- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.zip
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.zip
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Ah, one of the eagar faces at the Trump inauguration is silently stealing screenshots of peoples’ phones. What could possibly go wrong? Glad I binned that stupid platform.
It’s taking screenshots.
Saved you a click.
Not just screenshots. Generally look at the permissions apps have; screenshots is one of them, but all sorts of other data can be sent off by any app with internet access.
If you do need facebook at all , and on your mobile, use slimsocial or similar wrapper of the website itself
Twelve years ago Moto X was launched by Motorola, at that time controlled by Google. I had it and at any moment you could say “Hello Google, what time is it?” and it responded. I was constantly listening. All the time. And it was a perfectly normal phone regarding battery life or data usage. TWELVE years ago, imagine how much easier would be to implement that now, with more powerful and efficient chips and bigger batteries.
From an article about Moto X back then: “If you want to take a selfie, you should be able to simply say “Take a selfie!” In short, your smartphone should live up to its name. That’s the goal with the Moto Voice and Moto Assist software integrated into the second generation Moto X smartphone. And to do that, the Moto X is always listening, for verbal commands from the user and also ambient cues of the context. That emergent behavior is spawned by complex interactions between the software and hardware”
Only much latter I came to the conclusion that with Moto X Google was making its first tests on using the microphone for mass surveillance.
There’s a difference between a wake word and general purpose speech recognition. A simple wake word can be done in simple hardware on the device, while general purpose speech processing either requires heavy, relatively constant CPU usage, or heavy network traffic to pipe the audio to a server for processing.
I think for marketing purposes you could have a hot list of marketing terms (presumably these would be scarce so sold to high bidding companies) and match against those which would be a sort of middle ground between the general purpose processing and a single wake word.
You could do it in a cheap (in terms of energy) and sloppy way where it only needs to be correct most of the time of the time to have a net positive impact on ad targeting when reconciled with other user data.
There’s also a third possibility most people ignore for what ever reason…
Speech-to-text and send to servers. No need for heavy CPU usage that way and don’t need to send MBs of Audio files…
With the technology we have today it’s easier than ever before… “colgate” and give you right into your face an ad for toothpaste !
No need for audio or complex processing. All new models come even with AI processor units… Haha ! What a joke !
But they is not even how those things work. And if you read the story the mic never came on. There has been no one who has found that the mic is sending audio to the cloud but yet people keep on believing it. See what they are actually doing and be mad about that as it is bad.
The whole point is that there’s no need so send audio, it would be childish to do so.
And we just accepted it, because we trusted that every company was working in our best interest… Jesus, what a long con…
save you a click: it’s in-app tracking and device screenshots. Don’t install apps that have a working website. Also don’t use Facebook.
“There were no audio leaks at all – not a single app activated the microphone,” said Christo Wilson, a computer scientist working on the project. “Then we started seeing things we didn’t expect. Apps were automatically taking screenshots of themselves and sending them to third parties. In one case, the app took video of the screen activity and sent that information to a third party.”
Out of over 17,000 Android apps examined, more than 9,000 had potential permissions to take screenshots. And a number of apps were found to actively be doing so, taking screenshots and sending them to third-party sources.
Websites do the same thing. Example: openreplay.com
Using a browser is still better because users have more agency. But switching to the web variant isn’t a magic bullet on this front.
The browser version at least does not have the ability to take screenshots, but you will always be tracked on the websites you use, especially if their business model is advertising-based
It does. That’s what session replay is. Granted it’s scoped to the website itself, so no browser or desktop.
Checkout exodus privacy in case you didn’t already know about it in order to check if any app you have has permissions to take screenshots or anything else.
Do you know where in Exodus you can see if an app takes screenshots? Looking through the permissions of two of the most invasive apps I could think of off the top of my head (Facebook, Google, Temu, Instagram, some popular mobile games) I couldn’t find any permissions specifically related to screenshot. If most apps tested are taking screenshots, I would have thought it would be easy to see :/
I guess if it doesn’t say they have permission to take screenshots then they don’t and won’t take screenshots. Or maybe exodus is wrong (i kinda doubt that) but I’m not knowledgeable to make any proper decision.
At any rate I would recommend not having any of those apps on your phone particularly facebook or temu. but if you still need to use them just use the website since that has much less permissions for your device and definitely won’t take screenshots.
