Facebook Really Is Spying on You, Just Not Through Your Phone's Mic

Re:Facebook Really Is Spying on You, Just Not Through Your P... by natch on Wednesday March 07, 2018 @06:38PM (#16541016)

If the speech recognition is done on the device, the amount of data could be very small indeed. If I was to do this, what I would do would be to defer the heavy lifting of speech recognition (if it caused any significant load on any of the chips) and perform it in the background, later, when the device is known to be plugged in to power. That way this kind of work would not be impacting the battery. I don't think looking at the amount of data is going to tell you much unless they have done things in a spectacularly stupid way.

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Re:Facebook Really Is Spying on You, Just Not Through Your P... by PeterisP on Wednesday March 07, 2018 @10:14PM (#16542016)

Speech recognition is quite compute-intensive and the load of running it on the device would be obviously detectable - not necessarily by random users, but definitely by any security researcher who'd care to do so.

Also, storing the data until it's plugged in would require an unusually large amount of storage, and that would be detectable.

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Re:Facebook Really Is Spying on You, Just Not Through Your P... by natch on Thursday March 08, 2018 @01:01AM (#16542641)

I was replying to a commenter who was proposing to inspect what was being sent over the network, if you'll just read what they said.

That aside, speech recognition isn't that heavy of a process these days if all you're looking to do is extract keywords. We used to do industry-leading large vocabulary continuous speech recognition on a Pentium 133... phones these days are way beyond that without breaking a sweat. Detectable? Sure. But remember, I was talking about this person's plan to look at network data.

Furthermore you don't need to store all data. You can store only when the phone is hearing stuff, as determined by a super lightweight measure of magnitude that does no speech recognition whatsoever. Is the storage detectable? Sure. But again, what was I responding to? Network traffic monitoring.

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