[Closed] Are your devices listening to you?

Mobiles will be listening all the time, for ‘hey siri/alexa/whatever the windows version is’

We have certainly noticed on several occasions that adverts for ‘a thing’ that we have discussed verbally, will appear shortly after on both our devices.

I think the algorithm is smarter than simply listening…
Phones use GPS to realise you’re near a friend with similar interests..maybe they looked something up online.
The ‘system’ figures you and your friend are similar, and YOU might be interested in what they’ve been looking at.
Therefore, it advertises THEIR interest to you…

DrP

Conversely, it’s probably fair to add:
Several years ago, i repeatedly got an advert popping up that said “welcome back to the voodoo lounge”
Anyone who knows me reasonably well would be able to tell you, categorically, i would never, under any circumstances, and regardless of what that website is actually about, visit a website with that name.
So it could just be random utter shite.

Adverts for yoga go unnoticed until interest in yoga develops shocker?

It's been tested. People have monitored these devices all day and found they don't send any data until you say the wake word.

They do however employ all sorts of tactics to advertise stuff to you that may appear like they're listening. For example, if someone else in your house had searched for yoga it might show you stuff on your devices. Or, if you were perhaps talking about yoga because you saw someone walking down the street dressed in yoga gear and subconsciously recognised it, or you work with someone who has been searching yoga and it assumes you might be talking to them about it, etc etc.

It could have been triggered by those things and the fact you were also talking about it made you think it was listening, but it's just a coincidence. Consider all the things you discussed this week and didn't see adverts for, and you didn't think twice because there was never an advert.

hey siri/alexa/whatever the windows version is

Cortana, and for Android it's hey Google. And Samsung have their own thing that absolutely no-one uses.

Two words: propensity modelling

I do a fair amount of work in this field, and with datasets the size of Meta/Amazon/Google etc, its very easy to predict to a high level of accuracy what you're likely to engage with based on similar behavioural groups across the dataset.

It's a couple of years old now, but The Great Hack explains the tech really well, and since Cambridge Analytica went, many of the data scientists have gone on to set up behavioural modelling ad tech businesses. It's scary but pretty amazing stuff.

We have a number of Alexas. None of them seem to listen to me though, as they all seem to play random bits of music I haven’t actually asked for.

I wish I could get a device to listen to me though - I’d bore it s**less with a discourse on the shortcomings of British tank design in the years 1941 to 45.

IT related, I spent a day talking to customers about IT systems integrating and real time monitoring of errors. Later that day, Facebook started advertising Splunk to me. Pretty sure I'd not been googling that before.

Our dog found some abandoned kittens and so was a topic of conversation for a few days. We had to phone the Vets and Cat Protection to get them sorted out.

My Facebook and Instagram feeds were suddenly full of cat pictures and adverts for cat food for a few weeks.

I challenged cybersecurity expert Ken Munro and his colleague David Lodge from Pen Test Partners to see whether it was physically possible for an app to snoop in this way.
Could something "listen in" at will without it being obvious?
"I wasn't convinced at first, it all seemed a bit anecdotal," admitted Mr Munro.

However, to our collective surprise, the answer was a resounding yes.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-35639549

For example, if someone else in your house had searched for yoga it might show you stuff on your devices.

Asking for a friend, is this yoga specifically or anything that someone in the house may search for.?

@grum there's no doubt such a system is possible. Of course it is.

The question is, are Facebook/Google &co doing it?

This might explain why FB marketplace decided to send me lots of ads for RSJs a couple of weeks ago. My lunchtime discussions had included a friend trying to find out what to do with a couple of spares.

Sitting with a 6 month old baby who was hitting a toy drum, almost instantly FB Marketplace is trying to tell me about real drum kits for sale. Never searched for before, doubtful even discussed.

Anything via text is a definite. Conversation recently about certain cars had said brand and model popping up very soon after

Calling Cougar to the forum.

(Let's see if it works...)

Our dog found some abandoned kittens and so was a topic of conversation for a few days.We had to phone the Vets and Cat Protection to get them sorted out.

How did you find their phone numbers?

My mate keeps getting adverts the following day for whatever it was we were talking about the day before.
Not on the same WiFi.

The week before last it was composting toilets. This week composting toilets.

Whether his phone being some cheapo amazon job has anything to do with it, I don't know.

Very odd as his is the only phone that seems to pick up on whatever happened to be the topic of the day.

Two words: propensity modelling

I do a fair amount of work in this field ...

Doing it for targeted advertising seems to me like a huge waste of bright minds. What brings the satisfaction? Or is it just a case of being interesting and paying well?

timbog160

I wish I could get a device to listen to me though – I’d bore it s**less with a discourse on the shortcomings of British tank design in the years 1941 to 45.

Well that's a subject that I would listen to 🙂

This happened to me a few years ago.

I was at work talking to colleague who’d cycled the length of Wales on one of those sportives. That evening I was chatting to my brother in law about it and how’d I’d planned to do the English coast to coast in a day a few years back but had given up on it because the logistics were too difficult. I hadn’t thought about it or searched on line about it for five years. After he left the first thing in my Facebook feed was an add for the supported coast to coast in a day. That’s too much of a co-incidence. This was prior to house been full of Google homes so it must have been Facebook listening to our conversation.

Calling Cougar to the forum.

Hiya!

(Let’s see if it works…)

Ah. Shit.

I challenged cybersecurity expert Ken Munro and his colleague David Lodge from Pen Test Partners to see whether it was physically possible for an app to snoop in this way.
Could something “listen in” at will without it being obvious?

The key word here is "could."

Molgrips is on the ball here. Could it? sure. But is it?

All (many) other things aside, if this were the case then they'd have been busted by now. It really is that simple. I would expect apprentice-level engineers to notice this sort of network traffic, let alone industry experts.

Ken Munro, incidentally, is a leading cybersecurity authority in the field of teledildonics. I'll leave that to your googling but it's exactly what it sounds like and it's frankly terrifying.

Well, it would appear that I'm not paranoid!

Only one response victim blaming out of 20. Am I in the running for totw? 🤣🤣🤣🤣

@Cougar

What I have you been told about coming here with your logic and your reasoning?

Pfffffft!

🤣🤣🤣🤣

That evening I was chatting to my brother in law about
...
it must have been Facebook listening to our conversation.

Or your brother in law looking it up on his phone and Facebook figuring that you might have common interests.

This stuff makes me laugh.  I get called paranoid for blocking cookies, running adblocks and not having bluetooth and location on.  But the result is i see very few ads and none of them are directed like this.  I don't use anything google either

Synchronicity is a concept first introduced by analytical psychologist Carl G. Jung "to describe circumstances that appear meaningfully related yet lack a causal connection.

cybersecurity authority in the field of teledildonics

🤣

I presume Myfreecams are getting a Daley Thompson style upgrade?

More seriously it would appear he's actually more interested in the wider IoT field though the articles on that site regrading, er, teledildonics are quite interesting.

@mrovershoot - in which case I’m surprised your phone hasn’t suggested the ‘we have ways of making you talk’ podcast. Listen to it, and then you too will be able to bore your Alexa with reasons why the Matilda II was the BEST tank of the Second World War 😆

Adding in… if it is possible to deliver adverts to people who you can ascertain will be be interested/susceptible to them before they express any direct interest themselves (it is), then it stands to reason that the timing of that ad delivery is sometimes going to synchronise with them talking about it for the first time with someone.

My wife has pondered this a few times. She thinks it happens to her, but it doesn’t happen to me. She uses Facebook regularly, while I’ve never had a Facebook account (although I do Instagram and very occasionally Whatsapp).
She also searched google logged in to her account, and I don’t and also block third party cookies and regularly clear my history.
If they were listening then surely I’d get the same targeting?
IMO it comes down to is algorithms designed to target data are scarily unnoticeable at what they do.

But the result is i see very few ads and none of them are directed like this.

That’s because your phone has heard you say that adverts don’t work on you, so it doesn’t bother.

However they connect up the dots it's pretty blatant they are monitoring activities somehow.

After watching an episode of Great British bake off, and having never done anything online regarding baking, I start getting adverts for baking stuff....🤔

Lols at Drac 😂

After watching an episode of Great British bake off, and having never done anything online regarding baking, I start getting adverts for baking stuff…

You have always had adverts for baking stuff, but you get a lot of adverts so you didn't really take any notice of them until you watched GBBO and then your brain applied an association to disconnected events.

Probably helped by advertisers of baking goods prime time for advertising being when GBBO is broadcast and the few hours after.

What you're missing there is that the viewing figures for GBBO is not "one."

All this secretive dark arts technology and the best they are using it for is to advertise, yoga, cycling, bit of metal and something related to a hugely popular TV show that's inspired millions of people to take up baking... Just imagine what will happen when evil corporations find out about this, they'll be having a field day advertising suppression of the population.

As people have said above, technology is far cleverer than most people understand.

We're looking at replacing my OH's car shortly and we just now we were talking about credit ratings. Literally mid-conversation I got an email alert from Credit Karma. They must be spying on us!

Or, it's a monthly subscription email and a complete coincidence, as evidenced by the tens of thousands of other times I've been talking about something and it hasn't happened.

Makes you think.

We were just talking about what veg to have for tea, then an advert appeared talking about Mary and her parsnip jam.

And Samsung have their own thing that absolutely no-one uses.

Bixby!

*and yes, I don't use it

They are absolutely monitoring us. For example, they might be able to detect when you are laying on the sofa watching telly, if you have you phone on you - maybe it's when it's being used whilst sideways or something - and it could correlate that with when GBBO was on and assume you were watching it. But they aren't listening to our conversations directly.

On FB by the way it will tell you why it showed you an ad.

However they connect up the dots it’s pretty blatant they are monitoring activities somehow.

Of course they are. And more importantly, the activities of everyone else. Using that data to work out what adverts to deliver to you, based on not just your history but also those of millions of others, will on occasion be absolutely spot on. It's scary stuff, much more scary than microphone stuff. Working out, for example, that you might be susceptible to a particular kind of political ad, based not on things you've said but on things you might be thinking because you are like others... is far more worrying.

Exactly what they did at Cambridge Analytica @kelvin - The Great Hack showed how they manipulated elections in some very, very clever but insidious ways based on the datasets and behavioural science/nudge theory.

Indeed. All made possible by “anonymous spying”, for want of a better term. They don’t know who you are, but they know pretty well what kind of person you are. They don’t need to listen in on your conversations in order to understand you.

I don't know if this is an Android 12 thing or I just never noticed it before but when an app is using the mic (and you've given permissions to allow it) a green mic icon appears top right then minimises itself to a green dot also top right.

I was just saying to my friend the other day how I hadn't spoken with my sister in a while.

And then the phone rang.

It was my old friend Bob.

Mobiles will be listening all the time, for ‘hey siri/alexa/whatever the windows version is’

Only if it’s turned on. I don’t now, nor have I ever had, as long as I’ve been using smart devices, (which is since the iPhone 3G), had voice command turned on. Friends of mine have a box with Alexa built in - I have to avoid making unseemly comments or s****ing when they try, repeatedly, to get the bloody thing to do something really simple, that I manage to do with a remote control. I’ve never used Siri, I have fingers to tap the bloody screen, I don’t need to talk to a device to get it to do what I want. While I’m 68 this year, I can still manage to walk over eight miles at work, I’m not so infirm that I have to have a machine do what my fingers are still perfectly capable of doing.

I’m not so infirm that I have to have a machine do what my fingers are still perfectly capable of doing.

Damn it now we are all going to get Love Honey Ads.

I’m not so infirm that I have to have a machine do what my fingers are still perfectly capable of doing.

No idea why you're showing off about not having voice control. It's handy sometimes, that's all there is to it. Your status as a human being does not depend on having voice operated stuff or not.

Mobiles will be listening all the time, for ‘hey siri/alexa/whatever the windows version is’

You can disable all this and in iOS on an app by app basis you can select who has access to the microphone. I've pretty much barred every app from access to the microphone and camera.

Voice recognition - such easy to use tech

Or even this

NSFW ( very sweary)

I've been taking about holidays to Mexico around my phone and Google home speakers for a few years on and off. Never once had an ad or anything about Mexico pop up.

Install Facebook apps and the Mexico ads pop up really quickly.

But it doesn't seem to acquire this data when accessed through a web browser on an Android phone.

They have all this data, yet can't work out to stop sending you ads for an item you've just bought which is super annoying!

Damn it now we are all going to get Love Honey Ads.

Genuine LOL moment there!

No idea why you’re showing off about not having voice control. It’s handy sometimes, that’s all there is to it. Your status as a human being does not depend on having voice operated stuff or not.

No, it doesn’t, but neither is it enhanced by my having to repeat a number of times a spoken command when I can make the device I’m holding in my hand do it by tapping the screen! I have voice control, I choose not to use it for very clear stated reasons.
The only possible time I can think of when using voice commands would be of use is in the car, but the only command that I can actually think of that would be of any actual use, is “Hey Siri, Shazam this tune” when I’m listening to 6Music on the radio!
I don’t have a smart speaker system, and even if I did, my phone is always right next to me, as is my iPad, why on Earth would I use voice commands to do what the piece of expensive electronics that I’m actually holding in my hand can do just as well? If I’m using satnav, I programme the route in advance, start the car, plug the phone in and the route is there on the screen, again, I have no need to use voice command to do what my fingers are more than capable of.
The corollary of which is that I never have to worry about whether my phone or pad are listening to me, which is the whole point of this thread!

A few years ago my wife and i were watching an Italian show, The Mafia kills only in summer, via an on demand tv app. Every advert break seemed to be for Alfa Romeo. It was driving us nuts (npi). Eventually I shouted at the TV - "not the f-ing Alfa advert again!"

Next day, Facebook was full of Alfa adverts. Was it listening to me? (btw you can turn access to your mic off on your phone).

We decided to test it by making a concerted effort to talk about something we're not interested in - sailing boats - to see if it would come up on my feed.

... i've never seen anything related to sailing boats on my feed.

However, I did watch Italian TV. I'm not convinced anything needs to listen to me, it just x-references everything else I do.
A classic example is the reward cards - all that data on your shopping habits.

My new iPhone is already suggesting which apps i might want to use given the time of day.

... and now i'm getting adverts for a certain Italian car company on this forum.

blocking cookies, running adblocks and not having bluetooth and location on. But the result is i see very few ads

Same number of ads as the rest of us I would have thought, except you don't get adverts for handlebars and cycling events, you get them for cosmetic beauty products and club18 holidays to Ibiza.

Although no doubt you will be less engaged so you probably notice them less.

Same number of ads as the rest of us I would have thought,

I doubt it very much.  the adblocker removes most.  I get none on facebook for weeks then a flurry of them then none for weeks for example as the algorithms fight it out.  I get none on the guardian website or other newspaper sites  I get none of flickr just a blank page, I get none on youtube etc etc

FB on my Missus phone is most definitely spying on her (and by extension the rest of the family), and she never seems to close apps properly. Lots of instances of targeted ads after a single comment...

The thing that concerns me is, what do they do with the gathered intel that doesn't just result in a simple advert? How detailed is the profile assembled for each of us and what ultimate use could/will be made of it?

To be clear we're talking about tech companies here, not some shodowy arm of government. The trouble with "disruptors" is that they see breaking the rules in the name of progress as a badge of honour...

You can disable all this and in iOS on an app by app basis you can select who has access to the microphone.

Same on Android.

FB on my Missus phone is most definitely spying on her (and by extension the rest of the family), and she never seems to close apps properly. Lots of instances of targeted ads after a single comment…

It's not, it's a coincidence but if you want to you can remove voice permissions for it. Try an experiment and start talking about say, scuba diving holidays.

They have all this data, yet can’t work out to stop sending you ads for an item you’ve just bought which is super annoying!

They know you've just bought it. They also know advertising something to you after you've bought it can make you feel more positive about your purchase, and then you're more likely to talk highly of it or recommend it to someone else. Advertisers don't just pay for ads and hope; they evaluate how much impact their spend has and won't spend on the same thing again if it's not delivering benefits. They aren't stupid

why on Earth would I use voice commands to do what the piece of expensive electronics that I’m actually holding in my hand can do just as well?

You don't, you use voice control when you don't have the thing in your hand. Or when it's a faff. For example I can get up and leave the kitchen with my hands full whilst saying 'Alexa lights off' and it's quicker than fumbling for a switch. Or I can dim the lights from the sofa by saying 'lights to 50%' and it's faster than going over to the switches or finding and unlocking my phone, opening the Hue app, navigating to the room in question and configuring the lights manually.

Then there's other stuff like making announcements that it's dinnertime or asking the kids ti being their laundry down without having to shout or walk up two flights of stairs and closed doors. And even asking for the time when your phone is in the other side of the room.

I'm not saying everyone should get it but don't assume everyone is a techno fashion victim just because you personally haven't seen any benefit.

‘Alexa lights off’ and it’s quicker than fumbling for a switch.

If it understands your accent!

Yes, absoloutely. and as previously mentioned probably much more. mobiles know where you are, who you are with, where you shop, what your patterns are.
Im pretty sure they know not only where youve been on the web, but how long youve lingered over sections of a page, what is of interest and what isnt.

Question is, do you care?

Ultimatly they are feeding you adverts that are of interest to you, rather than totally at random.
Winner for the advertisers, and a winner for you, surely?
would you rather get adverts letting you know of a sale on that bike part youve been pondering, or for some random generic guff you have no interest in whatsoever?

The only thing putting me off using "Hey Google", is the "Hey" part.

Makes me feel like a right doofus, talking to myself.

I realise they couldnt just use "Google" (A la; "Computer, Earl Grey, Hot"), but it would be more comfortable in my mind.

I dont think you can set your own trigger words, as it has to be hard wired into the device.

I doubt it very much. the adblocker removes most

Adblocker is superb - very rarely see any ads at all...

Also running NoScipt, it blocks all the advertising and data gathering domains from running anything....

Try an experiment and start talking about say, scuba diving holidays.

I'd suggest you might need to pick a different topic than that one - because there's so much user tracking crap built in this site that the Ad companies will almost certainly know you looked at a page with the words scuba diving holidays on it. But you could certainly pick some weird topic, write it on a piece of paper and agree with your wife to discuss it regularly for a week but commit that neither of you will search it etc and see if either of you get adverts for it. To make sure its a fair test - you'd want to pick something that is likely to have plenty of advertisers (so diving holidays is a good example) but also nothing that might produce a false positive because friends etc search for it (in that sense assuming you are a typical middle-class MTB rider diving holidays might be bad!). And of course no scientific experiment is particularly meaningful without replicates - so try it three times a week apart and see how you get on... Really a proper study should have a control group too - so perhaps you need to ask someone (out of earshot of devices, and not using text etc) so watch their own ad traffic for the same "topics" but NOT to discuss with anyone in their household (e.g. I frequently see ads on this site for equine stuff even though I've never ridden a horse in my life, and nobody in my family has been searching for that sort of stuff - so probably the advertiser has a broad brush promote to middle-class outdoorsy people policy).

I'd add that if you then want to work out where your ads are coming from why not take one of the non-topics that you used the week before and do some very quick search/research on it. I'll be surprised is you don't see ads, but also if your wife doesn't see the odd add for things you've searched for (at least on the same Wifi connection - but it might be smarter than that).

Listening, Watching.

Taking notes.

By default people seem to think they should worry about this, it doesn't bother me in the slightest.

I am going to see adverts, I always have. On TV, on buses, in magazines. Nowadays I also see adverts on Socials media, in Prime, etc etc. If I am going to be presented with Ads, I would rather they are targeted, then at least they are more likely to be be of interest.

If my smart speakers or phones listen to me, I really don't care. If I did, I would just not use them or turn them off.

I'd love to see the Venn diagram of people who think phones are listening because they don't understand how clever big tech is but also think that big tech is too big and powerful.

Having voice controlled stuff in our house means we don't have to have our phones next to us all the time which is proving a much better household experience.

The only thing putting me off using “Hey Google”, is the “Hey” part.

You have a couple of options. I use "OK Google" in the car.

You're right to be paranoid. A close friend wrote algorithms that go into smart meters and said they are specifically designed to deduce what appliances you are using when.

A close friend wrote algorithms that go into smart meters and said they are specifically designed to deduce what appliances you are using when.

I've had one of those for years, it's pretty poor at guessing what the load is..

I ended up chatting to the developers as it didn't spot the kettle (which should be easy 3 kW load for a minute or two) - it kept getting flagged as the Oven. They were in the US and couldn't comprehend you could have a 3 kW kettle, hence they miss-classified it as they don't have decent kettles (probably being on 110v doesn't help).

[url= https://live.staticflickr.com/677/21863062509_35507e2276.jp g" target="_blank">https://live.staticflickr.com/677/21863062509_35507e2276.jp g"/> [/img][/url][url= https://flic.kr/p/ziXUMB ]Neurio Energy By Appliance[/url] by [url= https://www.flickr.com/photos/brf/ ]Ben Freeman[/url], on Flickr

Although why you should be worried about it working out that people switch on ovens in the evening and kettles in the morning - it's hardly revolutionary stuff. They're not going to be able to work out which light bulb or laptop you switched on.

By default people seem to think they should worry about this, it doesn’t bother me in the slightest.

Its not so much the commercial ads tho they are highly irritating - its the other use the data can be put to.  Cambridge analytica data used in elections anyone?  Who knows what other use this huge amount of data can be used for?