uses.
so I’ll just stick to messenger
What’s a normie in this context?
An average person
unless this is provably and demonstrably true, this is definitely not true, because up until now, this has been entirely speculation.
Ngl man I’m not buying it. With all the protections in mobile OSes against this exact kind of thing it straight up doesn’t seem possible
Thank god those moral people would never sell stuff to law enforcement nor sell it to companies that would then sell it to law enforcement.
Nope. Those people are all moral, good, and rich thus we are safe.
A market agency claiming they do something of the sort isn’t proof that conversations are being monitored en masse. Security researchers can and probably have tested for this and found no clear, verifiable evidence, otherwise we would have known. Also, this stuff can be blocked at the OS level and I find it hard to imagine (esp. without solid proof) that Google or Apple would jeopardize their reputations to this extent by enabling such unauthorized listening in on users’ conversations.
Of course it’s good to keep watching this space but we shouldn’t jump to conclusions.
Anybody that’s ever spoken to a salesperson knows that they’re talking out of their arse most of the time, and I doubt this is an exception.
He’s said this because he thinks that the people he’s talking to will give him more money if he does.
If it was happening at all you’d have seen proof by now. Like people pulling apps apart and finding proof, not just “I spoke to Bob last week about cameras and now I’m seeing ads for cameras”.
The truly terrifying part is they don’t need to listen to your conversations to know what you want.
They have it’s very easy there are free programs that monitor all data traffic.
This claim that Facebook listens to you on your phone has been around for years. It has been investigated numerous times and has never turned out to be true. Until recently the processing capacity required would have been insane and you would have an incredibly high noise to signal ratio. It’s just not an economical way of gathering data for advertising.
Why bother anyway when people put their entire lives on Facebook, for free, in easily processable text?
Your phone/plan carrier using voice data to make a marketing profile is well documented actually. This data is purchased and verified and resold by meta, or in some cases bought and used by alphabet for GAS. Cacti can show you outgoing data for every device on a network, and you can see data being sent from a phone in signed packets going to your carrier when you’re not “actively using” it. It seems like you know about network monitoring tools but you haven’t actually used them, just talked about them in reference to data collection.
“Why buy the cow” here is also easily answered: not everyone uses Facebook, a fair number of users will deactivate their facebook page but continue to use messenger.
So what you’re saying is the biggest companies like Amazon, Google, ChatGPT, etc… can’t perfect voice dictation when I’m talking directly and clearly to my device, but this company has been able to figure it out. And doing it while hiding from the smartphone OS that it’s doing it. While the device is at a distance/hidden in my pocket. And is using it just to sell ads.
👍
Is this copypasta
Your comment? I’m pretty sure yeah it was, and a really old one
I asked because it was nonsensical and could have been funny if you were imitating the typical internet child comment but here we are with you making no sense and me disappointed
Really?.. Wow, not only did you copy pasta one of the oldest trolls online but you can’t understand how illogical the troll is. And you want to accuse me of being a child?
Your comment was disproved here… In 2018. And it wasn’t a new idea then either.
And you have yet to provide any evidence for your belief.
I want evidence please provide me evidence or shut the hell up because all you’re doing is perpetuating a prejudice against Facebook, which isn’t unjustified, but is totally without any kind of basis in reality.
Can you share this well documented documents?
The july 2017 verizon data leak was made public.
Yeah, with lots of leaked customer data. Nothing about using voice data to make a marketing profile. Unless there is a second leak I don’t know about.
But judging by your inability to link it you just made it up.
Please think about what you’ve just confirmed about yourself
Because people’s (presumed private) conversations on Messenger are not the same thing as things people post publicly.
Personally, I would never install that malware on my phone. But if you even have FB Messenger installed on your device, chances are that it’s constantly sending your data to Facebook. Go take a look at what permissions it “needs.”
We can see what it’s sending to facebook though, and it’s not constant. There’s a bunch that it does send and receive, but this isn’t hypothetical speculation, like, we can just see that it’s not using your microphone for that, or sending anything like audio data. You can check this yourself, wireshark is free and packet specifications are available.
Security researchers can and probably have tested for this and found no clear, verifiable evidence, otherwise we would have known.
Facebook snooped on users’ Snapchat traffic in secret project, documents reveal
Interesting. And shady. Though not about recording conversations.
Aye. Facebook has been proven to be shady af over and over again.
By paying people $20 / month in exchange for installing a VPN that will snoop on your data so they can market research their competitors.
It is unacceptable, but it wasn’t in secret from the users. They agreed to get paid in exchange for the usage data of competitor apps.
So it’s a completely different situation to any “secretly spying” claim. The users had to go out of their way to get it setup.
it wasn’t in secret
Did I misread something? It even says in the title of the linked article, that it was a “secret project”.
Yes, it was secret in the sense they didn’t want their competitors knowing about it.
It wasn’t secret to people who were invited and signed up for the program.
It was already ruled that they failed to sufficiently disclose which information was used and how.
Nothing to do with your microphone.
Yes. Just another malicious thing facebook does. Surely, they are totally trustworthy in all other regards. /s
This has nothing to do with trust and everything to do with facts and evidence.
The evidence is: among other things, facebook has repeatedly violated user’s privacy. It would be no surprise if they would also monitor conversations via the microphone. Sure, currently there seems to be no evidence for that. But I wouldn’t be so naive to just trust them on that.
The evidence is: among other things, facebook has repeatedly violated user’s privacy
This is not evidence that they’re using your microphone, and you know it’s not.
It would be no surprise if they would also monitor conversations via the microphone.
Honestly, I would be very surprised. Not that they would, but that they were able to. And that they were able to without ever being caught, somehow bypassing Google and Apple’s mic usage notifications.
But I wouldn’t be so naive to just trust them on that.
I don’t know why you keep coming back to trust. I’ve already addressed this. No one is suggesting that you should trust them. You shouldn’t trust them. And you shouldn’t use their services. That’s not the point.
This is not evidence that they’re using your microphone, and you know it’s not.
I didn’t claim it to be evidence for that.
somehow bypassing Google and Apple’s mic usage notifications
Unless some form of hardware notification is hardwired into the device, which indicates cam or mic usage, I’m on the rather paranoid side regarding software notifications. Software is usually much easier to break. I’m leaning a lot out of the window now, as I don’t know how secure those notifications are implemented. However, even then there is reason for concern, given that facebook had / has questionable deals with device manufacturers. If they were willing to share personal data with device manufacturers, there is reason to suspect this went or can go the other way around as well.
I don’t know why you keep coming back to trust. […] That’s not the point.
It is mine. Even though there is no evidence for a surveillance using device microphones itself yet and it could be surprising if they were able to, given the history of facebook, they participated in a lot of rather surprising shit.
We know? It’s not a coincidence that when you mention something like Cheap Flights to Dublin, it soon ends up on your ad rotation.
Honestly I’d rather that than ads for the things I already bought.
uOrigin user : you have ads?
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!
Hold on, I just tripped on another goddamn dildo, you don’t wanna know where I fell.
If that works, you should try it with a product that you aren’t interested in too and compare the results.
I tried that. Didn’t work. There may be some filters so they don’t serve inappropriate ads to people with families or some such.
I’ve tried that, it didn’t work…unfortunately.
It remains funny to me that futurism.com became mostly about covering the dystopia we live in.
Yeah that’s a shame, electronics seems to have reached a level where most people just don’t need or dream of a better something (PC, phone, etc) and other tech is hard to grasp like biotech.
Not, like, “haha” funny…
The future is going to be amazing! Well, it has the potential to be amazing if we use tech the right way. No I mean, like in an ethical way. Without exploiting people. No not like that, in a way that helps people. Well yes, billionaires are people, but I meant… at least it should be in legal ways. Or at least policed. Not hostile to average people. Not an openly criminal endeavour. Maybe just dont criminalise resistance to it? … oh, actually the future is going to be a techno-monopolistic dark age, I see. We can pivot to covering that.
For everyone saying apps need permission to use your mic I want to point you to “play services”. The permissions protections only apply to user space apps not system apps. Thats how u can say “OK google” and get the chat ai to pop up even tho its “not listening” according to the OS.
Also if you read the website they are not piping audio to their servers. They push triggers (keywords, etc) to the local ai on your phone that listens for things like “OK google” and then sends those reports back.
Meta apps would need permission to to mic but I think if y’all check your big tech apps u will be surprised how many have that permission.
I can’t speak to iOS because its closed source but it probably has similar backdoors for apple.
