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Do our phones listen to our conversations? The answer is complicated.

Do our phones listen to our conversations? The answer is complicated

https://english.elpais.com/science-tech/2023-07-29/do-our-phones-listen-to-our-conversations-the-answer-is-complicated.html

Our mobile devices listen to and collect a significant amount of data on us, even without using our microphones

Our mobile devices listen to and collect a significant amount of data on us, even without using our microphones.

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recently_coco

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The messed up part is that it should not be complicated at all. It should be simply "no." And it isn't, so we have a problem

hardypart

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It is essentially a no. Read the article.

yip-bonk

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Okay, I read the article. It isn’t “essentially” a no. It’s “let’s believe that google and apple wouldn’t let this data be misused.”

As well as several paragraphs about a three-person study (wtf), and an inconclusive one, for no apparent reason other than to underscore “we just don’t know”. Then they give paragraphs over to Apple and Google for them to repeat their claims that everything’s just fine-and that’s it. That’s the article.

So it’s “essentially no” if you believe google wouldn’t harvest your data or that intelligence agencies and hackers can’t or wouldn’t listen in.

TL;DR, go into the Privacy settings of your phone and disable everything that uses it - that’s the best you can do.

hardypart

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It’s “let’s believe that google and apple wouldn’t let this data be misused."

This is only valid for your specific voice commands. They're of course transmitted to and processed on their servers. That's something they could misuse, yes, but that's not what the article is about. The article is about whether your phone always listens to you, and there's no proof of it. People are repeating this claim all the time, but no one has come up with a proof. If you think about it also doesn't make any sense at all. This would cause so much data usage, people would have definitely noticed that at some point. The storage and processing requirements on Googles / Amazons part would also be ridiculous. But no matter how you look at it, it's up to someone who makes a claim to prove that it's true, that called the burden of proof and no one has managed to come up with a proof so far.