Hundreds of smartphone apps are monitoring users through their microphones

https://www.the-independent.com/tech/smartphone-apps-listening-privacy-alphonso-shazam-advertising-pool-3d-honey-quest-a8139451.html

by blurbleblurble • 1 year ago

48 18 1 year ago

the-independent.com

Escapade5160• 1 year ago

Everything comes back to ads. I think the end goal is to monetize every single moment of our lives in some way.

TekMol2• 1 year ago

When an app gathers information on someone - for example via the microphone - how does it assign the data to a person?

Say the person says "I will buy a new car next week". Now what? How will the ad agency bombard the person with car ads? I mean outside of the one app that has gathered the information?

bix62• 1 year ago

They have various fingerprints including email logins and device ids. So then Google says tekmolAtGmail likes cars and lines up the perfect advertiser for you!

TekMol2• 1 year ago

How would the email end up in the ad system? Isn't it just a library the app developer includes and that runs in the background? Does it interact with the user and ask for their email?

And fingerprinting? Even if the fingerprint is unique - now what? They still could only target the user while the user is using apps that are complicit in this advertising scheme, right?

PhilipRoman• 1 year ago

Not an expert but I'd assume they keep track of the public IP of the device. When a site has bought this information and receives a request, they can record the link between person and account, so this needs to happen only once. On top of that you've got additional fingerprinting techniques to improve the accuracy.

3np• 1 year ago

"Asking for a friend"?

gnabgib• 1 year ago

(2017) Original source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/business/media/alphonso-a...

Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

AzN1337c0d3r• 1 year ago

Duplicate HN submission from over 7! years ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16119981

243423443• 1 year ago

5040 years is a long time ago.

klodolph• 1 year ago

We know that microphone use on iPhone requires an entitlement and if an app is actively using audio in the background, an indicator appears on the screen. This has been true for ages.

I assume Android has something similar to this but I’m not in touch with the Android ecosystem. This article is pretty old so I can believe that apps, far enough in the past, could do this. But it is otherwise some fearmongering you would see copy-pasted among tech illiterate.

izacus• 1 year ago

It's the same on Android for a few versions now (including the mic indicator), so yeah.

neilv2• 1 year ago

Advertisers can then use this information to learn more about consumers and target ads more effectively.

Stop writing like that.

For decades, this prompted the consumer to say, Why would I care about advertisers showing me ads that are more relevant to me?

And so consumers didn't care about privacy.

Not realizing that that's not the entirety of what the surveillance will eventually be used for.

Hopefully everyone isn't about to learn, the hard way, one of the worst case scenarios.

orev• 1 year ago

You just did the same thing—hinted at some larger risk but didn’t actually spell it out. I do agree that it’s long passed time that media needs to be way more direct instead of hoping the audience figures it out by themselves.

neilv2• 1 year ago

HN knows some of the risks, and I don't have to spell them out.

I called out a journalist, writing for a broader audience, who was effectively implying to the populace that those risks don't exist, and that the only thing in question was how relevant the ads they are shown.

jokoon• 1 year ago

That's probably why I need to charge my phone so often.

blurbleblurble• 1 year ago

And here I thought we could get some substantive conversation going on this topic. What a huge disappointment. Why is this flagged?

Hundreds of smartphone apps are monitoring users through their microphones

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