fuck offffff
Because all of their customers were clamoring for such a “feature”?
Of course, it will have the option of being “turned off”.
I mean, we’ve all long suspected our phones are listening to us anyway, why not make it into a “feature”.
Fuck you Pichai you fucking banchode.
TIL what a banchode is….
“Banchode” (often spelled “banchod” or “benchode”) is a vulgar Hindi/Gujarati slang insult roughly meaning “sister-fucker,” similar in strength to “motherfucker” in English.
Pronounced bench-o-day?
<Laughs in GrapheneOS>
I am thinking about installing Graphene OS, any thoughts so far on how it work, or rather what hasn’t worked on it? I am already using Brave and Proton and trying my best to get out of the AI overlord mess that is Google.
Second the req against Brave, the CEO is actively a fascist sympathizer.
Mullvad and Librewolf are both better, especially since Brave is Chrome-based and is going to stop supporting Manifest v2 when Google finally swings the axe.
Ironfix on Android is best equivalent to Mullvad on PC.
Also fuck Brave and its CEO and its crypto fascism bulkshit.
I use grapheneOS for many years now. I’m having some trouble coming up with things that haven’t worked on it. I use Aurora as an alternate front end for google play, for downloading certain free apps.
I think I’ve seen problems with apps that check google store for purchase verification, but I don’t personally have a google account or purchase android apps so it hasn’t affected me.
Its nice if you are actually trying to stay away from Google. Its probably not the best experience if you still want to use their apps and services.
I prefer the experience. My phone doesnt try to get my attention or track me, at least as far as I can tell. Reminds me of when the first smart phones came out and they were just useful tools.
brave is not a good privacy choice (it has repeatedly shown that it is not to be trusted, it squeezes money out of you, and is run by a homophobic cryptobro (who is also the creator of javascript)
on android, use firefox or ironfox; on desktop, use librewolf
Is mull not recommended anymore?
Mull was from DivestOS, which ended up folding a few years ago. Sad, cause I actually used it on a OnePlus 7T phone and it was a promising alternative to Graphene that similarly allowed for bootloader relocking. I really wish the team got the support it needed.
idk about it
ironfox is forked from it tho
Good to know, thanks!
OK, how do you disable it permanently? Besides Graphene or mobile Linux?
Yes. To all of those.
Interesting how the majority of the comments refer to you being monitored on your own phone, ignoring that you will be monitored on everyone else’s phone as well.
Much like how Facebook includes non-users in their social graph.
Probably something people aren’t thinking about. How would this even work in two party consent states/countries?
The same way slopgen cleverly went around seemingly unbendable coryright laws: by ignoring the shit out of it, and half-scaring half-bribing the governments and the public to allow them to do whatever the fuck they want.
By
bribinglobbying local politicians. As always, laws are only real when they’re enforced.
Which is also an important issue with google mail.
But this also violates the expectation that spoken conservations are private.
This will be quite illegal in all countries and states that require 2 party consent at minimum.
Incoming Google lawsuits in 3, 2, 1.
lol. they are exempt from copyright, they will be somehow exempt from this too.
The internet is becoming a hostile place, filled with predators and hazards, a privilege only of the wealthy, the powerful and their slaves, was not on my bingo card for things I’d live through. I feel I may have no choice but to genuinely disconnect from all of it in my private life.
Setting aside corporate surveillance, I have started to have a love/hate relationship with AI transcriptions in meetings. My auditory processing isn’t great, so it is nice to have notes. And it’s not replacing a job that someone was doing before. At the same time, it makes me feel more on edge. Everything I say becomes part of a permanent record. And I am part of a public institution, so that is subject to FOIA requests AFAIK.
The entire point of meetings and phone calls nowadays is that they can’t later be subpoenaed. It’s also why there are document retention policies in all major companies.
This is really about training AI, isn’t it. They’ve tapped nearly all the sources of human text output already, so now they want to create as much more of it as possible, as quickly as possible. They will tap into conversations and use it as a new data source, mark my words.
Yep, not just audio either. There is a reason the tech companies are pushing into glasses with cameras and it isn’t to make people’s lives better.
They are so lazy they want an LLM to tell them what is hot and the only way they can do it is by massive spying. The surveillance state brought to us by fucking advertising of all things. So bizarre.
“There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part; you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!” — Mario Savio, 1964
GrapheneOS, asap Pixel owners.
Thank me later.
Before it’s somehow no longer an option. I fear the Motorola deal will somehow get blocked.
The people who called me crazy because “there’s no way your phone can be listening in on you all the time” are the same people who are going to be the most excited about this “feature”
How did these people expect “Hey Siri” / “Hey Google” to work?
Im a perfect world, as they claim, its a secondary system listening that isn’t recording or transmitting anything, and is meant to be low power. If it hears the wake up word, it wakes up the other mic and starts recording.
Thats how they claim the smart speakers work anyway.
This would be different.
This was my understanding, but I just don’t believe it anymore. There have been way, way too many time my wife and I were talking about an incredibly niche thing that didn’t come up through the internet in any way, and lo and behold the algorithm presented those key words. Nobody will ever convince me it isn’t being done to some extent.
I had this happen many years ago, to the point there was no chance something wasn’t listening. We suspected it was my partners iPhone with Facebook installed before they got better about preventing abuse like that, as it was a Facebook ad that showed up.
Were talking about something where we never use the product, would never use the product, but it came up in a conversation just between the 2 of us, and there were ads the next day.
It happened a few times.
It doesn’t need to, that’s the issue, there is so much other data you are generating that can be harvested. Nothing you talk about is completely random, so it’s incredibly easy to build profiles about you, without listening to a single word.
I understand that’s the theory, but these situations were specifically not something that could be easily gleaned. We’re talking like reminiscing about things that happened in our pre internet youth that there’s no record of anywhere and that came up randomly in conversation. I’m definitely aware of the dynamic, even before ubiquity of the internet, it’s true that sometimes companies would know people were pregnant before the person did based on their purchasing profile. This wasn’t that though, there’s just no possible connection.
That happened a few times now, so pretty much nothing is going to convince me it’s not the case.
It can’t hear if it isn’t already listening.
“How they claim?” Is there no way to confirm that?
You look for network traffic. You might not be able to see inside the packets, but you can know when they’re sending packets, and how many. As far as I know, voice assistant systems that claim to use a secondary local circuit to detect calls are telling the truth.
That’s kind of what I was wondering, I figured this as well as a way to track that it is at least sending data at unusual times. Someone else in this thread explained that actually determining what that data is would be difficult yeah: https://lemmy.world/post/48510943/24408747
I don’t know enough about system security or forensics to evaluate this, but it does make sense based on what I know.
The consensus so far seems to be that they don’t collect as much data as people think, partly because they can’t process all of it, and partly because educated guesses are good enough to target ads often enough.
I have a memory of people black boxing it and seeing power usage and network traffic that supported the claims but that was a snapshot in time and as others note its all proprietary.
It takes a lifetime to build a good reputation, but you can lose it in a minute.
They ship with proprietary code, this would be the point of open source.
In practice in my experience, every company is at least skirting the law regarding privacy, and I never worked for one big enough that could lobby itself out of a fine.
would this not be detectable by tracking the data sent through your network?
I used to run forensic network capture and analysis tools.
First thing, traffic is encrypted. All you will see is a blob of traffic passing through. You used to see hostnames with TLS, but now with quic, you see nothing. This makes it hard.
You could root the phone and install a root ca certificate for a decrypting proxy, you might see more, but the data itself (not just the transport protocol) could be encoded or even encrypted within the network encapsulation.
Next, you’d have to reverse engineer the protocol if they’re using something nonstandard. Also, malware can often be set up to “behave” when it can detect analysis. I’m all but certain Google would do this.
Maybe you could do statistical analysis of the traffic and attempt to baseline normal vs when it’s transmitting audio. It would be a bit of a blind guess at best.
If I had more time, I’d love to try it. I have an old pixel7 pro. Maybe I can sort something out.
People have already done that and shown that no the device isn’t listening to you 24/7 and sending all your data out. There are plenty of papers on the subject, and it makes sense. Why record, decode and analyze all audio when your digital footprint is so much easier to compile and analyze. People aren’t random, so it’s easy to put them into statistical buckets of how to target them. Here is one reference paper (of many): https://recon.meddle.mobi/papers/panoptispy18pets.pdf
If its real time monitoring you, but not if its logging data to send later when it would be expected to be doing so.
Audio doesnt take up much space.
Even if it was open source, you’d need to be able to verify what they ship matches the specs. Allowing you to flash whatever you want onto it helps, but you still need to validate the hardware.
I dont know. You’d need to reverse engineer the hardware and software to be confident, and could a OTA update then sneak a bypass in anyway?
Edit: i think Amazon might have abandoned this as well and always records on echos now too.
Doesn’t need to track you all the time to know exactly who you are and what you’re up to.
Continuously monitoring is such a waste of their resources, they already know everything about you, they just need to check in now and then to make sure you’re buying the correct t-shirts.
I got GrapheneOS
I saw this title and immediately said “fuck off” then clicked, and …glad to see OP sharing my immediate sentiment.
