Some random company claiming this capability without any further evidence should probably be treated with some level of scrutiny.
The part of CMG advertising the capability is CMG Local Solutions. CMG itself is owned by Apollo Global Management and Cox Enterprises, which includes the ISP Cox Communications. CMG operates a wide array of local news television and radio stations.
Cox Enterprises isn’t some random company. It’s one of the largest privately owned companies in the US. They are somewhat capable of doing things like this.
Having experience with Cox Enterprises, it’s just a massive amalgamation of disparate acquisitions that have never been remotely brought together in a meaningful way so it is a slightly dubious claim. This would require much more coordination across entities than I feel is possible with the CMG I knew of pre-pandemic.
Why?
What about modern capitalism makes you optimistic. I know for a fact this is happening. I bought a pair of Bose earbuds—I was pretty excited about them but they were defective. The app they tried to get me to download required me to sign away permission to “map” my head movements, intercept any sound coming through what I actively play through the headphones…AND “passively record any sound around you.”
And when I saw that shit, I got right the fuck out of there—even though seeing that shit required me to click through three sub menus and entirely different legal documents, all of which I would’ve agreed to like every other privacy policy: absentmindedly.
After getting right the fuck out of there, I went on their website to contact customer service about the defect. So I opened an SMS chat with customer service—where I was told “replying to this chat is tacit agreement to our CUSTOMER SERVICE PRIVACY POLICY,” which I opened. And initially I was fine because it seemed like it was a different policy just allowing them to record the conversation “for training purposes.” Until I clicked through one, two, three and now FOUR sub menus to find I WOULD’VE AGREED TO THE SAME FUCKING PRIVACY POLICY.
So I fucking called Bose. I wanted to know if I could use these headphones without ever agreeing to the privacy policy. But of course customer service couldn’t even conceive of my question. I asked to get transferred to the legal dept.
Lol of course not. What the fuck was I thinking.
So fuck them, I returned those fuckers as fast as I could.
How often are you digging into sub pages and cited clauses of the privacy policies you’re agreeing to on a day-to-day basis? Because I will tell you, they were making me sign away the right to ALL a of that information, and their specific info on how they were using it (a different sub-contract) was pretty lax on who they could share it with.
I fully believe this has been happening WAY longer than just recently. Capitalism is trading on our data in the most invasive ways imaginable. The spying and capabilities have reached dystopian levels. How long ago did those CIA leaks come out about smart TVs being used to eavesdrop? That was like 2014. Ten goddamn years ago.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
buying crystals, tarot cards, and Vitamin C pills
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
But isn’t that just some other logical fallacy? I don’t have anything to cite, but a lot of shit is being sold to people under the pretense of religion. It doesn’t discredit the value it brings religious people. Or the people that abuse faith to swindle poor people out of their money—what’s it called? Investment Christianity or some shit? The whole “tithing brings you closer to god” thing where those incredibly wealthy televangelists are seeing the opportunity of “you just have to have faith/not having faith in me is spitting in gods eye” and abusing it. Do televangelists discredit all religion?
I mean, I’m an atheist myself, but I’ve read studies from sociologists saying the population’s increasing loss of faith does have negative effects on overall contentedness and hopefulness and community. Saying, “well televangelists exist, so just know your faith in god is being used to swindle poor people.” You can’t discredit everything having to do with a concept by finding the people taking advantage of it. People find a way to take advantage of every single thing.
I can’t discredit the concept of using phones because the concept of calling someone is being abused to steal old people’s personal info.
And, I mean, what lines are we even drawing here? It’s WELL established that data miners, data trading, invasive permissions signed away in privacy policies for the purpose of packaging and reselling, invasive domestic spying programs…these things all exist and have existed for a long time. My point is…I’m against it? I’m not drawing some insane conclusion about some conspiracy—just because there is a nuanced connection between being wary of our data being stolen and the insane conspiracy theories that the unknown aspects of that problem spawn, doesn’t mean that every person concerned with the loss of privacy is responsible for the extreme end of the spectrum.
That’s the problem I have with what you’re saying—you’re acting like there is no nuance. Because there is well-established reason for concern regarding privacy. And jumping to unfounded conclusions is almost a natural response to any new information in the internet age.
COVID denialism, illuminati, etc. is wariness brought to an illogical extreme. The existence of that phenomenon should NOT discredit any reasonable person concerned about privacy.
Remember brexit? Remember trump? Both of those world events came about from a relatively unknown industry that was exposed after the fact. And those invasive data profiling businesses didn’t go under. They changed their names.
The Edward Snowden revelations were over a decade ago. I’d argue that assuming there is no cause for concern is beyond naive.
And you’re likening crystals and telepathy to “doctors have a profit motive?” Sure, there is an illogical extreme to the information that big pharmaceutical companies have a stranglehold on the medical field and corrupt treatment by prioritizing profits—look at the opioid crisis, look at the entire concept of pharmaceutical reps and commercials for prescription drugs.
These things alone are the concern. Just because they can and do breed extreme ideas with no basis in reality doesn’t justify discrediting the concept itself.
I get it, unfounded conclusions are generally disagreeable. But “our privacy is disappearing” isn’t an unfounded conclusion. I’m saying I’ve read the privacy policy that was getting me to sign away every scrap of privacy the limits of the product could’ve possibly invaded. Conspiracy theorists don’t make that untrue.
“Nah I’ve already got 4 tin-foil hats on and I’m destroying anything made after the 1950s right now. Kids included, they are microchipped with the vaccines. It’s okay because I’ll plead insanity.” -way too many people
Do people seriously still think this is a thing?
Literally anyone can run the basic numbers on the bandwidth that would be involved, you have 2 options:
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They stream the audio out to their own servers which process is there. The bandwidth involved would be INSTANTLY obvious, as streaming audio out is non-trivial and anyone can pop open their phone to monitor their network usage. You’d hit your data limit in 1-2 days right away
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They have the app always on and listening for “wakewords”, which then trigger the recording and only then does it stream audio out. WakewordS plural is doing a LOT of heavy lifting here. Just 1 single wakeword takes a tremendous amount of training and money, and if they wanted the countless amount of them that would be required for what people are claiming? We’re talking a LOT of money. But thats not all, running that sort of program is extremely resource intensive and, once again, you can monitor your phones resource usage, you’d see the app at the top burning through your battery like no tomorrow. Android and iPhone both have notifications to inform you if a specific app is using a lot of battery power and will show you this sort of indicator. You’d once again instantly notice such an app running.
I think a big part of this misunderstanding comes from the fact that Alexa/Google devices seem so small and trivial for their wakewords.
What people dont know though is Alexa / Google Home have an entire dedicated board with its own dedicated processor JUST for detecting their ONE wake word, and not only that they explicitly chose a phrase that is easy to listen for
“Okay Google” and “Hey Alexa” have a non-trivial amount of engineering baked into making sure they are distinct and less likely to get mistaken for other words, and even despite that they have false positives constantly.
If thats the amount of resources involved for just one wake word/phrase, you have to understand that targeted marking would require hundreds times that, its not viable for your phone to do it 24/7 without also doubling as a hand warmer in your pocket all day long.
The point of OK Google is to start listening for commands, so it needs to be really good and accurate. Whereas, the point of fluffy blanket is to show you an ad for fluffy blankets, so it can be poorly trained and wildly inaccurate. It wouldn’t take that much money to train a model to listen for some ad keywords and be just accurate enough to get a return on investment.
(I’m not saying they are monitoring you, just that it would probably be a lot less expensive than you think.)
I think what the person is saying is that if you aren’t listening for keywords to fire up your smart speaker, but are more instead just ‘bugging’ a home, you don’t need much in the way of hardware in the consumers home.
Assuming you aren’t consuming massive amounts of data to transmit the audio and making a fuss on someone’s home network, this can be done relatively unnoticed, or the traffic can be hidden with other traffic. A sketchy device maker (or, more likely, an app developer) can bug someone’s home or device with sketchy EULA’s and murky device permissions. Then they send the audio to their own servers where they process it, extract keywords, and sell the metadata for ad targeting.
Advertising companies already misrepresent the efficacy of the ads, while marketers have fully drank the kool-aid - leading to advertisers actually scamming marketers. (There was actually a better article on this, but I couldn’t find it.) I’m not sure accuracy of the speech interpretation would matter to them.
I would not be surprised to learn that advertisers are doing legally questionable things to sell misrepresented advertising services. … but I also wouldn’t be surprised to learn that an advertising company is misrepresenting their capabilities to commit a little (more) light fraud against marketers.
sigh yay capitalism. We’re all fucked.
This along with much else that’s pointed out make the whole devices capturing audio to process keywords for ads all seem unlikely, but, one thing worth pointing out is that people do sell bad products that barely or even just plain old don’t do what they told their customers it would do. Someone could sell a listening to keywords to target ads solution to interested advertisers that just really sucks and is super shit at its job. From the device user’s standpoint it’d be a small comfort to know the device was listening to your conversations but also really sucked at it and often thought you were saying something totally different to what you said but I’d still be greatly dismayed that they were attempting, albeit poorly, to listen to my conversations.
If it’s random sampled no one would notice. “Oh my battery ran low today.” Tomorrow it’s fine.
Google used to (probably still does) A/B test Play services that caused battery drain. You never knew if something was wrong or you were the unlucky chosen one out of 1000 that day.
Bandwidth for voice is tiny. The amr-wb standard is 6.6 kbits/second with voice detection. So it’s only sending 6 kbits/ when it detects voice.
Given that a single webpage today averages 2 megabytes, an additional 825 bytes of data each second could easily go unnoticed.
It’s insane people still believe voice takes up heaps of bandwidth.
Even moreso, on device you could just speech to text, and send the text back home. That’s like… no data. Undetectable.
Even WITH voice, like you said, fuckin tiny amounts of data for today’s tech.
This is why I’ll never have “smart” anything in my house.
This is simply not true. Low bit compressed audio is small amounts of bandwidth you would never notice on home internet. And recognizing wakewords? Tiny, tiny amounts of processing. Google’s design is for accuracy and control, a marketing team cares nothing about that. They’ll use an algorithm that just grabs everything.
Yes, this would be battery intensive on phones when not plugged in. But triggering on power, via CarPlay, or on smart speakers is trivial.
I’m still skeptical, but not because of this.
Edit: For creds: Developer specializing in algorithm creation and have previously rolled my own hardware and branch for MyCroft.
But what about a car? Cars are as smart as smartphones now, and you certainly wouldn’t notice the small amount of power needed to collect and transfer data compared to driving the car. Some car manufacturer TOS agreements seemingly admit that they collect and use your in-car conversations (including any passengers, which they claim is your duty to inform them they are being recorded). Almost all the manufacturers are equally bad for privacy and data collection.
Mozilla details what data each car collects here.
What you’re saying makes sense, but I can’t believe nobody has bought up the fact that a lot of our phones are constantly listening for music and displaying the song details on our lock screen. That all happens without the little green microphone active light and minimal battery and bandwidth consumption.
I know next to nothing about the technology involved, but it doesn’t seem like it’s very far from listening for advertising keywords.
That uses a similar approach to the wake word technology, but slightly differently applied.
I am not a computer or ML scientist but this is the gist of how it was explained to me:
Your smartphone will have a low-powered chip connect to your microphone when it is not in use/phone is idle to run a local AI model (this is how it works offline) that asks one thing: is this music or is it not music. Anyway, after that model decides it’s music, it wakes up the main CPU which looks up a snippet of that audio against a database of other audio snippets that correspond to popular/likely songs, and then it displays a song match.
To answer your questions about how it’s different:
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the song id happens on a system level access, so it doesn’t go through the normal audio permission system, and thus wouldn’t trigger the microphone access notification.
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because it is using a low-powered detection system rather than always having the microphone on, it can run with much less battery usage.
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As I understand it, it’s a lot easier to tell if audio seems like it’s music than whether it’s a specific intelligible word that you may or may not be looking for, which you then have to process into language that’s linked to metadata, etc etc.
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The initial size of the database is somewhat minor, as what is downloaded is a selection of audio patterns that the audio snippet is compared against. This database gets rotated over time, and the song id apps often also allow you to send your audio snippet to the online megadatabases (Apple’s music library/Google’s music library) for better protection, but overall the data transfer isn’t very noticeable. Searching for arbitrary hot words cannot be nearly as optimized as assistant activations or music detection, especially if it’s not built into the system.
And that’s about it…for now.
All of this is built on current knowledge of researchers analysing data traffic, OS functions, ML audio detection, mobile computation capabilities, and traditional mobile assistants. It’s possible that this may change radically in the near future, where arbitrary audio detection/collection somehow becomes much cheaper computationally, or generative AI makes it easy to extrapolate conversations from low quality audio snippets, or something else I don’t know yet.
They’ve redirected the page now that it’s getting attention, but here’s the archived version.
I’m very skeptical of their claims, but it’s possible they’ve partnered with some small number of apps so that they can claim that this is technically working.
We already knew this was happening at least a decade ago when people realized why Facebook and Instagram needed unrestricted microphone permissions.
This is why I generally ensure my phone is configured ahead of time to block ads in most cases. I don’t need this garbage on my device.
As for how they could listen? It’s pretty easy.
By waiting until the phone is completely still and potentially on a charger, it can collect a lot of data. Phones typically live on the nightstand by your bed at night; and could be listening intently when charging.
Similarly it could start listening when it hears extended conversations; simply by listening to the microphone for human speech every x minutes for y minutes. Then it can record snippets; encode them quickly and upload them for processing. This would be thermally undetectable.
Finally it could simply start listening in certain situations; like when it detects other devices (via BT). Then it could simply capture as many small snippets of your conversation as it could.
Aren’t they all already listening always? I mean, how else does it hear you say “Ay yo Siri” otherwise?
No.
Both Android and iOS do enforce permissions against applications that have not been granted explicit access to listen constantly.
For example, the Google Assistant is a privileged app oftentimes; and it is allowed to listen. It does so by listening efficiently for one kind of sound, the hotword “Ok Google”.
Other applications not only have to obtain user permission; but oftentimes that permission is restricted to be only granted “While app is in use”, meaning it’s the app on the screen, notifying the user, in the foreground, or recently opened. This permission prevents most abuses of the microphone unless someone is using an app.
the phone’s processor has the wake up word hardcoded, so it’s not like an ad company can add a new one on a whim. and it uses passive listening, so it’s not recording everything you say - I’ve seen it compared to sitting in a class and not paying attention until the teacher says your name.
Have you seen this code though? Every time I hear a statement like that, I have to wonder if you’re all just taking their word for it.
I don’t take their word for it, unless they show me that code and prove that it is the code running on all the devices in use.
There’s no way that an app with mic permissions could basically do the same thing and pick up on certain preprogrammed words like Ford or Coke which could then be parsed by AI and used by advertisers? It certainly seems like that isn’t out of the realm of physical possibility but I’m definitely no expert. Would they have had to pay the OS maker to hardcode it in to the OS? Could that be done in an update at a later time?
For that I think they use special hardware, that’s the reason that you can’t modify the calling word, and they still notify you when the voice assistant is disabled. I don’t know if this is actually true, or the companies try to hide behind this, or I just remember it incorrectly.
