Your smartphone tracks your location, listens to your conversations, and sells your intimate moments to data brokers.
The law pretends to regulate this, but lobbyists write the rules and enforcement is a joke.
Encryption apps aren’t enough when the hardware itself is designed to betray you.
The phone is a spy device marketed as a lifestyle accessory.
We need radical technical solutions, not incremental privacy policies that change nothing.
The surveillance economy depends on your ignorance and inaction.
Break the chain: use open hardware, de-Googled Android, or build your own tools.
#privacy #surveillance #digitalrights #antitrust
How much of your life are you willing to sell for a slightly more convenient map app?
Is there any hard evidence that supports the claim that an Android/Apple phone listens in on conversations?
Snowden showed us ages ago that all phone conversations are recorded. This is fact.
Do phones record what we say outside of phone calls? If you have voice control enabled, yes.
Do phones listen even if that isn’t enabled? Probably sometimes, but I don’t know that for sure.
To add to what others are saying, there’s been hard evidence of apps doing this, notably Meta apps.
No, it is trivial to verify it by checking your data usage. We have these AI devices (one of them is called friend) that actually do listen to you the whole time and even they do a terrible job of transcription. That’s when people wear them like pendants.
Now imagine using a phone instead that’s sometimes in the pockets, in the bag or just on the table. Speech recognition errors would be terrible. Even worse when the speech isn’t english. Use recommendation engines on this crap data and it’ll be an advertising disaster!
There’s hard evidence everything transmitted is logged and that any phone capable of connecting to the cell network can be listened in on at any time. I would be very surprised to learn monitoring/logging like that was not the default at this point given the infrastructure we’ve publicly built for that purpose and just how easy to implement it’s become. You think an on device assistant can help schedule and summarize your day but the NSA is going to opt out of those capabilities on principle and let that big ol Utah data center sit idle?
Would take a whistleblower to expose these things, and usually its done many years after.
Also its not that there’s some person currently listening. Its that they’re storing and probably transcribing all communications for all time, so that at any moment in the future, they can target a person and look up that history.
Also we know google and apple have been forwarding all these to the US goverment also, since at least ~2011, via the prism program, and thanks to Snowden and Manning’s leaks.
So no, and also no, I disagree. If phones did this, especially to custom-tailor ads, like I’ve seen claimed countless times, then security researchers would be perfectly capable of uncovering this behavior without someone on the inside.
Is this just more speculation?
When you make calls via these services, the entirety of that data is being routed through their service. What you’re asking is if google/apple actually stores that data. You should always assume they do, for a threat analysis.
I suggest reading about the Crypto AG honeypot scandal, which was a secure service that ran for over 60 years before it was revealed to be an CIA honeypot. Leaks in the future will likely reveal the same for US surveillance capital services.
I think this can be misconstrued a little bit. “Listening to conversations” could mean listening to phone calls, texts, etc, but it could also mean listening to conversations with people in real life.
yup. That’s really it.