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It's surprisingly easy to use adtech without voice and make a connection to serve a targeted ad. Had a friend ask me about what I was drinking. They were on my guest wifi network. They searched for it. Next day, I'm getting ads because of geoIP pinned my IP address as having an interest.
Also had someone that lives off the grid with no active network or devices watch a DVD of a movie and the entirety of their Internet connectivity was two cell phones in the room. They started seeing things related to the movie. They're older and not constantly on their phones. The phones just sit somewhere in the room.
Had a discussion with some tech friends a few years back and remarked that keeping awake to do this would take a lot of power. The EE mentioned running audio recording would take basically nothing. I expanded from there, the device uploads audio for off-phone translation to text, or queues batch jobs to process locally when power is high enough or on charger. Etc.
It is 100% probable that code runs on phones and just ships off amalgamated text frequency charts or entire conversations and the user won't even notice the battery dent.
That being said, I can't find even in the greediest capitalist money-claw that the person giving a go would not think, "well, I can't trust my own device anymore..." and maybe go: "yeah, I shouldn't do this." Maybe I'm too optimistic though.
How do you think your friend in the woods got the advertisements?
And yes, I still think you're too trusting of Big Tech. They are 100 times more vile than you think they are. THEY WILL do everything they can, and this is nothing to them.
The funny part is nobody wants to believe me and instead want to trust for-profit companies for their supposed pinkie-promises. Oh well, they'll learn in time.
My best guess is that I know one of them uses Facebook. Apple phones. Facebook, Uber, and a few others have had pretty deep access to APIs not accessible to other software companies. Sometimes they're caught like when Uber was caught using a screen scraping API. Sometimes they aren't. The other guess that glues it together is that Facebook has indeed scraped audio to text for a long time. It was almost 10 years ago that I had the EE conversation.
Google and Meta pay Apple money to gain access to their user metrics. It's likely symbiotic relationships. Facebook once had hooks directly in iOS. Likewise, the little mic/video indicators the OS displays when they are "active" are completely software-controlled and can be overridden.
At a time, I worked at a company that had(has) deep access to other aspects of iOS. Apple always required the source code is available to them so they could inspect it. I doubt that has changed. It also means they would be complicit. External tools wouldn't really be able to figure this out. For someone to black-box this they'd need a jailbroken iPhone and some specialized tooling or MITM decryption capabilities.
Not to sound hyperbolic, I'm connecting dots with no evidence, it's pure speculation. The compute seems to be there and with no regulation in source code, anything goes, if you want money bad enough. Especially with the mad dash every tech company has been on for the last 20ish years to harvest everything they can, ever since smartphones became powerful and commonplace enough.
Exactly. People should read your comment before shouting at me for not providing "proof". They seem incapable to understand that Big Tech can be smarter and more resourceful than a lot of security engineers