152
Are Phones and Smart Speakers Listening to You? Cox Media Group Claims They Can | Cord Cutters News
(cordcuttersnews.com)
this post was submitted on 23 Dec 2023
152 points (90.4% liked)
Privacy
32107 readers
535 users here now
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.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It's literally impossible for them to not be "analyzing" all the sounds they (perhaps briefly) record.
[Sound] --> [Record] --> [Analyze for keyword] --> [Perform keyword action] OR [Delete recording]
Literally all sounds, literally all the time. And we just trust that they delete them and don't send them "anonymized" to be used for training the audio recognition algorithms or LLMs.
It is possible to analyze the traffic leaving these devices, and AFAIK it hasn't been shown that they are doing this.
The way that "Hey Alexa" or "Hey Google" works is by, like you said, constantly analysing the sounds they said. However, this is only analyzed locally for the specific phrase, and is stored in a circular buffer of a few seconds so it can keep your whole request in memory. If the phrase is not detected, the buffer is constantly overwritten, and nothing is sent to the server. If the phrase is detected, then the whole request is sent to the server where more advanced voice recognition can be done.
You can very easily monitor the traffic from your smart speaker to see if this is true. So far I've seen no evidence that this is no longer the common practice, though I'll admit to not reading the article, so maybe this has changed recently.
If they were to listen for a set of predefined product-related keywords as well, they could take note of that and send that info inconspicuously to their servers as well without sending any audio recordings. Doesn't have to be as precise as voice command recognition either, it's just ad targeting.
Not saying they do that, but I believe they could.