If you use a wifi router, there is a useable map of your entire your home because of how radio waves work. It is so accurate that it can detect people through walls.
The device you're typing this on likely already listens to every single thing you say. The things you say become targeted ads the next minute. It also tracks you wherever you go.
Your comment and account in general are linked to your IP address, which law enforcement officials can use to find out who you are.
This is all too simplistically true, yes WiFi signals can be used to map rooms and homes and detect bodies, but to actually to this in your own home takes a whole lot of technical knowhow and then to do this in someone else’s home is a whole different level of expertise.
And I never understood the “your phone in always recording you” argument, how can this type of recording put no strain on the phones computation, battery or data usage, but recording using voice memo for an hour or scrolling Reddit for a long while drains a significant chunk.
Constant surveillance of every phone in the world is just too much data to handle for any nefarious corporate or governmental entity. It’s just not very efficient. It much easier and more efficient to track the actions you take while browsing the web and predicting patterns from that, that data can all fit in lightweight text format.
Simple occupied/vacant detection is much easier than tracking you as you move through the house. And useful, why not save energy by turning down/off the HVAC when you’re away?
If you have an iPhone, it is constantly listening for "Hey Siri". I literally records every single second of the day it's turned on, it just deletes the buffer after like 3 seconds though. But it is listening all of the time, otherwise that feature wouldn't be possible.
A dedicated circuit that listens to a specific keyword locally is very different from recording what you say and sending it for targeted advertising, which is the thing people commonly claim their phone is doing when it's just the Baader-Meinhoff phenomenon.
Facebook is 100% listening. There’s been countless lawsuits about. Apple (and Google has too) just lost a lawsuit because the “hey siri” thing “was totally not listening 24/7, and was toooootally deleting everything”… oh wait no it wasn’t.
Facebook gets away with it because it’s in the TOS that they can use your mic and then serve you targeted ads. Same with most other companies. They give a super vague and blanket tos that technically lets them do what ever they want to. Sure it’s technically illegal but a fine is just the cost of doing business in most cases.
You have a link? I know they recently busted LG TVs for doing this, but AFAIK everytime people have checked smartphones and home assistants it matches the "it's always recording a small buffer, but only records a big chunk and sends it off if you say the activation word"
Technically sure, but it only listens for the “Hey Siri” prompt, and have no processing capability to do anything else, after prompt is triggered it starts the more process heavy task of actually analyzing what you are saying.
It just doesn’t make sense that our phones are constantly listening and converting everything we do day to day into data. I mean you know yourself how inaccurate Siri is at understanding you, and that is at full processing power, how would a phone be able to convert that much auditory information into data without using heavy processing at the same time?
I've listened to a lot of music through YouTube music. Thousands of hours whilst driving. The other day a friend mentioned a band I had never heard of before. That same evening whilst driving home from work there was a song from that band for the second song in my randomised playlist. That's not counting many other coincidences that have happened throughout my life time. I've literally never heard of this band and it's never been a song in my playlists before. It's not a new band either, the were popular in the 90s only. I'm not sure how to explain it to be honest.
they already tested and proved this, they took a completely fresh phone and connected it to a power cable, left recordings of umbrella commercials on next to it 24/7 for a week. used the phone to set up a Facebook account, every single ad was for umbrellas
as an FYI you can turn that feature off. i always lock down my phone and prevent any apps from using my mic unless in specific circumstances and don't really get the creepy, hyperspecific ads i have seen my friends get
> and then to do this in someone else’s home is a whole different level of expertise.
no hate, but i would feel safe in assuming the several billion dollar companies can get some people with some expertise in
also, we've been optimizing phones since they were first thought of. hell, voyager 1 has no way to recharge and its been going for 50 years. the tech used every second of every day has had a lot of developments :b Siri requires your phone to record every single second its turned on.
Meta (and tons of others) have shown its profitable to use data from your phone, so im sure they wouldn't if the data usage would be an issue.
Devices listen to keywords, but they are not recording what you say and using it for advertising, until you say that keyword. You can talk about your favorite food till you’re blue in the face with your phone on the table, and none of that will ever be sent to any advertiser or company. It would take 5 seconds to figure out if a device is recording you and what data it’s sending out, this stuff would be spotted day 1 of release.
That’s ignoring how huge of a battery drain that would be on phones, and how much data would need to be sent over your customers network, or processed beforehand reducing the total amount of data and again destroying your battery and performance.
i have a qualm about the battery draining problem of recording audio. i had a pixel 2, then now playing feature ( always on display showing what song playing in background) was a super nice feature. it literally drained no significant battery when kept on.
And you really do believe that, if you were a hot enough target, whoever organization trying to do surveillance on you wouldn't have access to such skilled people?
LG tried to store voice recordings on a fucking TV and got busted with specific technical evidence. Phone apps and OSes are under a lot of scrutiny, constant background recording (outside of activation word detection when a voice assistant is enabled and set to always-on) would be discovered and published already.
Midcontinent, a Midwest US ISP, made me download an app that did all of that, and that was 4 years ago.
The smaller ISPs have to work with the 2-3 companies that run the US internet backbones, and there's a lot of data harvesting along the way.
Server racks can handle a lot more data than you would think. They have multiple CPUs, terabytes/petabytes of storage options, and a lot of RAM to help process that data.
do you not understand that scrolling reddit or recording using voice memo generally means your screen is on which is what drains the battery the most? a simple listening program isn't going to drain your battery like you think it will.
I was entirely with you until you said "its just too much data to handle", because that is absolutely not the limiting factor. Storing endless amounts of data has never been cheaper or easier, and there really is no limit to how much (even if its basically useless).
The fact of the matter is that one, there is no overarching agency with perfect access to all this data (besides maybe the FBI or NSA; could argue that back and forth all day till the cows come home), and furthermore there just is no reason to maintain that kind of tracking on the average person. It can't be used to sells ads cost-effectively, so nobody is particularly interested in it except global governments (and again, even then its hard for them to have total access to everything).
If you have a current smartphone and use it for as much as the average person does, then nothing you can do would begin to scratch the surface of the data that is collecting on you. The bare minimum is pretty much total data, location, and physical surveillance at all times. Adding a smart speaker is just pissing in the ocean.
I recommend these devices to my elderly patients who live alone and forget to wear their life alert devices. If they fall in the bathroom and there's an Alexa nearby they can shout to it to call 911 or a family member.
It's one of those things where we can't completely remove ourselves from the trap, but we can use the tools that are used against us to our own purposes as well. If you can't escape, adapt and improvise with what you've got.
I don't put an Alexa or the like in my home and try to disable as much data tracking as I can, but I'm not ready to go try to survive alone in the wilderness quite yet so might as well put the tools I have to good purpose. Having two devices isn't that different than having 6 devices, I just try to be choosy about what makes the cut.
I also think a lot of the technology we have is and can be insanely useful if we can make strong enough rules and enforce them to limit the bad actors despite how dire the situation is now, and I don't feel compelled to live like a hermit in the woods nor abandon technology and the future of our species to a bunch of idiot business tech bros and usefully evil, stupid, and rich octogenarians and worse just quite yet.
Yes, there are levels of privacy we can maintain while still interacting with technology. There are so many different factors, but ultimately it's up to each person to make an educated choice about what's right for them. I'm using Firefox forks exclusively, with ad blockers installed so at least I'm not seeing the targeted ads, and I'm avoiding sites like Facebook that are some of the worst offenders. But I'm still here on reddit even though I could be using a more privacy friendly platform. If I had reason to be more concerned, I'd be doing a lot more. What I'm not willing to do is just give up on privacy altogether.
Yeah. It's performative to not buy one thing because of your concerns about surveillance, then buy another thing that spies on you. That's just theater at that point.
But my argument is that you use things that do these things. Why are redditors surprised or “infuriated” when others use other things that do these things?
No. The argument is someone saying "its mildly infuriating that people pay money for surveillance in their home" is dumb and hypocritical when that person literally does that.
It's an "option" until they start leaving it on by default, then they'll hide that setting deep in the router's configuration, and eventually it'll be standard and you can't use your WiFi without it.
Being forced to use Windows 11 at work finally got me to switch over. Should've done it a long time ago. It's actually easier to use than Windows, and the forums are actually helpful vs. Microsoft's poor excuse for support platforms. My PC runs so much smoother too!
The device you're typing this on likely already listens to every single thing you say. The things you say become targeted ads the next minute.
AFAIK nobody has ever been able to prove that phones are constantly transmitting audio data, or transcribing audio data to transmit that. Both would be pretty obvious for anyone experienced with technology, the first because it would take a lot of bandwidth, and the second because it would take a lot of processing power.
There are some organizations that regularly test this, and they would have an absolute field day exposing this.
For the ad thing, it's a lot more likely that the people with whom you talk about are already known to have those interests. Your phone knows from various stuff who you're talking with and updates your ad profiles to include their interests, too.
Furthermore if you talk to somebody about something new and that person then searches for that stuff online, the ad algorithms will add that to your profile.
And, of course, there's always frequency illusion, where you notice something more often after talking or learning about it from other sources.
I mean, this is intentional. IP addresses are addresses. They very much intentionally individually identify each computer, by location, that's how they're supposed to work. It's like they sent a letter- of course it would be traced back to the mailbox they sent it from, that's how the mail works. Same with the internet.
You can spoof your IP address, which is like mailing your letter to Ireland, having somebody in Ireland repackage it in a new envelope with their return address, and sending it on to your intended recipient, but you have to do that.
Computers are supposed to be identifiable and their locations are supposed to be known to the network- that's all essential for how the internet works. Otherwise, when you sent a request for a website to display on your computer, it might send that website to my computer, instead, if there were no addresses. The location part of the address is important for data load and bandwidth things I don't understand, but its also essential, it tells the computer how long to expect it to take to answer and how powerful a signal it needs to send and so on.
There are lots of ways your devices are spying on you, but computers having public IP addresses isn't for spying on you, its so computers can work.
Your IP address is public, but connecting it back to you can only be done by your ISP. If you want to link it specifically to a device, you would need even more data than that.
LEOs would likely use subpoenas to obtain the personally-identifiable information from your ISP when tracking your actions on the internet.
Not every single thing. You've chosen poorly. My decade old Linux desktop, my wired internet, and my landline with a telephone from 1989 are most assuredly not spying on me or mapping my house.
Yes, going online intentionally to places like this can open you up to law enforcement tracking you if you break the law. That existed in the 1980s with bulletin board systems.
There was an article recently about how the in home surveillance devices now pick up non verbal info too. Dog barking? You're coughing, sniffling, usong your blender, zipping your khakis, brushing your teeth? It listens, learns your patterns, and knows if your entire household has a cold, or it's just you
Your comment and account in general are linked to your IP address, which law enforcement officials can use to find out who you are.
I once ran a digital fingerprint check out of curiosity; IP address is the least of your worries. Things like personal unique hardware IDs at the component level are easily accessible to commercial hosting - I can only assume law enforcement can get much more info. Every time you connect to the internet, it modifies what you see based on software and hardware compatibility - Are you on MacOS or Linux or Windows? What browser version do you run, what font versions do you have installed and when you type - which font is your system default? What timezone are you in - how precise is your local clock in comparison to international standard - which can determine your physical location / distance due to latency.
The data points that create an identifying digital fingerprint are insanely vast and surprisingly easy to obtain and they are all...weird as hell! I don't think most people would think about it at all.
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u/Kids_Love_Baseball 8h ago
If you use a wifi router, there is a useable map of your entire your home because of how radio waves work. It is so accurate that it can detect people through walls.
The device you're typing this on likely already listens to every single thing you say. The things you say become targeted ads the next minute. It also tracks you wherever you go.
Your comment and account in general are linked to your IP address, which law enforcement officials can use to find out who you are.
Every single thing is surveilling you.