Stories of these companies listening through everybody's mics are like modern day ghost stories. It definitely totally happens every single day but nobody ever manages to get a piece of hard evidence. Maybe the algorithms can sense wireshark like ghosts sense cameras

[–] infinitesunrise@slrpnk.net 16 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

Cox Media Group got kicked off Google's ad partner program a few years ago when 404 Media scooped that they had a feature called CMG Active Listening which did exactly this. They had a slide deck. Audio spying by advertisers is like doping in pro sports, everybody does it and you only get caught if you're stupid. Remember back in 2013 a whistleblowing NSA contractor told us to put our phones in the fridge if we wanted to have a secret conversation? He had a slide deck, too. The western world is run by a cult of pedophiles, the fact that our phones listen in on us without our consent is not a stretch.

[–] GiveOver@feddit.uk 1 points 3 days ago

So the only piece of evidence is a single mention on a low quality PowerPoint presentation from a company nobody has ever heard of. This is tinfoil hat territory

[–] Noja@sopuli.xyz 14 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Meta / Instagram / Facebook definitely does this, they even hack your phone to get even more data.

[–] GiveOver@feddit.uk 7 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Neither of those articles has any evidence of them secretly listening through everybody's microphone

[–] Noja@sopuli.xyz 2 points 2 days ago

I linked the second one because, I think, if they resort to hacking devices, they have no problems with recording you. Your voice doesn't even have to be transmitted to them, they can just analyze it on your device and use their system services which come preinstalled on every android device to distribute it locally.

[–] PumaStoleMyBluff@lemmy.world 7 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Metaphors are just a step too far, eh?

No, they're not "listening" to audio, but their servers are definitely listening for all the data we send them.

[–] Ledivin@lemmy.world 4 points 3 days ago (1 children)

It definitely totally happens every single day but nobody ever manages to get a piece of hard evidence.

Are you just lazy and in denial? There is traffic sent from both Alexa and Google Home every time it detects something that it considers speech, regardless of whether the wake word was detected. This is not debatable, set up your own tests.

[–] GiveOver@feddit.uk 1 points 3 days ago

I have Google Home and monitors on my own network, I've never seen suspicious activity. Here's somebody else doing it:

https://labs.sogeti.com/google-home-spying/

[–] bridgeenjoyer@sh.itjust.works 5 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Anyone who says they aren't listening are idiots who know nothing of big tech. They are listening.

[–] Bazoogle@lemmy.world 1 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Why would they need to listen? That's a lot of processing power for information we already give them. They don't need to listen, honestly. They get more information from us than we verbally communicate.

[–] Ledivin@lemmy.world 3 points 3 days ago

Why would they need to listen? That's a lot of processing power

But... why would they care? It's your energy bill, not theirs.

[–] Kolanaki@pawb.social 0 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I think about this every time I see a random thing I have never heard of before and go to search for it and autofill has the exact phrase I wanna search after typing only 1 or 2 letters. It either reads text on the screen or listened to me say to myself "what the hell is yadda yadda?" because how else would it know I had a really good chance of searching "what is yadda yadda" after only typing "wh?" The yadda yadda part could have been anything, but it still managed to predict the exact thing I was gonna look for.

[–] b34k@lemmy.world 1 points 3 days ago

I always just thought it was the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon at work… but who knows, I could be wrong.