[Djdjur7373bb]

Doesn't Android show an indicator when the microphone is being used? Are they bypassing this?

[armada651]

They're probably not doing it through smartphones, since the leaked slide deck never actually directly mentions the devices they're using to listen in on people only stating they're "smart devices": https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/25051283-cmg-pitch-d...

It is much more likely they're listening in using the microphones in smart TVs, which have much weaker privacy protections. This would also make sense since Cox Media Group is a broadcaster, thus they're much more likely to have broad access to data from smart TVs than from smartphones.

[bsmartt]

Just so we're all clear, the question about facebook and phones specifically is not new..

2016: https://qz.com/697923/heres-how-to-stop-facebook-from-listen... https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/facebook-using-people-s-p...

2018: https://money.com/how-to-turn-off-phone-microphone-facebook-...

2019: https://newatlas.com/computers/facebook-not-secretly-listeni...

[trustno2]

This makes way more sense.

[tjpnz]

So AdGuard DNS to the rescue?

[bsmartt]

So the "Hey siri"/"alexa"/"Ok Google", those features don't show your mic is recording, i dont think. Whether it's TVs or phones. all of the speech recognition and hands free control features are probably enough. there are masses of consumers that opt-in to these companies collecting data "to improve services" and other sketchy stuff. Honestly, I would think if you wanted to build a business around this it would be much better to go after the data collected behind EULAs that never got read than try to collect data from people who have all that shit turned off..

[dartharva]

It does, but I doubt most people care about the unnoticeable tiny little green icon in the corner.

[flir]

Frankly, I don't believe it. You can't hide the fact that packets are being shoved over the WAN. Somebody would have picked up on it.

[pedrocr]

From a quick search:

"Please be aware that if your spoken words include personal or other sensitive information, that information will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party through your use of Voice Recognition," Samsung posted in its SmartTV privacy policy.

https://money.cnn.com/2015/02/09/technology/security/samsung...

There's nothing to hide, it's part of the way the TVs work and explicitly stated by the manufacturers.

[rightbyte]

If you have speech synthesis running locally and send some keywords you can hide the data in the normal packets.

[stoperaticless]

If traffic is encrypted, and there is constant other traffic to same server, then it might be hard to identify.