This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Article is from 2018. Someone must have pasted the url from hacker news where the same story was dug up recently.
Is that to say that it's no longer valid? Or just that it's old news? The list of apps associated with the software is still pretty extensive; Google Assistant even showed up.
Well these days Android asks for more permissions so I guess it would prevent it in many cases by preventing access to the microphone for apps where you don't want to allow it...
Android also shows an indicator when any app is accessing the microphone or camera now.
7 years is a long time in tech.
Google Assistant is supposed to listen for the "Hey Google" trigger word. How else do you expect to use your device hand-free.
That's kinda my point, though. You have the Google Assistant app for a legitimate reason, and its need to use your microphone is also equally legitimate...the problem comes in when Google says that they don't monitor what you're saying, or worse, they say they can't because your phone processes it all locally. They have this giant loophole that they take advantage of here, in that while they do not keep track of what you say themselves, they embed a third party service that does. While not particularly surprising given it's Google, that's shady as fuck and they shouldn't be able to say they don't monitor just because they let their little bro Alphonso do it on their behalf and they magically get off on a technicality.
No, 2018 wasn't 7 years ago... No... Wait please..! :'(
Old news. It was old news in 2018
Wasn't there just a storey a couple days ago that apps where not doing this but taking screenshots and videos on the screen and sending that. And both iOS and Android have the microphone notification now.
ok thanks, but where's the list of these apps?
These type of articles never list the apps they're discussing.
I used to work for a mobile advertiser, and we installed hella bloatware on phones.
This idea was floated a couple times but was deemed not very effective cause you'd have to store and process hours and hours of audio data that didn't tell us much more than just having a week or so of GPS data, your Facebook profile, and your phone IMEI.
It's pretty easy to see if you're near a Popeyes and what other IMEIs are connecting to the same tower, extrapolate that to you being near your wife and you and your wife thinking about shit on the Popeyes menu.
Boom targeted ad/video for fried chicken.
The rest is general tech paranoia leading to Apophenia.
There's no microphones or cameras, it's just the already gigantic mountain of data anyone who uses a smartphone is constantly broadcasting getting ground through the big data machine that has been the pillar of all tech since the last recession.
But… they can't access the microphone without the user explicitly allowing
I thought Android has a non bypassable green dot in the notification bar when the micro is on ?
Go ahead, make TVs more smart. We literally removed our TV thus weekend. If you want me to upgrade it, please removed the spyware.
Next TV that breaks and we won't have one. I'll do a projector for movie night and that's it.
Right around the confinement my sister and I were talking about getting some seeds for my mom. Neither of us searched for seeds. From that point we both started to get ads for seeds, many for the ones we had talked about in particular. This thing was so unequivocal that it proved to me that our phones listen. Maybe they don't analyze, but they definitely listen for words actionable for an advertising purposes.
I keep my phone in a chip bag and only pull it out to LARP the preparation for the assassination Franz Ferdinand in general terms without naming actual places or names.
