< img src = "/uploads/blogs/39/78/ib-FS15uil73_9ea2a6bb.jpg" Alt = "on smartphones there is no secret listening, but true & quot; quot; < P > smartphones probably do not listen to conversations, but they track their owners in other ways to select target advertising.
< P > About this & nbsp; writes & nbsp; new Atlas, referring to research by scientists from northeastern university in the US and Wandera specializing in mobile cybersecurity.
~ < h2 > Do phones “hear” owners< p >According to the 2019, Bloomberg News published an article stating how Facebook has concluded a contract with an external company to transcript the audio -making reports conducted through Facebook Messenger. The purpose was to check the accuracy of the automatic transcript algorithm that the company implemented.
< P > Facebook stated that all users who connected to the transcript service knew about the potential human verification system. However, in newspaper headlines, this story was presented as: “Facebook acknowledges that he has listened to your personal conversations.” At the same time, Macruberberg stated that Facebook did not listen to users' conversations to create targeted advertising or adjust the news tape.
< P > later, 2024, investigating news site 404 Media reported that media coal Cox Media Group (CMG) developed & nbsp; Active Listening, which allows smartphones to track personal conversations to adapt. users.
< p >Active Listening did not listen to the microphone of 24/7, instead she used those small fragments of voice data that are recorded and loaded into a cloud at the moments when the user activates the voice assistant with “Hi, Google” or “Hi, Siri”.
~ < p > almost immediately all large technological companies were removed from CMG. Yes, Amazon said she had never worked with CMG as an advertising partner, while Google and Meta quickly break all the connections with the company. For its part, CMG stated that the product was “stopped to avoid incorrect perception”.< P > The publication noted that this incident revived the conversations about possible listening on smartphones, but it did not debunk some of the main reasons for which this idea is still technically incapable.
~ ~ ~ > 62 ~ < h2 > listening on phones: What showed research
< p >In 2019, Wandra conducted an experiment to understand if a smartphone can constantly listen to personal conversations. Phones of iPhone and Samsung Galaxy were placed in a room where for three days the audio recording of pet feed for 30 minutes was lost.
< P > User permissions for a large number of applications have been enabled. For the accuracy of data the same experiment was conducted with the same phones in a quiet test room.
< P > The result of no application after the test appeared advertising for pet feed. Moreover, there was virtually no difference in data consumption, battery use and background activity between testing in audio testers and tests in a quiet room. If the application received access to the microphone and sent an audio to a cloud server for analysis, there would be traces of data consumption.
< p >The article also provides arguments from the former Facebook Manager Antonio Garcia-Martinez, who has been criticized by the company for several years after his release. In 2017, he wrote an article explaining why Facebook does not “listen” smartphone owners through a microphone.
< P > as well as Wandra researchers, Garcia-Martinez suggested that the data consumption required for tracking with a microphone will make this technique not only difficult to sell but also virtually impossible for concealment.
~ ~ < p > He stressed that Facebook would have to record everything that hears the phone while it was on. It is functionally equivalent to a constant phone call. The average voice online call takes about 24 kbps in one direction, which is about 3 kbytes of data per second.
< p >“Suppose your phone is on half a day, it is about 130 MB a day on the user. The US has about 150 million active users a day, so it is about 20 petabytes a day only in the US. For comparison, the entire Facebook data storage is” only “about 300 petabytes, and daily loading is about 600; noted Garcia-Martinez.
< H2 > How smartphones get data for advertising
< P > at the beginning of 2017, researchers from northeastern university in the United States conducted a study that confirmed that phone microphones are not activated secretly, but found a number of other suspicious things.
~ ~ ~ > 62 > < p >“There were no sounds of sound & mdash; no application activated the microphone. Then we started to see things that we were not expected. The applications automatically took screenshots themselves and sent them to third parties. In one case, the application shot the screen activity on video and sent this information to third parties,”; noted Christo Wilson, who is working on the project.
< p > from more than 17,000 proven Android applications more than 9,000 had potential permits to create screenshots. A number of applications actively used this by doing screenshots and sending them by foreign sources.
< p > “it can be much worse than if the camera photographed a ceiling or microphone recorded meaningless conversations. There is no simple way to close this break in privacy”, & mdash; noted the participant of the project David Choffnes.
< P > Summarizing, the publication noted that phones may not really “listen” users, but Facebook and Google are able to show extremely accurate advertising, using a huge array of other tracked data. With the advent of intellectual devices with voice control, devices have become in a sense to “hear” the owners, but they cannot record conversations all the time.< P > “Everything that makes your phone useful, for example, knowledge of where you are, shooting photos, the possibility of online purchases and banking operations, & mdash; mdash; these are just those potential weaknesses and vulnerability. What is more useful your phone is; summed up Mike Campin, Vice -Cresident of Engineering in Wandra.