Wasn’t there just a storey a couple days ago that apps where not doing this but taking screenshots and videos on the screen and sending that. And both iOS and Android have the microphone notification now.
I know I’m usually on the more paranoid side, but I’ve always assumed everything I do on a smartphone is potentially being monitored via camera or mics.
If the apps are just taking screenshots, or recording a few seconds of data via mic, it would be almost guaranteed that certain corrupt (and also paranoid) governments that are dismissive of privacy rights could force or bribe those apps to allow them to also access screens, mics, and cameras anyway, right?
I’m in the U.S., and especially with how glitchy my phone has suddenly become over the last few months, I’m just at the point where I just assume that’s what’s going on.
I had the same android for like 4 years without many issues, then suddenly around February it just became almost impossible to use. Weird glitchy things with the size of the tool bar at the bottom of my screen and the popup keyboard. Redirect notifications all the time for certain websites, and my VPN connection is just constantly interrupted and having to be reset.
I finally was like fuck it, this is an old phone so maybe that’s it. Brand new phone, but most of the same issues.
I use signal instead of text most of the time, and switched a lot of things to proton mail, but if someone is potentially recording your screen, does it really matter if what you’re doing is encrypted?
Which VPN provider are you using? How do you know they are not the one monitoring your phone?
Did you obtained your phone from a trusted source, such as an official seller. Some phones purchased from overseas might have “International ROM” installed by the seller, which compromises the integrity of the device.
Consider having a trusted tech friend look over your phone to see if the device has malware installed.
I use proton VPN, but no I always just get my phones from Amazon bc it’s cheap. Never was a real problem in the past, but now that the U.S. is (officially) a giant Oligopoly, probably not a wise idea.
I don’t really know any tech friends that are super in the know about that kind of thing. I have a paid Norton 360 subscription that does frequent scans for malware and says it never finds anything, but honestly wouldn’t even be surprised to learn I’m paying for a useless subscription.
The only reason I even bring that up is bc our current Governor who has always been a power hungry authoritarian boot licker renewed the Executive Order for a state of emergency for a cyber incident that our previous governor first created when the data breach happened several years ago.
When he “renewed” the order, he also slipped in a new section that granted authority to the director of one of his cabinet’s agencies, Governor’s office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness (GOHSEP), to handle the emergency as he sees fit.
What’s even more concerning is that on the same day he renewed this order, he restructured GOHSEP so that it is now under the control of the state’s National Guard, gave the former director of GOHSEP a new title, and then named a member of the Guard “acting director.”
He’s been very vague about what the renewal was about, but it allegedly had something to do with updating the OMV/DMV data base for the state. Since then he has also created a hiring freeze for the state, which would seem to indicate that whoever was acting director is now indefinitely the director named in the executive order until the governor decides to lift the hiring freeze.
Even for someone not already paranoid, and without everything happening at a national level, that would all be a bit concerning right? I’m not a journalist, but I’ve been trying to get people to pay attention to it.
For some reason, no actual local journalists seem to be willing to point this out, but it’s all publicly available information.
Proton is a trusted VPN/company.
Norton on PC might be useful, but on mobile, it’s probably as good as a placebo.
Good luck with your state government. Sounds like a nightmare.
The reason no local journalist is critical of the state government is because there are no independent journalists left. Google and Meta have sucked up all the advertising dollars, so small local independent media cannot survive. The journalists have to work for mega corporations who dictate what they are allowed to write.
Yeah that is kind of a given, I just wish more people would wake up to that fact.
Every day more people ate taking notice, hopefully we can hit a critical mass within our life times
try swappa for phones, when i was looking for a new phone because the Problematic pixel 5a died after a small drop, i was comparing amazon to swappa, swappa you can negotiate a lower price from the seller, and you can filter out the "corporate sellers " because they tend to so more used phones for a higher price than it should be, and you can ask questions about the phone being sold giving you more idea what your getting into.
https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2023-21083
I guarantee you that the green privacy dot means diddly squat.
This link proves how robust the security research is and how quickly bugs like that are patched.
Past vulnerabilities doesn’t mean there is active mpdern vulnerabilities especially ones in widely tested operating systems that’s exploited by as many apps as people claim are listening when security researchers also regularly reverse engineer and analyze the source code of popular apps to figure out what they’re doing. You can decompile Android apps pretty easily to see what they’re doing. Some are obfuscated so it takes some effort.
Its one thing to claim there’s some a system level bypass for the icon that the NSA uses to spy on its enemies, it’s another thing to claim that it’s being exploited on a wide scale by a tech companies on different apps, iOS and Android, multiple versions/devices.
The reality is that we leak tons of info through other mediums that are easier and cheaper to collect than through microphones.
i used to think this as well (i have never used any facebook apps), but last night something happened that made me question it.
My wife and i were going through a chipotlane that was right next to a Popeye’s. As we were waiting i looked over to popeyes and saw some posters for their new pickle chicken stuff and asked my wife “the fuck is a pickle ‘glaze’?”
she said “i have no idea but i kinda want some fried pickles now.”
literally a few seconds later she opens instagram on her phone and is shown a video of a person making pickle brined chicken.
yes yes it could be a coincidence, but i am a lot less certain of that now.
The way I’ve heard it is that it’s not just coincidence nor microphone scanning, but just the effectiveness of targeted ads in general. You could be within wifi range of other users who are searching for pickle stuff or you yourselves have a history of pickle purchases, etc. This stuff is scary specific already.
A few years ago, I would have said you were being overly paranoid. Nowadays, I’m in the same boat.
Also, the fuck is a chipotlane?
chipotle drive through
Beer pong
Yeah that sounds like an app user who would be okay with his audio being recorded…
An app where all you end up recording is “Bro! Bro! Bro! Broseeeeph! Let’s gooooooo, Bro!”
May be even dozens
Instagram at least listens thru your mic, for sure. At least on my wife’s phone, she gets targeted ads based on conversations we have in the car with no music playing
About things the other person has searched for and visited and when their networks touch it spreads. It’s easy to do without a mic
I keep my phone in a chip bag and only pull it out to LARP the preparation for the assassination Franz Ferdinand in general terms without naming actual places or names.
That’s a good way to always keep chips on hand.
me to my phone right now
This might just push my fear of targeted ads enough to give in to my idea of a nearly soundproof box for my phone when I’m not using it. :(
Just install an OS that allows per-app microphone permissions. I’m running LineageOS and I can tell it for example to only allow Whatsapp mic access when I actively open the app. Actually according to the article, the same can be done on plain Android too.
You could remove the mic and pretend it’s a modern iPod 😁
Nah, I’m not that paranoid and I need the mic for calls.
Right around the confinement my sister and I were talking about getting some seeds for my mom. Neither of us searched for seeds. From that point we both started to get ads for seeds, many for the ones we had talked about in particular. This thing was so unequivocal that it proved to me that our phones listen. Maybe they don’t analyze, but they definitely listen for words actionable for an advertising purposes.
That’s why i always forbid access to my microphones by apps. Many AI apps will also remember what you discussed long ago.
OS doesn’t need permissions to access hardware
More likely, your late’ish habits and searches combined with age and another mountain of data correlated with people that have the same thought. We are no snowflakes.
Edit: I should say, if this example is true. I’m not saying you are lying, just that if you are, it’s not a “gotcha”. This thread is making me paranoid! :)
The thing is you can test it, simply never search anything related to it and see if you get ads, maybe I accidentally searched something but it works, or it could be wifi based maybe they searched something and it effected everyones ads, this could make sense if my roommates searched stuff and it effected my ads
I happened to say out loud to my girlfriend that there is a chance (a small one) that my ADHD medication can cause something called TD (Tardive Dyskinesia).
Suddenly, our Netflix is showing adds for a new medication for it.
Good thing everyone diligently reads the T&A of Pool 3d before using it. You are reading every line of text before you hit agree, and then uninstall, right?
I used to work for a mobile advertiser, and we installed hella bloatware on phones.
This idea was floated a couple times but was deemed not very effective cause you’d have to store and process hours and hours of audio data that didn’t tell us much more than just having a week or so of GPS data, your Facebook profile, and your phone IMEI.
It’s pretty easy to see if you’re near a Popeyes and what other IMEIs are connecting to the same tower, extrapolate that to you being near your wife and you and your wife thinking about shit on the Popeyes menu.
Boom targeted ad/video for fried chicken.
The rest is general tech paranoia leading to Apophenia.
There’s no microphones or cameras, it’s just the already gigantic mountain of data anyone who uses a smartphone is constantly broadcasting getting ground through the big data machine that has been the pillar of all tech since the last recession.
Also, have you ever been butt-dialed by someone? 99% of the time you can’t understand a single word, let alone enough to make any semantic sense out of.
But wouldnt it be a moot point if I restrict access to GPS for all apps?
How much of that data is from Google/Apple (e.g. Google Maps)?If you use android google grabs your GPS data regardless, you have to root and disable it.
Apple does the same thing but they didn’t have their pants occupied by third-party network’s fingers like google did until the pixel came out.
Google maps is basically a beacon for AdMob to target you nearly perfectly.
Also using “fine location” in any app grabs the nearby wifi list and sends it to Google/apple if it’s not cached.
Also most ad providers these days have made deals with major networks that let them tell what tower your IMEI pinged off of.
It’s why google tried to push android/ad IDs, way less info for the networks to advertise over, and it also put the tracking in their hands instead.
So graphene os ir a degoolged phone solves the first thing
you’d have to store and process hours and hours of audio data that didn’t tell us much
I mean that could be solved as simply as a local transcription service…
And do what? Sentiment analysis on the conversation you were having?
Remember semantically aware models are still fairly new and even they lack the context for a particular field of text. That’s something even the new fancy LLMs struggle with.
Unnecessary when there’s way better targeted models trained on years of data that people willingly send as part of everyday smartphone use.
tf-idf will give you the keywords you want to target ads
Sentiment analysis on the conversation you were having?
Among other things, sure. More simply, keyword analysis.
Remember semantically aware models are still fairly new and even they lack the context for a particular field of text.
All of these “models” are useless garbage but it doesn’t stop them from trying to absolutely cram them everywhere they can.
Unnecessary
None of what they do is “necessary”. They could just ask you what your relevant interests are and you could tell them, but they do it anyway. They go to great lengths for any seemingly insignificant amount of data they can get their hands on.
If it’s trying to figure out if you’re watching Stranger Things it can look for when you’re stationary at home and just needs to record a few seconds at a time every few minutes. I don’t know how the fingerprinting works. It might be able to run locally and not use a ton of power. We’re talking Shazam, not full text transcription.
Here’s the thing. If you watch that, Netflix know your IP. If you’re on an Android TV box, Google will know your IP.
Odds are your phone is on the Wifi. Linked through IP. Now you get ads for Stranger Things on your phone. It doesn’t need to listen because everything is so leaky. You are linked on so many devices.
Yeah, Netflix knows I’m watching Stranger Things. But afaik they don’t sell that information. And even if they do, there’s still reason for this company to try to get it themselves for cheaper. And they know something else about you based on these crappy apps they’re embedded in. So that’s all extra data points they can cross reference and get even more data.
yeah, alphonso appeared on my mibox, eset called it a trojan right after the update. had to delete it through adb, cause its a “system app”
Reading this made me wonder if I was having a stroke, because it seems like English but I don’t recognize so many of the words. 👴
Go ahead, make TVs more smart. We literally removed our TV thus weekend. If you want me to upgrade it, please removed the spyware.
My tvs are connected to an SSID that can’t hit the internet. I blocked them before but my dumb ass neighbor left their WiFi unprotected and my tvs just connected to them because it couldn’t get out the internet on my network. So I created an SSID logged them in and blocked it from the internet. It doesn’t bounce to open WiFi anymore. If I block it completely from the network the WiFi just disconnects from the network because it can’t hit anything. I have LG’s.
The fact that they just desperately jump on any network is absurd. Its acting like malware.
It’s not an act!
That is an insane thing to have to do. Having to manipulate your TV into not doing something you don’t want or require it to do.
Why is it even legal for it to just hop open networks automatically? Sure, if you leave your wifi unsecured you’re dumb and anyone can access it, but it’s still not a network you have permission to access
I don’t think it’s illegal. The TOS could just be saying “If you connect me to the internet you consent me upgrading myself.” It doesn’t say how hard it’s allowed to try to connect.
Same. The only ‘TV’ I currently own is my monitor. Fuck that shit, I’m so over modern television as a concept.
Next TV that breaks and we won’t have one. I’ll do a projector for movie night and that’s it.
But… they can’t access the microphone without the user explicitly allowing
Only on iOS. Also a lot of apps can present valid uses for microphone access, which prompts users to allow unlimited malicious use
I can be absolutely certain no apps can access my mic in the background. Even when in the foreground, there is a hot-mic indicator.
Here’s the misleading part:
Tap on one of those “while in use” apps. You’ll see there is no option “allowed all the time.” It doesn’t exist.
“while in use” is top level, and changes to “while using the app” when you actually look at the permission. They really mean when the app is running. And many often run in the background.
Theoretically if mic gets accessed it should be lighting the indicator. Not sure if that’s how it actually works though.
Not only on iOS. I use Android and my microphone is always off unless I allow a specific app to use it, and even then, I have the option of only allowing it for that one time. Including the phone app.
Mic and camera are always off.
What happens when you answer the phone?
A little pop up comes up saying something about “getting the most out of your phone” with the option to turn the mic on for the app that’s requesting it (phone app). Only turns on for the call. Just gotta tap the screen once.
I keep the mic and camera options at the top of my quick-… whatever they call them… options, so if I need either one for something else, it’s super easy to turn off/on.
Android shows a little green logo in the top right if the mic and/or camera is on as well. So if I ever do enable them, it’s easy to remember to turn them off again.
Thanks I’m gonna try it out for a while
It works great for me. I’m using a Pixel with stock Android, so I can only speak to how it behaves on my phone. I know sometimes carriers add/change shit.
Check out GrapheneOS
I did this but stopped because if I pick up the phone locked, I have to unlock it to turn mic on and answer the call. So I just make sure to allow mic access only to apps that really need it
Because it is software-based access control, it is impossible to guarantee that access really has been disabled. Thanks to Apple’s design, we now live in a world where users are not supposed to detach batteries or physically turn off microphones and cameras; it’s all software-controlled. The problem is that software can be hacked and have backdoors. Also, thanks to Apple’s smart design, users can no longer upgrade the memory sticks on their Mac Minis and MacBooks. Why do I say it is all Apple’s fault? Unfortunately, other manufacturers copy these design ideas…
Tell that to Facebook. Shit, I’ll talk about something with my wife and see ads about it ten minutes later. Been happening for years.
It’s more likely that your wife or someone nearby was further researching the same topic you were talking about.
Facebook and other ad companies use your location, relationships, and other data they already had on you to serve you relevant ads.
At this stage, they know more about you than the government, or your wife.
Bullshit. The amount of times I’ve had random conversations about odd topics for the very first time with my wife and the fucking subject appears in a FB add three hours later.
Nope, go peddle your corpo propaganda elsewhere.
I’ve read about this phenomenon in the past. Generally it’s found that due to audio processing cost and the sheer amount of other data easily gathered, there’s no reason for them to snoop with your microphone because other data is so readily available, much easier to process, store and ship.
Honestly these days they could process the audio on your phone with a small audio classification machine learning model, although nowadays phone os’s show if the mic is in use
I read about that recently as well. There is a problem though. Your phone can turn your voice into text instantly. It’s a feature built in to your keyboard. They could turn the audio into text and then transmit the text only. Saves much data that way.
I tested this with my Facebook app in 2013. Found a Spanish radio station, set my phone down next to it overnight, and for several weeks I was seeing ads exclusively in Spanish. Deleted the app the first day I saw them in Spanish, and deleted my account not long after that.
My wife still uses them after 5 years together and me pointing out all the times it’s obviously eavesdropping on us, and she’s even been creeped out by it before. Still uses it…
Unless my microphone and camera have physical switches, I will assume they are being used. Those little “your camera and microphone are off” icons in the corner of the screen don’t reassure me.
Did you receive the Spanish radio signal over the traditional airwaves or streaming. Was it a digital radio, as those can also be tracked.
It was a stereo from 1987.
Ye Olde Analog airwaves, no fancy digital nonsense.
This has been tested and proven time and time again. Google and Apple give apps a method to access the mic that the OS can allow or deny. This is what the apps are supposed to use.
Facebook doesn’t use that method for passive monitoring, only for active engagement. Don’t looks like it’s working when you go the use the thing and it’s disabled but it’s still listening to you.
If you must use such a social network, never ever ever use the mobile app. Use the website or don’t use the service at all.
That’s monitoring you and your closests’ other behavior, as well as monitoring then nudging you towards wanting certain things. The ad itself is the last nudge in that chain that tries to go “you wanted this, don’t you?” after all of the other thinking it’s making a case for your life being better with it.
my wife and I had been married for 2 years. been together for close to 10.
not once did we EVER say “Adirondack Chair”. Just never came up in conversation. we were broke as fuck and couldn’t afford something as superfluous as one of those.
One day, were driving down the road home and see one on the side of he road.
what’s that?
looks like an Adirondack Chair
Adirondack Chair? For free?
yeah, it looks broken though.
we get home go inside. I sit down to veg on my phone on the sofa. what does Amazon put in my “things you like” feed? mother fuckin Adirondack Chairs. Google news feeds? Adirondack Chairs on sale.
My wife had YouTube videos that were reviewing Adirondack Chairs.
this was ten years ago. Imagine what they’re doing now…
This is stuff they could’ve gotten from location-data, or if your wifi was on, as you drive through different peoples’ wifi connections (both seeing where you’ve been, and hooking the data from you into data of people in your area to form connections of what’s trending and what they can get you to think about)
I’m not saying they’re not mass-surveilling in the most efficient ways they can, but hot-mic while sounding frightening, is the least useful tool ever for their means, and as has already been mentioned in this thread, android auto locks out that permission now anyway, making this a bad focus in the sense that it is not over just cause they can’t get to your microphone.
And people wonder why I keep rooting my Android phones.
Without advanced permission denial and file access restrictions, phones will spy on anything and anyone.
Rooting is no longer required and is a security risk
Or do you mean flashing custom privacy respecting rom
Granting blanket root to all programs on an android phone sure that’s a risk; but who the fuck does that on any system…
From memory individual apps would be able to request root which could be denied, approved once, approved always or ignored.
Why would you provide any app with root access tbo?
What do they need it for?
Really depends on what you want to do.
Same as any Linux system you don’t want applications to have root access all the time. However if I want to remove a system file or modify something that a normal user isn’t able to, something is going to require higher privileges than the standard user account has.
Not OP but rooting is still necessary for advanced backups like those made using Swift Backup
No, I exactly mean rooting, and it is a hard requirement for me when choosing phones.
If you know what you’re doing, there is no security risk involved, since every app requesting for root access needs to be granted individually, and you can opt to do so for a limited time or permanently. Or not grant it at all, obviously.
Tools like AppOps (advanced permission management), Storage Isolation (prevent access to certain folders even if “file access” permission is granted to some app), Ice Box (keep certain apps in a permanent state of hibernation unless you explicitly launch them) are absolute core essentials.
Other apps that enable you to fully remove system apps, system level adblockers, VPN sharing etc. might be optional, and there are no-root workarounds, but they all come with serious limitations.
Doesnt GrapheneOS provide some of these features?
That’s only available for Pixel phones, and I don’t buy from Google.
Little nitpick: Graphene OS isn’t artificially restricted to Google phones. Pixel phones just happen to be the only ones that fulfill the safety requiremets that Graphene OS wants.
Other manufacturers could do the same and Graphene OS devs would welcome it, they just choose not to do that.
Hmm… Do you use a different root method than magisk? I don’t think a root method based on the efforts of a single developer is a safe practice.
There are other tools, but their developers aren’t publicly known. So I indeed trust into the one man show that is magisk, at least as a full time Google employee who gets his codebase reviewed in-house, there’s some more trust than to a random nobody. And he does publish the code and allows for user contributed fixes on github.
Appops is great. Just mentioned in another comment ,though I use shizuku.
That helps with other dangers, but in this case all you need to do is not give “Pool 3D” access to the microphone, no rooting required.
is this still a surprise to anyone here?
Yes.
Not to you or me, but there are tons of people, even here, that are absolutely incredulous towards the idea that its possible.
I mean it implies that these apps are both violating permissions (in many cases) and the android visual indication of an active microphone. So far I have seen no actual proof that this is the case. Mic activity is logged. You can debunk this yourself easily.
I’m part of those people. The usual argument is that everybody’s phone is listening all the time, without agreeing to permissions or showing the mic notification or anything like that. I’ve never seen any proof of that. This article is about a bunch of shovelware apps (Pool 3D, Beer pong: Trickshot, Honey Quest etc) that aren’t even listed anymore. There’s nothing about them skirting permissions or hiding the notification.
People see the headline and assume it’s Facebook et al.
Anyone whos said anything outloud and then immediately got an ad should know by now that it isnt some conspiracy, its easily testable by not searching something and just talking about it while having an app open, the more obvious one they track is dms, if I dm someone something (text based not posts) ill get ads or posts related to it.
Im assuming they target your wifi too, because my ads change to reflect what I do on other devices too (always noticable as a hobby hopper)
Not helpful
I remember a bunch of people freaking out about this a few years ago and an equal number telling them they were paranoid.
You can talk about stuff and your phone will just magically start suggesting related items. Why would anyone be surprised the monitoring device in their pocket is monitoring them?
