“guys google assistant isn’t always listening lol it only wakes up on the trigger word. you people know nothing about IT or how good marketers are at guessing” -10,000,000 neckbeards for the last decade, despite everyone’s obvious anecdotal experiences that are just too bullshit to ignore.
Did it really take them admitting it for a publication to talk about it?
Edit: this has angered the neckbeards
Just because you don’t understand statistics and metadata analysis doesn’t make it fake. And of course, since it’s real, you can surely point to all the apps whose network traffic was monitored and all the voice data constantly being transmitted that was captured. Because surely in an era where many people pay for data, it’d be impossible to miss the constant audio stream coming from every one of these devices eating up your bandwidth cap.
But nah, “I feel this is true” is all we need. Even when the person who says it, and said it to advertise their product, admits they lied for sales.
Are they tracking you? You bet. If you think they’re so unsophisticated that they need to literally listen to your every word instead of the millions of other data points you FREELY give away already, you just don’t understand the tech and are fear mongering.
Exactly, their predictive algorithms are entirely too accurate and it’s not just clicking on or searching for products that gives them the information. Even how long it took you to scroll past something is used to analyze potential future behavior and deliver you ads.
You take in so much content everyday that you don’t even realize. They probably saw plenty of them that OP didn’t even realize, I’m sure they gave it away via some other means.
People have tested this before and gotten no additional ads based on their words, it’s all anecdotal.
At the risk of being called a neckbeard:
Before Cox Media Group sent its statement, though, CMG’s claims of collecting data on “casual conversations in real-time,” as its blog stated, were questionable. CMG never explained how our devices would somehow be able to garner the computing and networking power necessary to record and send every conversation spoken within the device’s range in “real-time,” unbeknownst to the device’s owner. The firm also never explained how it acquired the type of access that requires law enforcement to obtain a warrant. This is despite CMG’s blog claiming that with Active Listening, advertisers would be able to know “the second someone in your area is concerned about mold in their closet,” for example.
In other words, they were hyping up capabilities they don’t have.
Are you familiar with Wireshark and network sniffing? Instead of just wondering, why not look for yourself what these devices are sending out? It’s not hard, and it’s not a secret.
I’m not scared of them, because I know exactly how they work and exactly what’s going across my network at all times.
Are you able to dissect the packet contents tho? I can see the raw hex payloads of any packets on my network but that doesn’t really tell me much about the data actually in them
You can at the very least tell when it is and is not transmitting data when you talk around it. You can set up experiments, like having a casual conversation with and without the “wake word” and compare packets. If it starts spewing data every time you talk, or if it remains mostly idle with just occasional DNS lookups or NTP updates and such, you’ll know.
Is there a way to route traffic from the router to Wireshark? Or would this require a router capable of like OpenWRT?
I have a stupid linksys that has awesome wifi power, but I can’t seem to get custom firmware on it. I might be able to configure it as an access point.
My router is a full on Linux server PC in a rack, so in my case I can just monitor all its interfaces directly on the box. I’ve got an entirely seperate VLAN for my IoT stuff (because a LOT of them are still very unsecure and I’m more scared of my network being compromised that way, by them just getting straight up hacked).
An easy way to do it in your case if you have a gimped ISP-provided router is to find an old hub (not a switch), plug a wireless access point into that, and have the device connect only to that access point. Then plug your laptop or computer into one of the other hub ports and you should be able to listen in on everything being sent across that hub.
More advanced switches might be able to do port-mirroring, which accomplishes the same thing.
“I got one downvote and a few people sharing facts that dispute my comment. It’s a witch-hunt 😠”
