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I still don’t think companies serve you ads based on spying through your microphone (simonwillison.net)

submitted 5 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

199 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Not my title! I do think we are being listened to. And location tracked. And it's being passed on to advertisers. Is it apple though? Probably not is my take away from this article, but I don't trust plenty of others, and apple still does

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (2 children)

With the scientific method and anecdotal evidence: kind of never. It's illegitimate to draw that conclusion, this way.

You got to dig down to the facts. Or we can just tell the fact that a lot of people feel that way. And I mean "confirmation bias" is a very good explanation. We also have thousands of people believe in esoterics, homeopathy etc. The mechanics of psychology are well-understood. And it's kind of the reason why we invented science in the first place. Because we found things aren't always as they seem. And there are a lot of dynamics to factor in.

If we want to get to the truth, we have to do a proper study. I'm not an expert on this, so I don't know if we got to that, yet. I know people have demonstrated this is technically possible. But as far as I'm aware people have also taken apart a few of the major apps like Facebook etc, logged the traffic and couldn't find anything that uses microphone data to do targeted advertising.

Conclusion: It's either not there, or we missed it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Playing devil's advocate here - we know voice information is being sent back to both Google and Apple, if the analysis were done server side dissembling apps isn't going to show us anything we don't already know.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago

That's kind of the important question... We know it sends audio on request, if you trigger it somehow. But does it transmit anything clandestinely in the background? And does it suppress any microphone icons from showing up? I believe that's where disassembly and sniffing network traffic come into play.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 days ago

Now I want to do some kind of experiment where I speak things into my phone and see what happens. It still seems too much to be coincidental.