Don’t know about Google home, but google meet is definitely like this. You mute your mic from the UI, you speak, and a small popup tells you something like, “are you trying to speak, your mic is off”.
Something like this also happened on Short Circuit (a channel of Linus Tech Tips) when testing Meta Glasses. Riley, the host was talking to it, and after the convo ended, he asked, “are you still listening?” And meta replied, “No”.
So, yes, it is safe to assume that the microphones are always listening and probably recording. These things are spywares and do not belong in private places like homes.
Guys, ten or hundred of thousands security researchers have been going at this for years. Google isn’t secretly listening to you.
These things work with 2 mics, and 2 different circuits. The recording mic is one, while the detection mic is another. The second mic is only capable of pattern matching.
So yeah it’s on but only capable of hashing a 5 second recording and matching it to your voice (this shit works a lot like rsa keys if that’s helpful) to serve as a wake word. Maybe flag a simple response.
All that’s happening is the device heard a loud sound and knows it wasn’t a match or what’s expected.
Every time someone comes out and says that the phones aren’t secretly listening to us, I gotta tell this story.
I was at one time practicing therapy in a University. We did charity work, and I was providing therapy to a homeless man. This homeless man did not have a phone, or any electronic devices of any kind. We kept in contact via email, and he would use library computers in order to connect with us.
While providing therapy for him, the only electronic devices in the room are a batter operated digital clock, a battery operated voice recording device, and my own cell phone, locked and inactive. Nothing but my cell phone is connected to wifi or internet of any kind.
During session one day, he started talking about wanting to move to another country. We hold our usual session, with plenty of talk about moving to that country specifically. Once the session is over, we say goodbye and he goes on his way. I go back to my desk, and within an hour or so, scrolling on my phone, I’m getting advertisements for flights and vacations to that exact country. I had never gotten advertisements to that country before, or even for much travel in general.
So how do we explain it? The most common answer is “Oh, well he used his phone to look up flights and stuff, and google detected that your phones were near each other, and must have assumed that you would talk about it.”
Except the other man did not have a phone, nor did he have any way for Google to tell that he was near me after having looked it up at a local library. There was no way for Google to be able to tell that he was coming to our office at all unless it was reading his emails, and even then, it couldn’t know that he was talking to me specifically, such that I would get the targeted ads and none of my colleagues would.
Nobody can give me an explanation for what happened other than my phone was actively listening to the conversation. I’m definitely open to alternatives, I promise. Nobody has been able to explain it.
I get ads in Spanish if my phone hears me use a rotary saw a lot. I used to think it was from working near Spanish-speaking work crews, or purchasing lumber, but it’s happened from isolated backyard projects using materials that had been bought with cash weeks prior. The adbots are listening, and they think power tool noises are a dialect of Spanish.
It’s far too easy to change the software that drives that. For example, in order to minimize blatant power drain the trigger mic could easily become a switch that activates the main mic only when human voices are detected (or even specific voices). With authoritarian governments on the rise — along with the more than willing corporations backing them — I don’t think a bit of paranoia regarding the possibility is unwarranted.
ETA: Also there’s nothing saying the hardware can’t be updated for newer capabilities without anyone on the outside knowing. It’d be pretty easy to get away with once everyone gets lulled into a false sense of security regarding how they work.
If I was running a fascist government, I wouldn’t enable my spyware on every phone–that would make it too easy to detect and it would mean the people I’m spying on would take measures to protect themselves.
Instead, I would leave a backdoor open so that I could activate the specific phone of a specific person, a phone unlikely to be monitored in a lab by a security geek.
Which is why shit is continuously tested. Guys, billions of dollars goes into this. It’s not hard to find extra data pushed into packets. Far more complex shit is the norm.
Don’t know about Google home, but google meet is definitely like this. You mute your mic from the UI, you speak, and a small popup tells you something like, “are you trying to speak, your mic is off”.
Something like this also happened on Short Circuit (a channel of Linus Tech Tips) when testing Meta Glasses. Riley, the host was talking to it, and after the convo ended, he asked, “are you still listening?” And meta replied, “No”.
So, yes, it is safe to assume that the microphones are always listening and probably recording. These things are spywares and do not belong in private places like homes.
Guys, ten or hundred of thousands security researchers have been going at this for years. Google isn’t secretly listening to you.
These things work with 2 mics, and 2 different circuits. The recording mic is one, while the detection mic is another. The second mic is only capable of pattern matching.
So yeah it’s on but only capable of hashing a 5 second recording and matching it to your voice (this shit works a lot like rsa keys if that’s helpful) to serve as a wake word. Maybe flag a simple response.
All that’s happening is the device heard a loud sound and knows it wasn’t a match or what’s expected.
Every time someone comes out and says that the phones aren’t secretly listening to us, I gotta tell this story.
I was at one time practicing therapy in a University. We did charity work, and I was providing therapy to a homeless man. This homeless man did not have a phone, or any electronic devices of any kind. We kept in contact via email, and he would use library computers in order to connect with us.
While providing therapy for him, the only electronic devices in the room are a batter operated digital clock, a battery operated voice recording device, and my own cell phone, locked and inactive. Nothing but my cell phone is connected to wifi or internet of any kind.
During session one day, he started talking about wanting to move to another country. We hold our usual session, with plenty of talk about moving to that country specifically. Once the session is over, we say goodbye and he goes on his way. I go back to my desk, and within an hour or so, scrolling on my phone, I’m getting advertisements for flights and vacations to that exact country. I had never gotten advertisements to that country before, or even for much travel in general.
So how do we explain it? The most common answer is “Oh, well he used his phone to look up flights and stuff, and google detected that your phones were near each other, and must have assumed that you would talk about it.”
Except the other man did not have a phone, nor did he have any way for Google to tell that he was near me after having looked it up at a local library. There was no way for Google to be able to tell that he was coming to our office at all unless it was reading his emails, and even then, it couldn’t know that he was talking to me specifically, such that I would get the targeted ads and none of my colleagues would.
Nobody can give me an explanation for what happened other than my phone was actively listening to the conversation. I’m definitely open to alternatives, I promise. Nobody has been able to explain it.
I get ads in Spanish if my phone hears me use a rotary saw a lot. I used to think it was from working near Spanish-speaking work crews, or purchasing lumber, but it’s happened from isolated backyard projects using materials that had been bought with cash weeks prior. The adbots are listening, and they think power tool noises are a dialect of Spanish.
It’s far too easy to change the software that drives that. For example, in order to minimize blatant power drain the trigger mic could easily become a switch that activates the main mic only when human voices are detected (or even specific voices). With authoritarian governments on the rise — along with the more than willing corporations backing them — I don’t think a bit of paranoia regarding the possibility is unwarranted.
ETA: Also there’s nothing saying the hardware can’t be updated for newer capabilities without anyone on the outside knowing. It’d be pretty easy to get away with once everyone gets lulled into a false sense of security regarding how they work.
If I was running a fascist government, I wouldn’t enable my spyware on every phone–that would make it too easy to detect and it would mean the people I’m spying on would take measures to protect themselves.
Instead, I would leave a backdoor open so that I could activate the specific phone of a specific person, a phone unlikely to be monitored in a lab by a security geek.
Which is why shit is continuously tested. Guys, billions of dollars goes into this. It’s not hard to find extra data pushed into packets. Far more complex shit is the norm.
Where did the money for all that come from? Where will it come from in the future as the wealth transfer to the few continues apace?
Yeah, no - I’m not inclined to rest easy. Just because more complex methods are available for use doesn’t mean the old standbys are forgotten.
Same with Teams, but the point it to mute yourself in a meeting, not from Microsoft