Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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Android Microphone Snooping (lemmy.world)

submitted 8 months ago by czardestructo@lemmy.world to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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So I had a verbal conversation with a coworker yesterday and now I'm getting fed very specific ads. No possible way it's accidental. I have most of the microphone access to apps limited, I have Google assistant turned off and no VPA setup in my home. I use a Oneplus 9 pro, does anyone have recommendations on how to further root cause this or just par for the course for using any standard android OS? Have other folks had similar experience after locking down their stock phones?

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[–] SGNL@kbin.social 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (2 children)

Probably because no one has any proof other than anecdotal evidence. And the vast majority of times it's looked into it's because the person reporting it doesn't understand how else their information is collected (i.e. web searches, intranet data for other people, browsing histories, etc.)

Look at it this way, is it more likely that the majority of security researchers that look into it, find nothing, and deem these use cases as inefficient and improbable, are wrong; OR is it more likely that data collectors builds good profiles, mixed with some Baader-Meinhof, a little Dunning-Krueger, and a lot of coincidence?

Not everything is a big conspiracy, nuance is neccesary, or the sky will always be falling.

[–] arquebus_x@kbin.social 3 points 8 months ago

This is how we ended up with Q and anti-vaxxers.

[–] Captainvaqina@sh.itjust.works 0 points 8 months ago

I mean if you want to deny the sky is blue when plenty of experience says otherwise that's on you.

I agree that it would be very inefficient to send voice recordings, and those would be easy to pick out with some packet sniffing.

But a locally processed txt file of keywords would be such a small amount of encrypted data that it would easily pass under the nose of any security researcher and they would have no idea unless it was decrypted.

So no, this is not debunked.