This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
But… they can't access the microphone without the user explicitly allowing
Tell that to Facebook. Shit, I'll talk about something with my wife and see ads about it ten minutes later. Been happening for years.
I tested this with my Facebook app in 2013. Found a Spanish radio station, set my phone down next to it overnight, and for several weeks I was seeing ads exclusively in Spanish. Deleted the app the first day I saw them in Spanish, and deleted my account not long after that.
My wife still uses them after 5 years together and me pointing out all the times it's obviously eavesdropping on us, and she's even been creeped out by it before. Still uses it...
Unless my microphone and camera have physical switches, I will assume they are being used. Those little "your camera and microphone are off" icons in the corner of the screen don't reassure me.
Article is from 2018. Someone must have pasted the url from hacker news where the same story was dug up recently.
Is that to say that it's no longer valid? Or just that it's old news? The list of apps associated with the software is still pretty extensive; Google Assistant even showed up.
Wasn't there just a storey a couple days ago that apps where not doing this but taking screenshots and videos on the screen and sending that. And both iOS and Android have the microphone notification now.
I know I'm usually on the more paranoid side, but I've always assumed everything I do on a smartphone is potentially being monitored via camera or mics.
If the apps are just taking screenshots, or recording a few seconds of data via mic, it would be almost guaranteed that certain corrupt (and also paranoid) governments that are dismissive of privacy rights could force or bribe those apps to allow them to also access screens, mics, and cameras anyway, right?
I'm in the U.S., and especially with how glitchy my phone has suddenly become over the last few months, I'm just at the point where I just assume that's what's going on.
I had the same android for like 4 years without many issues, then suddenly around February it just became almost impossible to use. Weird glitchy things with the size of the tool bar at the bottom of my screen and the popup keyboard. Redirect notifications all the time for certain websites, and my VPN connection is just constantly interrupted and having to be reset.
I finally was like fuck it, this is an old phone so maybe that's it. Brand new phone, but most of the same issues.
I use signal instead of text most of the time, and switched a lot of things to proton mail, but if someone is potentially recording your screen, does it really matter if what you're doing is encrypted?
