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In Leak, Facebook Partner Brags About Listening to Your Phone’s Microphone to Serve Ads for Stuff You Mention (futurism.com)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago

Thank god those moral people would never sell stuff to law enforcement nor sell it to companies that would then sell it to law enforcement.

Nope. Those people are all moral, good, and rich thus we are safe.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 months ago

unless this is provably and demonstrably true, this is definitely not true, because up until now, this has been entirely speculation.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

Ngl man I'm not buying it. With all the protections in mobile OSes against this exact kind of thing it straight up doesn't seem possible

[+] [email protected] 47 points 2 months ago (6 children)

[deleted]

[–] [email protected] 21 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (6 children)

At least on iOS, it takes it a step farther and tells you specifically when an app is accessing your location, microphone, camera, etc… It even delineates when it’s in the foreground or background. For instance, if I check my weather app, I get this symbol in the upper corner:

The circled arrow means it is actively accessing my location. And if I close the app, it gives me this instead:

The uncircled arrow means my location was accessed in the foreground recently. And if it happens entirely in the background, (like maybe Google has accessed my location to check travel time for an upcoming calendar event,) then the arrow will be an outline instead of being filled in.

The same basic rules apply for camera and mic access. If it accesses my mic, I get an orange dot. If it accesses my camera, I get a green dot.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

My Pixel does the colored dot thing as well. It also has the ability to add "Mic access" and "camera access" quick options to the pull down menu to quickly turn the permissions on/off at the OS level. I keep mine off at all times. If I receive an incoming call, I get a popup asking if I want to enable the microphone to answer it.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

Yeah it's great, same thing on the Google Pixel. The mic/camera thing brings peace of mind

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[–] [email protected] 56 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Wouldn't want to be mean to Facebook users, but the vast majority of them probably has micophone access enabled for Messenger at least, if not Facebook.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 2 months ago (1 children)

This comment inspired me to go turn off microphone, camera, Bluetooth, and local network access for every app. I’ll reenable as necessary.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Just leave it on for whatever runs your phone calls. I emabarrasingly discovered that the phone app NEEDS microphone access lol.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

I keep my microphone and camera off at the OS level always now. Android has quick options for it that you can add to your pull-down menu thing at the top. When I get an incoming call, a popup comes up asking if I want to allow voice permissions. Then after the call I disable it again. Same goes if I need to take photos.

I've never not believed that they listen to this shit. I've had far too many coincidental ad placements after saying something completely unrelated to anything I've ever searched for.