Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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Our phones DO listen to our voices 24x7 (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

97 comments fedilink hide all child comments

(I know many of you already know it but this incident I experienced made me so paranoid about using smartphones)

To start off, I'm not that deep into privacy rabbit hole but I do as much I can possibly to be private on my phone. But for the rest of phones in my family, I generally don't care because they are not tech savvy and pushing them towards privacy would make their lives hard.

So, the other day I pirated a movie for my family and since it was on Netflix, it was a direct rip with full HD. I was explaining to my family how this looks so good as this is an direct rip off from the Netflix platform, and not a recording of a screening in a cinema hall(camrip). It was a small 2min discussion in my native language with only English words used are record, piracy and Netflix.

Later I walk off and open YouTube, and I see a 2 recommendations pop-up on my homepage, "How to record Netflix shows" & "Why can't you screen record Netflix". THE WHAT NOW. I felt insanely insecure as I was sure never in my life I looked this shit up and it was purely based on those words I just spoke 5min back.

I am pretty secure on my device afaik and pretty sure all the listening happened on other devices in my family. Later that day, I went and saw which all apps had microphone access, moved most of them to Ask everytime and disabled Google app which literally has all the permissions enabled.

Overall a scary and saddening experience as this might be happening to almost everyone and made me feel it the journey I took to privacy-focused, all worth it.

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[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 week ago (9 children)

I am surprised by the response I got from majority here. I thought the people who are privacy-focused, wouldn't give the benefit of doubt to Google of all companies. But it isn't the case here. Everyone here just assumes and believes strongly it isn't technically not possible which is really the case when you look at the other services offered by Google.

@op i would advise caution on stating '24x7' until there is evidence of that specific claim. (unless you're referring to while voice assistants are enabled.)

Google app which is pre-installed is pretty a forced voice assistant on everyone on android.

[–] [email protected] -3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (6 children)

I get your feeling :) Don't worry the silent majority is on your side. However they won't comment because they fear from being banned or backslashed....

While It can't be proven or disapproved, I also had my share of strange coincidence where my mind goes "Huh? How is that even possible?"... Kinda strange feeling! But that feeling gave me the push to the privacy route maybe in a rather to extreme direction? Always follow your guts when there's to much noise to make a clear decision.

RethinkDNS (block every in/out request except those manually allowed)
Degoogles android (Shizuku+canta, magisk, debloater)
Only open source apps and delete everything else (no exceptions here) -....

You will never get full 100% privacy or anonymity, however you can make your data as much as difficult to get and waste some of their resource and time :).

Good luck !

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 days ago (4 children)

Looks like the silent majority disagrees with you... Stop convincing yourself of things that aren't true.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 days ago

76 up's / 68 down's on OP's post.

It's very close, still the majority wins, that's how it works, if not happy change the system not the voters.

Maybe not 24x7 but this did happened and people have reported it multiple times. If you really think those multi-billion dollars companies are not capable of or won't do anything so sketchy because it's not "worth it", then it's time to open your mind to the possibility that those companies are not your friends.

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