this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2024
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Privacy
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The amount of battery used and data that your phone would be sending if it was constantly recording and sending the data to Google would be very obvious
Its more likely that Google and Co have just profiled you really well and or you searched for that specific topic before. Or that topic was an ad that you clicked on in the past or that you slowed down when scrolling to look at
Newer android version notify you in the top right when your microphone is active and you should also be able to see when the last time, down to the minute, that any app accessed the mic in settings
Not possible. To be explicit, he was asking me my opinion about car maintenance and if I changed the oil in my cars every X miles OR every six months, or if the expiration time of oil was BS. I told him my opinion was that the age of the oil is irrelevant unless you idle your car for many hours at a time, just change it based on the millage. Today I got fed an article about how a dude tested the oil from various cars, with various ages and miles against brand new oil and found that age made no difference on the key characteristics of the oil. That is a remarkably specific article from a VERY specific VERBAL conversation I had over a Teams call on a work computer. It certainly got me thinking but again its the first time I've had one of those super specific ads in a long time that made me question my privacy.
Edit: I'm getting down voted, so people don't think this is a markably specific ad response? People really think Google is just this good to infer this type of article in less than 24 hours is just dumb luck because 'oil change'?
I don't understand how people are still in denial that this is happening when it's so obvious.
Probably because no one has any proof other than anecdotal evidence. And the vast majority of times it's looked into it's because the person reporting it doesn't understand how else their information is collected (i.e. web searches, intranet data for other people, browsing histories, etc.)
Look at it this way, is it more likely that the majority of security researchers that look into it, find nothing, and deem these use cases as inefficient and improbable, are wrong; OR is it more likely that data collectors builds good profiles, mixed with some Baader-Meinhof, a little Dunning-Krueger, and a lot of coincidence?
Not everything is a big conspiracy, nuance is neccesary, or the sky will always be falling.
This is how we ended up with Q and anti-vaxxers.
I mean if you want to deny the sky is blue when plenty of experience says otherwise that's on you.
I agree that it would be very inefficient to send voice recordings, and those would be easy to pick out with some packet sniffing.
But a locally processed txt file of keywords would be such a small amount of encrypted data that it would easily pass under the nose of any security researcher and they would have no idea unless it was decrypted.
So no, this is not debunked.