100% I'd rather be paranoid and wrong than the alternative.

Yes. I've had this happen many times, usually in conversations with my coworkers discussing tools.

The manufacturing and importing of smart phones has to first be approved by the government and military agencies. In other words, this is what these devices were designed for doing in the first place. Originally, microphone and cameras were all designed to be removed and then designed to turn off or be covered up with physical switched or covers. Now all devices are required to have access to the internet and phones all have GPS on them by default, along with high megapixel camera on both sides. People are stupid.

@@Skylord12345 this

If that really does happen, how comes no reverse engineer / security researcher found any concrete evidence for it?

"Alexa, tell the the signs of being pregnant" "Alexa, suggest some baby names" you can bet sure as fuck you're going to start getting adverts for baby shit

OK google is a great one

Have you checked your own google and amazon account? you might be surprised on what they are keeping.

@@isbestlizardI’m pretty sure they’ve admitted to that

Anybody remember that thing from awhile back where a father got angry because his daughter was receiving ads about pregnancy-related stuff from (Fred Meyer? Idk) and it turned out his daughter was pregnant and hiding it from him? The ads knew she was pregnant :/

True but the more the better, helps these bastards I mean companies make more money.

good point

When they see my history I don’t think they want to place advertisements anymore

But they do anyways

oh you sweet summer child.

i thought they admitted this like a decade ago....

bullshit

​@@n-i-n-owomp womp undercover google employee

​@@ShadowCracker not really. just a guy with a beer

I got recommended a cover of a song I haven't actively listened to or searched for in almost a decade, 10 years, and I play it on a guitar for less than a minute on a REAL GUITAR and youtube recomends me a cover of that song as the first video on the front page.

Yeah I remember watching a KZfaq video a few years ago, and the same was true with "red dog toys" although I'm pretty sure that was on a desktop computer

I think It’s been around a while. Over two years ago, I was talking about Guy Fieri’s flame shirt and the next time I opened IG it was there in an advert…

We've been here

Actually... It's not a breach of privacy.... You've chosen to put a microphone in your pocket that is attached to a larger network of devices that are communicating consistently. Maybe buy a different phone? But no then you wouldn't have the new, fancy iPhone 53.5x with Obsidian lining and a *slightly* better camera than the 53.4y model. Everything has a price and I'm not talking about money.

@@user-ix1cr3tn7u oh look, a real life "well, actually" guy 😂 It is a breach of personal privacy, regardless of the fine print. The same way looking through a persons curtains are and then saying "well you shouldn't have had holes in your curtains then!". Sure, everything has a price, but not everything needs a price. What, products don't have enough markup already? our personal information also needs to become the product for a company to have even more profits? disgusting and morally wrong by all standards of humanity. If you have any technical knowledge then you will know how vulnerable and controllable having digital records your personal conversations are, and all in the name of selling you a new vacuum. Sure.

​@@CrimeBeanus Oh look, an idiot. Thank you for using an analogy to prove my point. Why do people purchase curtains? To keep others from looking in.. ultimately, it is the homeowner/tenant/occupant's responsibility to protect their own privacy. This means, however, that if you want to let a little bit of light in, you have to accept the fact that someone can now see you... this is called a tradeoff. Doesn't really require any technical knowledge, but it still somehow escaped your understanding. Perhaps it's time to retire the KZfaq account and pick up a few more books... HOWEVER, if you truly want to have the "who has more technical knowledge" conversation at least start with a solid understanding of things. For example, the internet (and the PLETHORA of digital records that exist). Your phone is connected to other phones and devices through a series of routers and switches. These devices all document the MAC and IP of every device that sends packets and frames through them. Now, in order for you to access these devices, you need an agreement with a company who is willing to let you borrow their infrastructure (aka ISP). You create an account with this company, and provide your address right? In exchange for your PII (personal identifiable information) you get the internet. So this means that somewhere out there is a table with your name, address, MAC, and IP. EVERY SINGLE PACKET AND FRAME THAT YOU SEND IS NOW TRACEABLE TO YOU. Is it a violation to possess this table? No. Is it illegal to inspect the packets for nefarious activity? No. So now let's bring the technical conversation back to the current topic. A device with a mic is in your pocket. You know it's there. In fact, you use this mic constantly to upload videos (with audio), make phone calls, etc. All things that you are aware use your mic. All things that "let the light in", so to speak. My question to you is, how do you justify complaining about privacy when you have willingly volunteered your information several times over in exchange for goods and services, only to now get upset that you are willingly volunteering your information for the pursuit of a more efficient exchange of goods and services? Oh and then there's morality and ethics. How moral is it to benefit off of the same system that you abhor? There's a saying about cake that I feel fits perfectly right here... I just can't remember it. TL;DR I'm not saying it's right, I'm saying deal with it.

​@@user-ix1cr3tn7uApple isn't the only one participating in violating our privacy. Motorola, Samsung, Xiaomi, pretty much every single tech company does this nowadays. Just know that pointing and laughing at other people for using an iPhone and not reading the EULA ruffee fine print does nothing to help the cause besides feeding yourself with that extra bit of dopamine

Can you not teach them please. You silly silly mouse.

@@DsiakMondala It's funny there are some ideas that I'm not sure are implemented fully or widespread yet so I refrain from accusing a company because I don't want to give an idea they didn't already have. But this? This way of hiding things is more than likely known. If some rando on the internet such as myself can come up with it I'm sure the people who implemented this came up with it too.

@@ZentaBon From experience having worked with and in multiple marketing companies, I can tell you they don't care about hiding anything. They don't now and have never done so. Why? Because that's losing money and if there's one thing marketing wants; it's money. The only thing they want to hide themselves from are ad blockers.

As any math geek will point out, until the advertisers really aren’t doing it there will always be a very measurable “signal” to statistically detect in the noise. And as the other side will always point out, this is why it’s profitable to keep the public overworked, undereducated, politically divided, afraid of being labelled as conspiracy theorists, and incompetent at STEM.

@@ZentaBon basic gaslighting 101

Yeah no shit amazon alexa does that. This is on phones tho

This happened multiple times with youtube. I say something, I didn't search it, it comes as ads in youtube.

So, traveling years ago, a week of the same old elevator music was getting to me. I complained about it to a friend on the phone in the privacy of my room. Next day I noticed it had changed. Since then if music/ ads/ etc annoy me in some way, I make a point of fussing about it out loud when nobody should be listening. Fairly often it changes. That's the plus side of whatever this is... Sentient web or surveillance capitalism, just learn to make the most of it.

lol, "companies" The government passed the laws to allow the manufacturing of these devices in the first place but you think it's, "companies" ?

We don't have the technical capabilities nor the infrastructure to handle the massive amounts of data even just 1000 phones would generate. It's impossible.

@@andyz3225 that's definitely not true. Speech to text would be needed anyway for queries and youtube has been able to handle hours and hours of video uploaded with no problem. You don't think transcribed conversations with some audio added for parts that were tough to translate could be saved? How much space does audio take up compared to 8k video?

@@Freakazoid12345 KZfaq isn't processing and analyzing that data in real-time. And that's just server-side. They're also not receiving a constant stream of data from every single phone, only a small percentage of consumers upload to their servers.

@@andyz3225 yeah, but you were trying to argue that something that happens doesn't happen and that there isn't the infrastructure to support it. Which is false. You are probably a bot, for all I know.

...because their software is so heavily baked into devices (?)

I believe you.

@@jer1776 Why on earth would anyone believe what people say on the internet? Especially an anecdote from personal experience in a youtube comment. You must be mad. I know you think you're trolling, but you've done such a bad job I kinda feel like I need to play into a bit so, uhhh. Pretend it's quantum information, like a Schrodingers An-cat-dote. It's both true and false until you bother to do some research and find out for yourself. Hows that? Feel better?

So the only way to stop them big tech governments listening to us is rooted our android? + iPhone users jailbreak their ass apple phones?

let me guess you're at least 30 years old

@@HarrisonMartinson No, 21 and I know that technology companies are absolutely the most scummy bottom of the barrel pieces of shit when it comes to data privacy and user safety.

​@@cripstopheriii3509 yeah, tech companies are definitely scummy and have little regard for privacy. your distrust is normal and justified. however, the person I was replying to gave off facebook qanon vibes. people of all ages say goofy stuff but the particular style of the comment I replied to is more common the older you are. I've seen so many people like this (including minors, for what it's worth) and they're used to being treated like they're crazy. it's unlikely that this applies to you.

A speaker is approximately on the technical level the same or very similar to a microphone. Any speaker (a device that produces any form of audio output) can be abused as a microphone.

@@Suriprofz Technically true but I'm pretty sure they'd have to specifically design the hardware to pick up audio from the speakers. Can't just change it in software

It's fun when the algorithm gives you a bunch of ads the things you just got and don't need/want another of. Advertizers are kinda getting a reputation for being kinda scammy in that either the impressions they give to people are just kinda of low value and only basically fulfilling the contract, or not even giving out the paid for number of impressions at all. Not that I care either way if advertizing is effective, I imagine they can be when they need/want to be for social or political pressure in their interests, but when they don't, they seem to be really slacking. :p

Maybe your daughter searched for it and they use source IP as a method of targeting ads?

All major corporations now profile users, including your appearance, voice patterns, fingerprints, and so on. Google has long created social networks based on which wifi networks you pass, who logs in to the same device (ever), and so on, combined with everything you've ever written in texts, e-mails, KZfaq comments, etc. Google Analytics runs on most web sites on the Internet, this further tracks you -- what sites you visit, software you use, where your mouse moves, what you click on, how long you spend on the page, etc. Be sure they know way more than you want them to know.

@@RavenMobileThe only real escape is to log off and even then, not really anymore.

Yes that's the only possible explanation. It can't be confirmation bias because it's too spooky. And we all know spookiness means it's more likely to be true. Like ghosts. The spookier the realer they are.

They use geolocation to serve similar ads to people in close proximity, so yes, they do know you two spend time together.

Not to belabour the obvious but… does that computer have a mike too? And is it running commercial software or open source?

Probably 😂

I cant tell if op is being serious or not

@@JS-jr1fo Google had received numerous NSL's, and never fights them in court. They work closely with governments around the world. In the USA the NSA has major contracts with Google because they're better at analysing data spied from citizens.

Honestly, i bought UniFi for the entire reason of "self hosting". for most people, i think it boils down to a time / cost equation. the "average" person doesn't want to know the ins and outs of Linux, docker, IP addressing, PoE, AI/ML (for image detection) they want a product that works and that they have a physical box in their possession (if they are semi security conscious).

Yes.

Yep. Nobody is regulating this. In my case.. people see my posts to my family and friends, and they assume that they have rights to those private conversations. Next thing I know. I've got my wages stolen. Rumours flies to overseas. Bad mouthed about me. Then my family is targeted abroad. I had confirmation from sources here in the UK. Then even .... I asked my mother, I have never personally told you the details of what happened. How did you know what happened ????.... I never told her about the wages being stolen from the workplaces. Or the consistent frauds that went on ???.... The real truths ? The real truth is that crime takes place a lot... But people mask it in order to save the person from being jailed. I recall lots of people stealing stocks... When family members had actually had businesses. So you are always in the negative. To face that stress on you, along with carrying the weight of the banks, and of course prosecution of payments if you couldn't pay etc. I don't think that the employee cares about the directors positions. Jailing a director wasn't uncommon.... Of course the people today never knew that of those days in the UK. So this is why now more sole traders unstructured businesses exist. And uncontrollable credit card spending.... Some things are not worth it any more. As my teacher used to teach me... "Sticks and stones"..... Does not hurt, til you break my bones. Well... They broke half my body. I'm not competition. What am I competing for ???....

Its possible to bypass most permissions on both apple and android.

​@@nobodynoone2500elaborate?

@@nobodynoone2500 how

That's why I don't install random apps, that run on startup, on my android devices. Wether this is enough, idk. I'm hoping it is.

@@nobodynoone2500 I imagine security bugs are use by government to target dissidents and not burned by advertisers trying to sell more twinkies.

People need to remember that CCTV is supposed to be closed circuit. If it has internet access then you have a failed security product.

​@@blunderingfoolsame with wireless cameras. A savvy attacker can easily disable those for the duration of a physical attack or intrusion. Is that in most people's threat models? No. But, it is possible.

Sure do love how Google scrapes discord chat logs for youtube recommendations. /s Dunno if it's also scooping up discord voice calls tho.

Turning off a modern phone or computer does not actually turn it off. It runs a low-power operating system (on PCs this is your UEFI, the update to the BIOS) that supports Internet and microphone access. Your phone still pings cell towers to track you. Your computer still sends data.

Besides turning off the phone, a couple more ideas: Put it in an RFID-blocking bag? Remove the battery if you can? Put the phone far away from you? Put it close to a noise source such as your aircon or ghetto blaster?

@@RavenMobile Are there any tests with proof that phones ping networks when off and/or airplane mode?

Over a decade ago the feds were bragging about how they caught an organized crime ring by remotely activating the microphone of a suspect /while his phone was turned off/.

​@@RavenMobile I work with low-level software for phone modems and I can 100% say that, when it's turned off, it is turned off. It doesn't do anything remotely close to pinging cell towers. At least for anything from Qualcomm and Mediatek.

Three reasons against too much evesdropping: it drains peoples phone batteries quicker, it eats up peoples data quotas quicker, and once exposed for either of those reasons, it becomes a PR scandal driving customers to the competition. All the more motivation for the tech giants to maximise people’s data quotas and to push the phone market towards phablets with bigger batteries: to make the hit less noticeable.

It's not possible with current technology and infrastructure. Besides, it wouldn't be efficient; there's enough data gathered through other means that's just as useful for effective targeted advertising, constantly streaming and analyzing massive amounts of data really isn't necessary, let alone feasible.

It is not only feasible but makes sense because of how the internet has changed to become another marketing arm of corporations. They want to know what you want and what you're thinking because it helps them sell you more stuff. Not only that, but it's personalized to every single person, and it's not like a person is going through each and every person's voice clip. It listens for keywords and phrases, interprets them, and that info gets sent to servers to get sold, along with other information about you.

@@andyz3225 😂😂🤣🤣 buddy look at youtube. This site literally has THOUSANDS of hours of HD video footage being uploaded every second. You think uploading and analyzing basic audio files is somehow out of the question in terms of infrastructure and technology??!! I mean surely you are just joking dude. Are you high? What are you talking about?

@@bestieswithtesties I suggest you do a bit more research on the subject before calling people "high" and suggesting that their joking. For one, you must be the one joking if you think KZfaq handling user-uploaded content and processing it for storage, retrieval, and playback is the same as some ubiquitous computing entity (the cloud?) handling a constant 24/7 stream of audio data from millions of devices and performing real-time analysis, speech recognition, and data extraction, all for an ad that you probably won't click anyway. The differences are fundamental.

If we have know this for years, where's the actual evidence of these claims? It's not hard to log these things from a technical point, and show the evidence. So what's stopping everyone, including you, from doing so? Are you in on the scheme?

@@dealloc There doesn't exactly need to be any logs. That's why it's so inconsistent. It's just whatever the microphone can recognize. And honestly, companies aren't even that happy with it. Because most of what they get is just a garbled mess. Even if they find workarounds to avoid the microphone permissions. Most of the power they have is covering up the ability that they do to do that. Honestly, if legislators they would be in so much trouble. There's nothing that exactly clears them either. Plus, all statements regarding an intentionally misleading. It's in all the agreements. There's been a lot of money put forth to do something that they're not doing.

@@dealloc Plus, you have way too much faith in a company that not your friend. They'll exploit you by any means necessary as long as they can get away with it.

​@@what-un4yq I can't speak for Android as it is device dependent, but camera and microphones are controlled in firmware and Apple makes it clear when they are engaged. It will also appear in system logs whenever they are engaged and report which process requested it and whether it was granted access. If this is truly something that is actively going on, as many people claim, it would have to be done by exploiting vulnerabilities in the firmware in order for it to not be detected. It would have been caught by security researchers and issued a CVE. We have yet to find evidence that such vulnerabilities are being actively used in the wild for marketing purposes.

Well I mean businesses lie a lot for money. If they can do shady shit and get away with it, it doesn't mean you can't guess what's going on, it means it's just kept at the edge of plausible deniability. Sorta like when apple was caught lowering performance in older phones then decided to claim it was to help battery performance or whatever. In reality if they really wanted to help you with batteries, they'd make them swappable easily.

Run wireshark and show us the network traffic of the voice data then, mr. smartass.

wonder if that is true for something like graphineos

People have tested it and indeed it does listen to you

It's not that easy since the way you scroll also influences which ads you see. If you test this and hover over ads or content related to what you test, it will influence the result. I don't think advertisement companies need the voice data. They already have enough information on you.

It might depend on what apps you have installed/running, too. But yeah it's entirely possible the base installed OS/software on a phone may be as well.

@@Aeduo No apps or searches connected to that.

@@jeymendev I mean, some apps might have the spying built in and it's maybe not something on every phone.

@@Aeduo The thing is, the ads (recommendations) were on the Playstore, which means the spying is built in Into Android.

@@Aeduo Well, I think it's a Google (android) thing, rather than a phone specific thing (MIUI, OneUI, etc),

Computers used to be like that in the early 90's. But it makes it harder for the government to spy on people that way.

Yeah, I need to learn how to do that. Can always plug in an external mic if needed...

Just business. Corporations are soulless entities, people do not mean anything, just shareholder income.

It's crazy how people started using smartphones when they are basically just tracking/spying devices that people are paying hundreds of dollars for every 3 years.

The simple fact that all the "evidence" is paranoid nobodies on Reddit and not cybersecurity researchers is why we need more evidence. Something like your microphone being accessed at all times would surely had been discovered by someone who knows what they're doing.

Opposite my experience... Google keeps insisting on showing me ALL ads in the language of whatever country I am visiting, regardless that I don't speak a word of the language. Can't make it stop!! 😞

For the time period. That is why now, you see so many businesses doing the same thing too. So it carries on and on and on. It's loaded. Since I used chrome. My life had been hell.