Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
Samsung TV's have an ai assistant: https://news.samsung.com/global/samsung-redefines-ai-search-on-smart-tvs-with-a-smarter-bixby-voice-assistant
Samsung Ai assistant privacy policy: https://d264isyiyrfhr3.cloudfront.net/storage/tos/usa/2.1.3/1765237389944/eng/usa_eng_pp.html
Other Samsung Scandals if the above wasn't enough: https://cybernews.com/privacy/samsung-settles-lawsuit-collecting-texans-tv-data/
My Samsung TV is not on the WiFi and I have AdGuard running network-wide because of shit like this.
https://www.howtogeek.com/you-can-still-buy-a-dumb-tv-but-should-you/ This article outlines the situation really well. your two options to not be spied on out of the box are to buy a terrible TV or to buy a commercial one. They dont make "dumb tvs" anymore. I wonder if theres a way to implement one's own firmware n all that to turn a nice samsung into something more private.
I heard older versions of Android running on older smart TVs can be overwritten with Linux but once it's updated past a certain 2023 threshold that option is closed.
You could take extreme measures like Louis Rossmann has said he does to his phones.
He said he disassembles his phones and desolders and removes all the microphones. He said if he wants to make or receive a call, he'll use his Bluetooth headset or earpiece.
I don't see why the same can't also be feasible for televisions either, aside from how difficult they can be to properly disassemble and service.
if he wants to make or receive a call, he'll use his Bluetooth headset or earpiece.
Oh boy he should not look up how insecure Bluetooth is then
Eh, it entirely depends on your threat model. If you're trying to protect against mass surveillance, it makes sense because you'll only sometimes have a functional microphone powered on. If you're trying to protect against a targeted attack against you specifically, then yeah Bluetooth had some problems. You have bigger issues at that point, though. I also think Bluetooth is probably more secure than you think.
If you’re worried about the guy 10 m away from you eavesdropping, BT is not a great option. If you’re worried about the hackers on the other side of the planet, BT should be fine.
I mean graphene would be easier for phones.
Theoretically if you never hook a smart TV to the net it shouldn't be able to spy. I'm sure they do tho
Graphene is still only for Pixel phones right now isn't it? I heard something about them working to expand out to other model phones eventually, wonder how that's going and how many more devices it'll eventually support? 🤔
They announced last week their partnership is with Motorola. I'll keep using my pixel and see what they roll out and let them work the bugs out of it for a bit first.
Only pixel yes and google is working hard to kill it.
Theoretically if you never hook a smart TV to the net it shouldn’t be able to spy.
I think you are right (today!), but look what happens with cars... the car connects to a wireless network without asking you, to send back telemetry. The cost of doing that is coming down all the time, and there is a big juicy profit stream just waiting to be harvested. I will not be surprised if we see TVs do this eventually, like cars do already.
They could also be designed to simply refuse to function if they can't connect. I didn't hear about any like this so far, but it feels like a matter of time. Enshittification comes for everything.
Here's court cases lost by Google and Apple
Also, whenever monolithic megacorporations not recording you directly, virtually everyone is still buying any data about you they can get from actual malware distributing criminals.
Microphone hijacking is real and commonplace. (Edit: Fixed link thanks to some feedback.)
The malware vendors sell what they learn about us on black markets. And in net effect, everyone is buying from them.
They "Privacy Wash" the things they learn from the illegal recordings, by passing them from one disreputable broker to another. Each broker can keep poor quality records of exactly where they got their data. Pretty soon it's just "part of your digital fingerprint" and "can't be helped".
Thanks for providing links but I don't trust the ny post.
Here's a story where people working for Apple got access to audio recorded during seemingly unwanted times like during sex.
But I imagine these people were enabling voice recording in the first place. I trust my phone not to record if I disable those features (though sometimes they make this difficult).
I think Apple is generally better about this stuff then other companies though? Since they actually went to court to protect e2e encryption.
Lastly, if youre someone of interest to powerfull people, there are otherways they can use your phone against you like with pegasus:
I don't trust my smartdevices farther than I can throw them. Hence, I run GrapheneOS.
Mark Zuckerberg puts a sticker over his laptop camera and microphone.
He also gave his famous opinion about Facebook users. Deep down, he agrees with privacy advocates. The diff is that he's a shitty enough person to take advantage of the less techy people out there even if his society will be damaged badly in the process. Most of us are not that shitty.
they trust me
dumb fucks
I think we can move beyond Facebook here. Trusting big tech with your data never works out well.
the biggest hypocrites are tech CEO's limiting their children's screen time and forbidding social media
The manufacturers tell you.
And they even make you click the "I have read and understood this" button under the document that explicitly states that they're spying on you and selling all your data.
don't need any such "proof". the whole industry has lost any and all benefit-of-doubt privileges, for ever. they don't get an opportunity to gain a foothold in mi casa and possibly be in a position to do harm.
I don't get the idea that after all the shit they pulled someone's like "well maybe this new thing's nice".
those are immoral people with zero compunctions about doing anything that hurts you, your community, and humanity as a whole. we are in an adversarial position and you'd do well to remind yourself of that constantly.
I don’t get the idea that after all the shit they pulled someone’s like “well maybe this new thing’s nice”.
I look at my friends who do this even though I advize them not to. For them, data is invisible and out of sight, out of mind. Their TV is a consumer device like IDK a toaster or washing machien. They put it online with no real thought to data or privacy. From their perspective this is normal. Their neighbors all do it with their TVs. Their friends all do it! I am the only one who makes a warning to them. Everyone else they know does it. Who wouldn't want a "smart" TV???
They don't understand tech very well and they feel like what they see most people doing must be good. They are not thinking about the eroding effect on their whole society from normalizing dragnet surveillance and total privacy loss. It's too abstract, and the allure of the shiny is too much.
The thing I find so funny about all of this is that people would rather believe that their phone is spying on them with the Mic that there is no proof of. Then what is more likely the truth you are not as unique as you think you are and they have so much data on you they have no reason to spy on what you say because they know you better then you know yourself (we lie to ourselves).
But yes it is easier for people to believe the mic is spying on them because thy can't or won't accept the more likely option.
Found the sane comment. What we know for sure is that a combination of browser fingerprinting, de-anonymization (you can take anonymized hashed emails and compare them to hashes of known emails), and the third party broker marketplace that they can predict things with disturbing specificity like pregnancy, and obesity, to hidden patterns you might not even realize are in the data.
Plus there's enough statistically informed shots in the dark that drive specific ads that, sometimes, they strike with perfect resonance. That's enough to explain uncanny similarity. And the microphone listening thing is still plausible, but without stone cold proof it's just a guess, and it overestimates how much data they need to be able to track you and sell you shit.
It's still never been proven despite countless very smart people looking for this exact behaviour for well over a decade now. The first person to actually prove this whole mass spying via microphone to sell ads thing is actually happening, would be world-famous overnight.
For instance on an android phone, it's not really possible for an app to do something that a determined enough security researcher couldn't ultimately detect if they were looking for it. When you can build your own version of the operating system and decompile the application easily, there's not really any other places to hide that won't give something away.
If you feel like your phone is acting off of a conversation you had without interacting with it, it's nearly always one of these three:
Don't get me wrong, I've thought surely something fishy was going on plenty of times, but the reality is, until someone can actually prove it (which is entirely possible to do if it's happening), it's gotta just be the above. We're being tracked a crazy amount, but it's not passively by microphones in our pockets
Note: none of this applies if you're actually being specifically individually targeted (i.e. by a hostile government). All bets are off in that instance
The first person to actually prove this whole mass spying via microphone to sell ads thing is actually happening, would be world-famous overnight.
The first person that proves that Google, Microsoft, Amazon or Meta are directly doing it, using their hardware vendors privilege - would be famous overnight.
But that won't happen, because they don't have to.
(Okay, it might still happen with Meta. I'm not sure those jackasses have any self respect.)
In general, the big vendors don't need to listen to anyone's microphone, because the average user installs a free flappy bird clone that runs the microphone continuously, and then sells that to absolutely every single limited liability corporation, coffee shop, or data broker - to correlate for advertising.
Saying "they're not using the microphone" is splitting hairs to death.
Yes, a few of the biggest players can't be arsed to directly use the microphone.
Instead they buy the result of malware microphone use indirectly from the malware pushers who do absolutely use the microphone.
Absolutely every tech company, employer and three letter agency is buying the content of your voice recordings through a form of Privacy Washing. They didn't collect it themselves, and they didn't look to closely at how it was collected, so it's okay, right?
For the average user, whose kid installed some stupid little free games, yes, someone is almost certainly "listening" right now, and all the time.
But they're not using it to decide who to arrest, who to deport, or who to hire or fire (for saying "union"), or whether you really need the salary you requested...unless they are.
And yes, finding out some of that would absolutely make the news, but those are harder to find out, and could go for decades undiscovered.
Anecdotal, but I was on a Boy Scout trip as a chaperone where us parents were talking to each other in person about where we'd take our first break en route to the campsite. We decided on a Burger King at one of the towns along the route (it being a small town, the only one there). My phone was in my pocket at the time, powered on but black screen idle.
I got back into my car and pulled up Google Maps. As I typed in the words Burger King, it auto completed with the one we were just talking about that was half a state away in that town. It didn't pull up the closest one to me, which I would have expected it to do.
Freaked me out.
The very notion of proof implies that you can reproduce it. So I would suggest you forget what anybody here or elsewhere said. Instead, you :
Yes this takes a of time but that will help you make YOUR own opinion on the matter if you genuinely care.
AFAIK this is the only evidence: a claim by a marketing company that they're actually doing it. However, they have some reason to lie about this, bc it makes them sound all-knowing and powerful to their clients.
https://www.404media.co/cmg-cox-media-actually-listening-to-phones-smartspeakers-for-ads-marketing/
It is not the only evidence, as you say, but it is particularly good evidence.
Okay, so here is my story:
I was on holiday with my friends and we were playing a TTRPG. In the RPG our group needed charol tablets. I have never in my life googled or needed something like that.
After the session, I opened up Amazon to buy something I forget to pack and voilà: Amazon suggested me to buy charol tablets.
My smartphone must have listened in and given that data to Amazon.
No Alexa or similar products were in the vacation home.
Who in your group didn't know what charol tablets were and looked them up?
I and everyone I know have similar stories. They are listening
Just think about the scale of the surveillance: every smartphone user is being monitored 24/7 in hope to find something to sell them.
If you hate AI because it wastes so much energy, think about the cost for the this: Energy, water, battery life, bandwidth, ... And in contrast to AI the 'users' don't get anything in return.
Conformation bias. You think of something and you see more of it. You don't realize the 1000's of other times you have seen that. Do you honestly remember every add you ever see? No but when you have thought about something you are more likely to see more of it. Or do people purchase more or your colour or type of car after you get it? Or is the fact you see more of them more likely because you are now "looking" for them.
There's no need for uploading a constant audio feed or transcript (something that would be easy for researchers to detect in the network logs) to show you an advertisement like that.
Your phone knows all the things you wrote in the post, namely: your location, that you are physically with those friends, the wifi network, the search history of everyone there. Because of all that metadata, advertisers probably know you were playing a TTRPG, maybe even the specific one
For example there was this one time where videos from robot vacuums leaked, including people shitting. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11562599/Robot-vacuum-cleaner-took-photos-woman-toilet-images-ended-Facebook.html
Regarding TVs, WikiLeaks' Vault 7 publication in 2017 included "Weeping Angel", CIA malware for Samsung TVs which streams audio from them while they're in "fake off" mode.
https://mashable.com/article/cia-samsung-tv-hack-weeping-angel
I saw proof one day. I was visiting a welding shop on business, never been there before, didn't know them. At some point, I'm sitting in the office with about five guys, distracting them from their work, yakking, and I mention a big piece of gear I have to haul around using a cart. One suggests a different kind of cart, and describes it. As we're talking, one of the other guys gasps, and holds his phone up to show the boss.
While we were talking, this guy opened his phone, and the first ad that popped up was for that odd, obscure equipment cart that we had just been talking about.
It turned out that these guys had been discussing this subject earlier, and now it was confirmed for all of us.
The fun part is that they dnt even need to listen for this. They track everything you search, link it to your phones ip, number, and location. But it doesnt stop there. They know people will talk to the people they are around.
So if person A searches something 2 days ago and then goes to hang out with person B who has similar interests, they will serve ads about those products to person B because they figure it will be relevant at some point. Basically, the prediction software is so good that it comes off as listening to every word you said.
They are def also listening, but this is more often what is happening. Use a vpn and privacy focused browser and you will notice the relevance of ads drop significantly
Phones no one has proven it which I wouldn't be hard. TV's definitely do they even can tell what your watching from the video on the screen. I find it funny one is proven one is not but both believed.
Knowing what you're watching on the screen is different than what you're saying out loud near the TV or remote. Plus almost all TVs can run without an internet connection too, which renders this concern somewhat null
Disagree. The fact that these devices are both capable of, and would actively, emphatically, attempt to do any level of data harvesting, is a problem. Can they be defeated? Yes. They should not have to be. We deserve better.
Aside from devices that acknowledge theyre listening all the time there actually isnt any, for undisclosed data collection via microphone specifically. Research has, to my knowledge, never found that to be the case
Researchers have generally explained that they dont need to listen to what you say with a microphone- they collect so much data about you they can accurately model what you're likely to have any interest in, and when that happens frequently enough confirmation bias takes over.
That being said, yes, that person is having all of their data collected, by meta directly and through cookies tracking them around the web. By google and android. By ai, and other companies. By the tracking images in the emails they open. Etc. Theres lots of evidence for all of those things
And there is evidence for companies having collected data that people didnt concent to, like when google tracked location data that people opted out of sharing (there was a lawsuit) or meta recently ended up in the news for circumventing the sandboxing around the Facebook app to collect mobile web activity in a way they're not supposed to be able to.
Aside from devices that acknowledge theyre listening all the time there actually isnt any, for undisclosed data collection via microphone specifically. Research has, to my knowledge, never found that to be the case
Please stop quoting this misinformation.
Microphone hijacking is real, and it is common. The average user has been a victitm of it.
And in addition, Google and Apple effectively admitted to microphone spying in court.
When I talk to somebody who has Facebook on their phone, an ad for that thing pops up in their feed. It's been obvious for years.
Every device made to receive voice commands (Smart TVs, Amazon Echo) WILL listen to everything you say.
And if they provide a button or setting to turn that off you are relying on trusting them to comply with it (I don't think they do and even if they are found doing it they will probably pay a minuscule fine for it)
Think of something you've never mentioned or discussed before, then out of nowhere, start having a conversation with a friend about it, how much you like it and are thinking about getting it, taking lessons etc then see what happens over the next week on either your or your friend's ads (turn off ad blocker if you use one).
I recommend something completely unusual for most people like an instrument (didgeridoo or cowbell)
many tv and phone manufacturers will literally say it in their license agreement.
i have read this in many different phones and some tvs.