CameronDev

Consider me whooshed then. Didn't see the first parts

Doesn't really work without the setup

That's just what CMG claimed to have.

But to be useful for an advertising network, it kinda needs to be installable on everything. And if it failed to suppress the mic LED on a single device, it would be very easily noticed?

Family Link. You can whitelist apps, get screen time stats, and if your kid needs an app, when they try install it it will ask your approval.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.apps.kids.familylink

Bit of a pain getting the accounts setup, but otherwise works very well for preventing my grandma filling her tablet with junk.

I think its better to keep your gateway basic, and run extra services on a separate raspi or similar. Let your router/gateway focus on routing packets.

Openwrt can run Adguard, and as long as your gateway can run docker, you can probably get pihole working.

Sure, except we are defenceless to the rampant dropbears. /s

Australia is a funny example for gun control. Yanks seem to think we have no guns at all, but the reality is that as long as you are mentally sound and store your guns safely, they aren't that hard to get.

Any idiot and chatgpt could knock up an overt always listening app in an afternoon. I have no doubt shady apps already can do this. Its not hard or expensive. (Backend storage and audio processing costs are a different kettle of fish, and I think those make this fairly prohibitive as well, but that's a funding problem, not a technical problem.)

But as soon as they make the claim that it doesn't trigger the microphone LED on iOS and Android, across all devices, then that's a "technically hard" problem. That's multiple zero days across multiple devices. Its just not feasable for an ad tech firm. They would never be able to recoup that investment.

I'm happy to be proven wrong, but so far all the researchers in the world have found nothing.

So I'm attributing near 0% chance that anyone outside of nation states have the later tech (device agnostic covert audio recording).

The capabilities TLAs have costs hundreds of millions of dollars to develop, and once caught, are worthless. TLAs are extremely careful with their toys to avoid them being caught.

This Adtech company is claiming to have something at that level, which they are deploying everywhere. If it existed, it would have been found the day after they announced it, the security researcher industry would be all over it. They are very intelligent people who do understand those devices inside and out, if it existed they would find it. Remember, these are the same researchers who frequently out actual TLA tools.

You can't prove a negative, so it definitely is a probability thing, but I put the probability at basically 0 that they have what they claim.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/12/no-a-marketing-firm-isnt-tapping-your-device-to-hear-private-conversations/

The capability they were claiming to have would make a three letter agency very excited. If they truely had the ability to listen to your microphone, transparently without notifying the user, they could sell that tech to every regime that wants to snoop on people, for millions of dollars.
Instead they claim to be using it for Ad-tech, where if it existed, would make it trivial to discover and flag as malware.

Apple and Google would also be very keen to find and squash whatever loophole let's them record without showing the notification.

Its just an extraordinary claim, which if true would have been exposed/validated by security researchers long ago.

Not disputing the three letter agencies, but there is zero evidence that that ad company ever had the tech or ability. They were/are just full of shit.

"And that's why I wear a condom while horse riding"

Jokes aside, there can be too much safety gear, especially if it gets in the way of building technique.