Can anyone tell this meme is true or false? I don’t have Gspy so I cannot test this
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
f-droid’s website https://f-droid.org/ has a link to https://keepandroidopen.org/ which says in Google will lock down Android in September,
If you were planning on reformatting your phone to GrapheneOS, LineageOS, PostmarketOS, or UbuntuTouch, now is the time to do it.
Ubuntu Touch isn’t much better.
I know this won’t be a popular answer, but with my distaste for google, my switch to linux, the rumored google search revamp later this month turning it completely to AI and THIS? I’m going to go to iOS I believe
If you think google is problematic in terms of either control or spying I got serious news for you little buddy.
Just get a Pine Phone or similar linux-based device.
Don’t get a pine phone.
Pain phone.
Just get a Pine Phone or similar linux-based device.
https://www.howtogeek.com/pinephone-pro-is-discontinued/
Anything with any decent specs is gone.
Battery life on non Halium builds is horrible.
Hallium still requires FOSS android drivers which requires Google not to purposefully fuck us over.
If you are implying iOS is anywhere near the control and spyware of google, you don’t know tech at all.
Apple was the first company to start using AI to scan cloud storage and later iOS devices themselves ‘for CSEM.’
and they are the only OS widely available that isn’t incorporating AI baked into every app so far as android 17 going to allow gemini to control your phone for you and read anything on your device.
…Siri has been around longer than all google AI integrations and has had phone control features since the iphone 8.
That comment alone tells me you don’t know what you are talking about.
Siri, to this day is a voicd-command assistant.
Read this part slower:
Google is actively developing “screen automation” so Gemini can order food or book rides in apps without you touching the phone. Android 17 is being framed as an “intelligence system” where the assistant does real tasks on your behalf.
You are saying Siri has done that since iOS8? How old are you? was iOS 8 like the oldesr you can think of?
The control on iOS is much stricter, and it always has been, but I suppose at least they sold it as such from the start and didn’t slowly trickle it in while pretending to be supporting open source. The spyware is also the same. They probably share it with a few fewer people I guess, that’s about the best you could possibly say for it.
The control for their hardware and sofware yes. They do it all in house.
between Google and Apple, you genuinely believe iOS tracks and retains more data than Google? Google who is a data collection agency at this point?
Android phones preinstall meta apps as well as google apps. Both heavy trackers. Even on a galaxy ultra device, hidden meta files will remain. You can’t even plug in and remove them passed the 24 models, as samsung and google have worked to explicitly block that.
iOS does not. iOS has apple apps preinstalled. Hell they don’t even come with youtube anymore.
Google is also pushing to block ‘sideloading’ while apple is opening it up.
google is putting gemini ON devices with android 17 that can read your screens and do any task on your phone without your physical interaction, beyond voice.
There is no avenue you can show or explain to me that would paint iOS near google’s anti trust data collection. You are acting as if I said 'iOS solves the whole issue."
control for their hardware and sofware yes. They do it all in house.
what else is there but hardware and software?
between Google and Apple, you genuinely believe iOS tracks and retains more data than Google
they both collect as much data as they possibly can, yeah
Android phones preinstall meta apps as well as google apps.
iOS does not. iOS has apple apps preinstalled. Hell they don’t even come with youtube anymore.
That’s OEMs, not Google. AOSP doesn’t come with anything installed.
Google is also pushing to block ‘sideloading’ while apple is opening it up.
Google is requiring registration with ID to publish on the app store. Apple always had that. The EU is forcing them to allow other app stores. Google will also have to do that.
google is putting gemini ON devices with android 17 that can read your screens and do any task on your phone without your physical interaction, beyond voice.
Apple tried to do this and just failed miserably to make it work, as tech improves they will do it again
There is no avenue you can show or explain to me that would paint iOS near google’s anti trust data collection.
Ok, if you aren’t interested in facts I guess we’re done here…
yeah they’re just trolling, no facts, just straight downvotes anythime you post anything of substance they can’t defend against. They don’t have a point and they know it.
Yes, they do it all in house. is that a surprise to you? Are you under the implication other brands do it all.in house, because I have news for you child.
There is no evidence of apple selling data to third parties or allowing third party apps to be preinstalled on their devices. There is also no carrier locked bootloader on any iPhone.
ANDROID devices (which are maintained by Google) come with an abundance of preinstalled apps thay you can’t see without using a debloater (which current models have had that broken)
So youre arguing Apple has had a better app store considering they are adding support for sideloading where as google is removing it? Interesting switch up.
Anf still, Apple isn’t doing it.
You haven’t shown one fact. You simply posted opinionated responses to my comments.
You sound like a dwindeling smooth brain who just can’t live knowing people think iOS just might be better.
edit:
You had to say ‘guess you dont lile facts’ or whatever while your evidence to data tracking was ‘they both do it as much as they can’ LMFAO Youre a joke. You get no more of my time child.
We’re not implying it, it’s ready fact. That walled garden is more secure against the outside, but you are completely a product to them that gets sold and you’re at the mercy of their appstore. Your data is not securely deleted from their cloud, tons of reports of data deleted years ago coming back, multiple attempts of them to auto-delete offending pictures from your roll with AI and the service being extremely overzealous.
All that did is further my point.
we don’t know what apple does with it, we DO however know exactly what google has done and is doing with it. It’s not just them either, its preinstalled apps on flagship devices. iOS doesn’t have hidden meta files on your phone, and as you said, it is more secure.
we don’t know what apple does with it
So go put your social security number on a billboard, you don’t know what people will do with it.
it only furthers your point if you’re sticking your fingers in your ears and going annanananananananananana
From Google themselves
"We want you to understand the types of information we collect as you use our services
We collect information to provide better services to all our users — from figuring out basic stuff like which language you speak, to more complex things like which ads you’ll find most useful, the people who matter most to you online, or which YouTube videos you might like. The information Google collects, and how that information is used, depends on how you use our services and how you manage your privacy controls.
Google also collects and uses data that is not associated with your account. For example, when you’re not signed in to a Google Account, we store the information we collect with unique identifiers tied to the browser, application, or device you’re using. This allows us to do things like maintain your preferences across browsing sessions, such as your preferred language or whether to show you more relevant search results or ads based on your activity.
When you’re signed in, we also collect information that we store with your Google Account, which we treat as personal information."
source : https://policies.google.com/privacy?hl=en-US#intro
from Apple themselves
"Personal Data Use for Personalized User Experiences
Unlike other gatekeepers, Apple does not use algorithms or profiling to make any decision that would significantly affect its users without the opportunity for human review. Apple does not receive or use any personal data from third parties for any marketing or advertising purposes. Apple does not track its users. "
source: https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/en-ww/personalized-user-experiences/
Seems Google is very open about using anything possible about their users even when not signed in.
Edit: absolutely hilarious people will argue things, then when presented with facts, they have nothing left but to downvote. That’s the strongest response they have.
Company A enshittifies
Options:
- Go to company B and trust them not to enshittify
- Embrace open source (for example GrapheneOS)
The choice is clear for me.
(btw you can run all android apps on OS built on the android open source project like GrapheneOS or LineageOS. Banking apps also work perfectly on GrapheneOS, don’t know about LineageOS, not using it)
The choice is clear for me.
(btw you can run all android apps on OS built on the android open source project like GrapheneOS or LineageOS. Banking apps also work perfectly on GrapheneOS, don’t know about LineageOS, not using it)
Not entirely clear unfortunately. #2 requires google to continue to allow APKs to just work on the open OS’s. If they decide to require google signed OS components and/or encrypt the APKs, we’ll be at the mercy of the individual developers to continue to compile for FOSS. Banks will be far less likely to release ‘less secure’ versions of their apps to run on ‘aleternative operating systems’
For now, 2 is a good answer, but looking toward the future, stuff is looking a bit bleak. It’ll be a slow downward slide into obsolescence if we can’t keep the developers interested in FOSS support and if they’re no money in it for them, we’ll always end up with the shit end of the stick.
Sad but true. I hope until this happens mobile Linux is a serious alternative.
There is a strong want, dare i say need. Most equipment manufacturers won’t touch it with a 10 ft pole. Motorola seems to be interested.
We need FOSS hardware drivers, a serious kernel power revamp and carriers not to kneecap us like they have in Australia.
Have you not seen that google is apparently going to limit the ability for grapheneos?
By YOUR metric #2 IS #1. If you go to grapheneOS, you are trusting that one they won’t enshitify and two that google won’t absolutely wreck the ability to continue.
lineageos is still based on androids kernel. It still has connectivity to google applications.
yeah, would love to, but last time I checked my phone is not supported
Shit, not even with Lineage? What model is your phone?
Samsung Galaxy A35
Yeah, I just checked Lineage and it’s not on the list.
So, there are unsupported builds of Lineage for the phone. Can definitely understand why you wouldn’t want to try that though.
I may try unsupported builds on a phone I don’t use, but for that I would need to buy phone.
The problem with Samsung (last time I checked at least) is that the moment you unlock the bootloader (which is needed to install anything other than stock), there’s a flag raised voiding the warranty. That flag from what I know is acting like a hardware fuse, so it’s pretty much non-reversible. Shame, really, because Samsung do have some really nice things in terms of hardware.
Well, It’s also a quite old phone. I was never one to replace something just because newer version is available.
Yeah, but if it’s new, you either put up with the stock firmware, or unlock it right away, giving up the 1 or 2 years of warranty (depending on the region).
It’s not true anymore, but Alexa’s used to only listen for specific keywords using a low-energy local-only chip.
It has since changed, as stated, and I have to assume other vendors followed suit.
As a specific example, the ESP32 chip does low power voice recognition for pre-trained trigger words. This lightweight recognition lacks the training to detect anything other than the list of trigger words that Espressif provides.
Basically only battery-operated devices work this way (for power consumption reasons). If you’re plugged in you’re probably always running the high quality listening loop.
Even in the first scenario, what stops there from being multiple wake words with different functionality? So like “ok google” wakes up the bot but “pepsi” wakes it silently and has it tick a box on the back end of a server that now sends me Coke adds because they paid about $3.50 for the privilege?
Pretty much nothing. Any company with the resources of Google or Amazon could easily have their top 100 wake words trained into that model.
This is also why a lot of the wake words are similar:
- Hey Siri
- Alexa / Echo
- OK Google / Hey Google
Those all have different vowel sounds, hard consonants etc. because without that there’s not enough difference to make a unique wake word/phrase. Google needed something like “Hey” or “OK” before it because “Google” itself doesn’t generate enough unique sounds to act as a keyword. They’re also between 3 and 5 syllables because they need to be short enough to monitor for them, and long enough that they can be distinguished reliably from background noise.
The sounds are converted into MFCCs, which is sort-of an extremely lossy form of compression. It was originally used to identify numbers, like when someone would call into an automated switchboard and they’d have to say “one” or “five”. It couldn’t identify complex words, just distinguish between a small set of very different sounding numbers.
The way these systems work is that they’re running on a very low-power loop converting ambient sounds into these patterns and seeing if there’s a match for a wake-word pattern. The sound is converted into basically a time vs. frequency matrix and matched against the keyword / phrase. If there’s a match it unlocks the much more computationally-expensive voice transcription programs, otherwise it just throws out the data.
You can tell that at least mobile devices aren’t always listening because if they were actually doing full-on voice transcription all the time, the battery would drain much faster. If they were doing off-device voice transcription, the antenna would have to stay on a lot more, which would also kill the battery, and it would be visible in your bandwidth bill.
People need some more basic computer literacy. I get that the FAANG companies are “evil”, and want to do unscrupulous things with your data, but there’s often a simpler explanation that doesn’t involve massive privacy violations that security researchers would have caught long ago.
I turned off “ok google” detection in my phone. Still it triggers incorrectly from the car radio sounding similar to “ok google”. In theory turning off the detection should mean that the assistant only starts when I tap the microphone icon, but that’s not my experience.
I can confirm, google is always listening, and it’s not even very good at pretending not to.
I never use any voice commands for my phone. So I disable it and uninstall all voice related apps and settings.
An unexpected benefit was this significantly improves the overall performance of the phone.
i love all the hate google gets
Peace be with you 🌹. I could really feel that this sentence came straight from the heart 😂😂. Jokes aside, same here✋🏻😐. I hate them too.
Hey, wiretap
never in my life have i ever said “hey” anything to my phone and i intend to keep it that way
Well that doesn’t mean it isn’t listening. Waiting for the day.
deleted by creator
On a side note, if you have a Chromebook or other laptops/desktops, you can reformat the BIOS to give you better control, more security, and less backdoors.
Why are we ai upscaling so many things??? Like what does that playdoughy smoothness add to anything. Espescially 10 year old memes 😭
(i dont blame op, anybody still using google or unaltered ddg will get ai for their first like page or two of image results)
It’s true for hardware that has dedicated low-power keyword detection hardware. I know my Pixel 1 had this behaviour. Haven’t tested it on my current phone since I actually have it enabled…
Last I muted mine it did this still. I believe the rationale is that wake word detection is local
I plan on moving away from the ecosystem but haven’t yet been able to invest time and money in a home assistant setup and start thinking about migrating
(I know many feel smart home tech is frivolous and just a security risk and privacy violation- I use automation to help manage a disability/medical condition)
