Techbros really went full police state just to deliver ads I wouldn’t click on straight into my adblocker
Even people you’d really expect to use adblockers. A good example is right here on Lemmy, people here are generally pretty tech-savvy yet you get threads with lots of people complaining about ads. This has been a weird lesson as I get older, seeing that most people somehow don’t even think about lifting a finger to fix things they see as problems, they really just complain and then do absolutely nothing to help themselves. It’s the same with if someone mentions something they don’t know what it is, instead of taking 5 seconds to just look it up they comment to ask about it and then never reply to people answering their question. I’m certain that it’s very common to have some weird need to make others do work for you, they don’t actually care about finding out what something is or how to do something to fix a problem, they just care about making others spend any kind of effort for them.
They’re called help vampires in the programming world.
I work as a software engineer with other software engineers. Even software engineers and UX designers using the internet that way. Talented ones. Many of them - maybe the majority. It takes me a second to get over my astonishment when they share their screens. Not only astonishment at how overboard ads have gotten w/o an adblocker, but also that this particular person doesn’t use an adblocker.
So many people aren’t well-informed about what ad networks or doing, or how different the web experience could be.
I have a friend that pays Google a YouTube tax every month… He tells me he wants to support the creators.
I’m just kind of sad for him… I tried to explain direct donations were a million times more effective, but he clearly just doesn’t want to learn how to use an adblocker.
This guy is like 30 years old.
Do you mean YouTube premium? Old YouTube music because they’re different things I think premium includes music actually but you can just have the music subscription.
Youtube music is actually better than something like Spotify for creators, so it’s not the worst justification in the world.
Why in the world would you think that someone paying to use a service is a problem? Sure direct donations are more helpful, but that doesn’t run servers to actually distribute the content you’re viewing. Your problem is completely different than what we are discussing about ad blockers.
Recent versions of Android make it much more difficult for a background app to access the microphone. There will be a notification if any background app is using the mic or camera.
Now if there was only an easy way to get to the offending app to identify it
Google’s “Now playing” feature constantly listens to what’s going on in the background to show you what songs are playing. They claim this is done with a local database of song “fingerprints”. The feature does not show the microphone indicator because: “…Now Playing is protected by Android’s Private Compute Core…”
I’m not saying that other, non-google, app do this to my knowledge; but the fact that this is a thing is honestly a bit scary.
Edit: screenshot of the “Now Playing” feature
I have seen said feature being mentioned or brought to other android versions whether with apps or modules, do they work the same way?
What other apps use Google’s “Android Private Compute Core” and therefore don’t show mic or camera usage notifications? Not trying to sound all tinfoil hat here, but seriously: can apps other than those from Google use the “Android Private Compute Core”? Even if only Google’s own apps can use the “Android Private Compute Core”, we can’t see the source code for Google’s apps as (far as I know, anyway) they are not open source. If an app is not open source, we do not really know what the app is doing in the background; we’ll just have to take them at their word.
For what it’s worth, I did just test it with airplane mode and it still correctly identified the song playing. So at the very least, it’s not lying about using a local database to identify songs, at least when it is offline.
It also uses a cloud fingerprint database apparently according to the second paragraph:
If you turn on “Show search button on lock screen”, each time you tap to search Google receives a short, digital audio fingerprint to identify what’s playing.
if this is used, or there is some whitelist that gives permission for background microphone use in voice interaction services, apps with tracking capabilities probably use some set of predefined keywords (hardcoded inside the app itself) and those can be triggered while being on standby/in background, when there is a match some pinging goes to outside servers…
“Meta does not use your phone’s microphone for ads and we’ve been public about this for years,” the statement read. “We are reaching out to CMG to get them to clarify that their program is not based on Meta data.”
Ah, yes. The tried and true defense of “we’ve denied it for years and continue to deny it” must be credible coming from a source as trustworthy as Facebook. I hear they’re planning on holding a press conference to pinky swear they’re not listening to the microphone they demand access to in order to show you ads that make them money.
FWIW, this was debunked when CMG originally made the claim. It was a marketing guy overselling their product and they had to correct their statement. They use the same info data brokers collect, and phones actively listening to you is not true.
No it was quite a lot more than “a marketing guy” - there were pages and pages of details about their Active Listening program on their website, investor presentations etc. They went far into detail about how much they could listen to and what they could do with all that audio data.
Here’s the Internet Archive link:
https://web.archive.org/web/20231116115055/https://www.cmglocalsolutions.com/cmg-active-listening
“Meta does not use your phone’s microphone for ads and we’ve been public about this for years,” the statement read.
Meanwhile:
Nobody said it was the same thing as listening in the background. It’s still relevant and important.
I trust that most adults understand the implications of an exploitable permission and a strong incentive to abuse it, as well as the track record of corporate denials.
Using the permission to record audio triggers an on-screen indicator that the mic is recording. Someone would probably notice it on 24/7 recording. Someone would have also by now found the constant stream of network traffic to send the audio to be analyzed, because they also aren’t doing that on-device.
Not defending Facebook, but if you record a video with sound, then the FB app has to have permission to record your audio.
That said, delete Facebook. Fuck Zuck.
if you record a video with sound, then the FB app has to have permission to record your audio.
I can’t tell if you’re trying to explain how it currently works (which I know very well, thanks) or asserting that the current behavior is necessary in order to record with sound.
It really doesn’t have to be as it is. The OS can provide a record-video API, complete with a user-controlled kill switch and an activity indicator, and the app can call it. The app doesn’t need direct access to the microphone to allow the user to create a file with sound.
Edit to clarify: I’m not saying that the “permission” doesn’t work as advertised. I’m saying that recording an audio file doesn’t have to require a permission system as coarse and disempowering to users as it is today. I guess the people clicking the downvote button misunderstood.
Pretty sure that qualifies for that permission.
But the whole point of doing so is to use it in the app, and you for sure can’t do that without the permission.
I highly doubt that they actually managed to do this, at least any time recently.
As another commenter noted, Android alerts you when an app is accessing the microphone in the background, and it would also absolutely destroy the phones battery life more than the FB app currently does. The only way that we have the “Hey Google/Siri” command prompts active all the time is with custom hardware not available to the apps, and certainly not without Android knowing about it.
Maybe they actively listen while the app is open, but even then I think recent Android/iOS would let you know about that.
As someone relatively ignorant about the mechanics of something like this, would it not make more sense that the app would be getting this data from the Android OS, with Google’s knowledge and cooperation?
The place I see the most unsettling ads (that seem to be driven by overheard conversation) tends to be the google feed itself, so it seems reasonable to me that they could be using and selling that information to others as well, and merely disguising how the data were acquired.
It would take a lot of data. On device voice processing is not very advanced. That’s why most voice stuff doesn’t work without a signal.
That makes sense, but isn’t it assuming they’re processing data on the device? I would expect them to send raw audio back to be processed by Google ad services. Obviously it wouldn’t work without signal either, but that’s hardly a limitation.
As someone else pointed out, how does the google song recognition work? That’s active without triggering the light indicating audio recording, and is at least processing enough audio data to identify songs.
The place I see the most unsettling ads (that seem to be driven by overheard conversation)
There’s a simpler explanation – you’re in the same geospatial region or you’re connected to the same networks as the people you’re having conversations with, and those people also looked up the things they have conversations about.
If you have GPS, Wi-Fi, or (possibly) Bluetooth, then that’s how they can pretty easily associate you to those people.
It’s a reasonable explanation, and what I typically assume to be true. Still, I’m curious about the actual mechanics, and if it potentially could be being done by Google without the larger tech industry being aware of it.
Google’s “Now playing” feature constantly listens to what’s going on in the background to show you what songs are playing. They claim this is done with a local database of song “fingerprints”. The feature does not show the microphone indicator because: “…Now Playing is protected by Android’s Private Compute Core…”
I’m not saying that other, non-google, app do this to my knowledge; but the fact that this is a thing is honestly a bit scary.
