Ask HN: Is it true our phones listen to us?
6 comments
1. many modern smartphones can be configured (and are configured, by default) to listen for keywords like "ok google" to start a search. So if this is enabled, then technically, yes, your phone is always listening
2. I think that there's a lot of serendipity involved in the stories. Sure, there's malware, and I 100% don't trust that facebook isn't constantly listening if mic is enabled, because I don't trust meta at all, but I think that a lot of the time, people notice the subsequent ad or whatever because the topic is still on their mind, and don't notice all the stuff they see that's _not_ relevant to what they were talking about.
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https://newatlas.com/computers/smartphone-listening-conversa...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43799802
Unless you have some nasty malware, probably ot the way you imagine.
If you have "AI" or some agent on it could totally listen in and use that when active, though.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43799802
Unless you have some nasty malware, probably ot the way you imagine.
If you have "AI" or some agent on it could totally listen in and use that when active, though.
Thanks for the link, very enlightening.
I found this article a while back, but I don’t know the details because I haven’t paid to read the article. You might be able to find more details on the same story from a different source, I don’t know. https://www.404media.co/heres-the-pitch-deck-for-active-list...
somehow you never hear stories where they talked about a singer and _didn’t_ see an ad for that singer’s concert?
I have never noticed this behavior myself, and I saw a video from a youtuber saying that these theories are strange since analysing voice on the device is complicated because first, until recently it was not so obvious, and second, it requires a good amount of computing power. Analysing the data on a server is even harder given the huge amount of users. Current progress in AI could make this work for sure, but still, I'm a bit skeptical. Going back to my examples, I guess the guy that got the ad for the concert was following the singer's account? And the other may have looked at google maps but doesn't remember it?
I'm not trying to say all these testimonies are wrong, but given the awareness in the population that phones are literal data sinkholes, sometimes it feels like we tend to believe in some far-fetched stories.
Did you experiment similar stories? I'd like to ear your opinions.
Thanks!