I find this unconvincing evidence because: you already knew this (somehow) and found it an interesting piece of trivia to bring up at that time. It's unsurprising, then, that a YouTube channel also finds it interesting.
It's very likely that you were influenced to remember this piece of trivia because of something you observed, like (for example) subconsciously spotting an advert.
These are common advertisements. You only noticed them the next day because you talked about them the previous day.
I'm unconvinced. If this is happening to everyone, surely it's possible to conduct a randomized controlled trial? Despite that, we only have years of anecdotes but zero such trials. Moreover, this directly goes against the security models of both android and ios, which both require microphone permissions for apps to listen in on stuff. ios goes one step further and puts a recording indicator when the microphone is in use, so it's hard to imagine how these apps are are even listening in the first place.
Her phone is a Samsung A50 probably Android 10 or 11.
> we only have years of anecdotes but zero such trials.
There's some quip about lack of evidence not equating evidence of lacking. But more importantly: at some point the quantity of individual anecdotes, along with the technical ability and interest of the parties involved, become data in and of itself.
It's not, but the burden of proof is still there. It's up to the claimant to prove that some activity exists, not for it to be assumed to be true and for others to prove it's false.
>But more importantly: at some point the quantity of individual anecdotes, along with the technical ability and interest of the parties involved, become data in and of itself.
Ever heard of the saying "the plural of anecdote is not data"? I think this applies here. Specifically, I think this sort of phenomena is highly susceptible to publication bias/p-hacking. ie. you only remember/hear about all the instances that confirms this theory, but not all the instances where nothing happened. With billions of facebook/google users worldwide, and dozens of possible "topics" being generated per day, I'd expect millions of anecdotes to surface just by random luck alone.
Finally, if we're going by "a lot of anecdotes is proof in and of itself", what does this say about other paranormal phenomena? eg. ghosts or bigfoot? Those have a lot of anecdotes as well.
> It's not, but the burden of proof is still there. It's up
> to the claimant to prove that some activity exists, not for
> it to be assumed to be true and for others to prove it's false.
Isn't that the difference between gravity and "facebook is surreptitiously listening to our conversations", that the former has loads of high quality evidence backing it up and can be trivially demonstrated and the latter doesn't? If someone claimed there was an invisible force that we don't know about, but you can't demonstrate it and the only evidence we have of it is various anecdotes, I'd be skeptical as well.
>Leaking a single keyword per day or per week would greatly enhance such systems' capabilities yet remain very very difficult to detect. Perhaps 52 new keywords per year is enough for them.
I suspect you're getting some of the threads mixed up. Other commenters have mentioned about this sort of activity being detectable via network monitoring, but I never made such claim. Instead, I claimed that such activity would be detectable by the operating system itself, due to the microphone activity indicators. That's not something you can sneak one word at a time, because you need to be listening all the time to pick up keywords.
While I would understand refusal to do so from non-technical crowd (e.g /r/technology or similar cesspolls), it's very difficult for me to understand this argument on hackernews.
I obviously agree with you as the GGP, but the logical counterargument would be, these phones upload so much data in the normal case that it's hard to know what's what. And all of it is encrypted with https, often with certificate pinning.
But, well, audio files are really quite large, at least in the quantities we're discussing. And so in order for the data transfer to go unnoticed, the phone would have to be processing it locally, to decide what to upload. That would be a lot of work, in terms of cpu usage and battery life, and that, again, should have caught some researcher's attention.
Suffice to say, while I don't think any of this is feasible today, this is why locked-down devices and certificate pinning scare me. Audio is expensive, but you can learn a lot with a keylogger.
PRISM was operating at the network level, as opposed to widely-available consumer devices. It's the difference between tapping a phone line at the call center, and going into every individual person's house and planting a bug under their counter.
In fact, not only keywords but even by just knowing verbal habits such as phrases used, frequency of curse words, accents, etc, could be very valuable in targeted marketing. The couple who regularly say phrases such as "please prepare the tea, dear" may be better to target different ads to than the couple which regularly say "wazzup dog".
And their is nothing illegal about listening for keywords, even if the companies currently deny doing so. There really is no risk: The people up in arms about privacy will remain up in arms, and the 99% who don't care will continue not caring.
Maybe the sorts of things or the pace of your web browsing early in the morning indicates grogginess. Maybe the machine learning has even picked up on some pattern like insomniacs clicking on a higher percentage of war and poverty news stories vs. celebrity gossip stories. It's also possible the ML has also used your browsing habits to pick up on the cause of your insomnia, while you think the advertising is due to your speaking about its symptoms.
Also, there's a bandwidth/battery life tradeoff associated with 24/7 sophisticated voice conversation tracking. It would certainly take a lot of bandwidth to send everything to Google, and the amount of processing power to filter for conversations about thousands of potential advertising products is significantly more than just listening for "Hey Siri". This is especially true of the amount of semantic processing to know that, unlike 99% of the mentions of "Chad" in English (and maybe Romanian) conversation, "Chad" isn't referring to the dude down the hall who makes a mean quinoa ceviche. I would expect that the kind of sophisticated processing we're talking about would kill a phone battery pretty quickly, and offloading it to the cloud would cause operators to start complaining about the bandwidth usage. Though, I could be wrong.
Edit: so, I think something spooky is going on, but I suspect that machine learning is sometimes just spookily accurate. I think it's Target that mixes in other coupons with baby product coupons when its ML has figured out a woman is 2 months ahead of giving birth, to make it seem less spooky.
If that video about flags appeared when you hadn't talked about flags would you have thought about it? Probably not. You only made a note of it because you'd talked about flags and it "confirmed" your suspicions about phones listening to us.
What initially led you to talk about flags? Was flags something you'd actually looked at before? Maybe, but again you probably never thought anything of it and you probably can't remember whether you did or not. But youtube would remember.
Advertisers also use so many different things about you. They estimate or know your age, interests, location, eating habits, etc.
> First of all, your social media apps are not listening to you. This is a conspiracy theory. It's been debunked over and over again.
But frankly they don't need to because everything else you give them unthinkingly is way cheaper and way more powerful.
And honestly, I don't think that they had anyway. Maybe one of the kids will take an interest in dad's boring facts about the world at dinner, but the wife has long since stopped even listening!
If would like to defend yourself, consider Librem 5 or Pinephone, which have hardware kill switches for microphone and other things.
I do think there's a lot of assumed knowledge gathered from your actions... my computers don't have microphones and I keep my phone in a box when I sleep (because I am that paranoid), but I started getting those when I switched from a day job to a night job.... being online on your off hours may class you as "having trouble sleeping"
What I always wonder is: why not? We have the technology to recognize keywords in speech, the ability to passively identify handsets, and we certainly have the technology to target ads to people based on keywords. Unless there is no money to be made doing it, why the hell wouldn't your phone be overhearing your conversations and serving ads to you? Is it that we think Google and Apple and Amazon and Facebook and various ad platforms respect our privacy too much to do something that sinister?
It's so much cheaper and technologically easier to parse your browsing history and parsing things you enter in as text than it is to parse voice. Especially when you don't own the platform your software is running on (what would need to happen for Apple to allow Facebook 24/7 access to the iPhone microphone)?
Also, Google/Apple/Amazon/Facebook don't have to respect our privacy, but they do need to respect privacy laws like the GDPR, so they can't actually tap your voice without your consent unless they want to risk actual billion dollar fines.
Failing that some tape works quite nicely!
QubesOS allows you to assign certain devices to Xen VMs , compartmentalising your hardware. No spying if there is audio/video device (a Xen hypervisor escape not withstanding) available to the guest OS.
I do like devices with physical kill switches. Some USB sticks and devices by Purism.
The very next day I open Youtube and one of the suggested videos is an explanation of the Chad and Romanian flags. I had not searched for anything relevant, and upon asking the children and wife (only people present) if they had mentioned the conversation to anybody or looked for something online, they say that they hadn't. And I believe them, I'm always presenting to them small bits of information about the world even though I know that 99% of it gets forgotten immediately.
That was a few months ago.
Lately I have been unable to fall asleep. I refuse to use the phone or any electronic devices after 12 (and wear Gunnars after the sun goes down) but in any case I lie in bed sometimes until the sun rises. I mentioned this to one of my kids (5 years old) a few days ago, I don't know whose phones were where. But the very next day I get an advertisement for "Medicines for those sleepless nights". Now maybe, just maybe, one of the older children or the wife used a phone late at night that specific night. But it seems far too far fetched to imagine that this happened exactly the day after I mentioned that I sometimes don't sleep.
I am 100% convinced that our phones are listening for keywords and assigning us to categories based on that.