(I know many of you already know it but this incident I experienced made me so paranoid about using smartphones)

To start off, I’m not that deep into privacy rabbit hole but I do as much I can possibly to be private on my phone. But for the rest of phones in my family, I generally don’t care because they are not tech savvy and pushing them towards privacy would make their lives hard.

So, the other day I pirated a movie for my family and since it was on Netflix, it was a direct rip with full HD. I was explaining to my family how this looks so good as this is an direct rip off from the Netflix platform, and not a recording of a screening in a cinema hall(camrip). It was a small 2min discussion in my native language with only English words used are record, piracy and Netflix.

Later I walk off and open YouTube, and I see a 2 recommendations pop-up on my homepage, “How to record Netflix shows” & “Why can’t you screen record Netflix”. THE WHAT NOW. I felt insanely insecure as I was sure never in my life I looked this shit up and it was purely based on those words I just spoke 5min back.

I am pretty secure on my device afaik and pretty sure all the listening happened on other devices in my family. Later that day, I went and saw which all apps had microphone access, moved most of them to Ask everytime and disabled Google app which literally has all the permissions enabled.

Overall a scary and saddening experience as this might be happening to almost everyone and made me feel it the journey I took to privacy-focused, all worth it.

  • ganymede@lemmy.ml
    33·
    8 hours ago

    no, they don’t

    Please be careful with your claims.

    In my experience, whenever investigating these claims and refutations we usually find when digging past the pop media headlines into the actual academic claims, that noone has proven it’s not happening. If you know of a conclusive study, please link.

    Regarding the article you have linked we don’t even need to dig past the article to the actual academic claims.

    The very article you linked states quite clearly:

    The researchers weren’t comfortable saying for sure that your phone isn’t secretly listening to you in part because there are some scenarios not covered by their study.

    (Genuine question, not trying to be snarky) Will you take a moment to reflect on which factors may have contributed to your eagerness to misrepresent the conclusions of the studies cited in your article?

    • .Donuts@lemmy.world
      5·
      8 hours ago

      Of course a researcher is never sure something is 100% ruled out. That’s part of how academic research works.

      My eagerness stems from being tired of anecdotes presented as evidence supporting a weird privacy conspiracy. This takes away from the actual issue at hand, which is your digital footprint and how your data is used.

      • ganymede@lemmy.ml
        2·
        2 hours ago

        Of course a researcher is never sure something is 100% ruled out. That’s part of how academic research works.

        once again, that isn’t what they were reported to have said. [and researchers don’t need to repeat the basic precepts of the scientific method in every paper they write, so perhaps its worthwhile to note what they were reported to say about that, rather than write it off as a generic ‘noone can be 100% certain of anything’] it’s a bit rich to blame someone for lacking rigor while repeatedly misrepresenting what your own article even says.

        what the article actually said is

        because there are some scenarios not covered by their study

        and even within the subset of scenarios they did study, the article notes various caveats of the study:

        Their phones were being operated by an automated program, not by actual humans, so they might not have triggered apps the same way a flesh-and-blood user would. And the phones were in a controlled environment, not wandering the world in a way that might trigger them: For the first few months of the study the phones were near students in a lab at Northeastern University and thus surrounded by ambient conversation, but the phones made so much noise, as apps were constantly being played with on them, that they were eventually moved into a closet

        there’s so much more research to be done on this topic, we’re FAR FAR from proving it conclusively (to the standards of modern science, not some mythical scientifically impossible certainty).

        presenting to the public that is a proven science, when the state of research afaict has made no such claim is muddying the waters.

        which comes to your main point, you may feel as i do that the responsible collection of even witness reports should include some acknowledgement or attempted elimination of the plethora of other channels for such correlations to be realised (not withstanding ofc there’s also the possibility of sheer random chance). then that’s fine, i agree.

        pretending its solved when its not even close merely further detracts from worthwhile discussions about non-voice surveillance channels & inferences thereof

        i don’t really blame you personally, the news media repeatedly fails to present the current state of research accurately. from my observation many popular headlines state “its not happening” even when the very article itself doesn’t say that. its frankly dishonest or extremely lazy “journalism”. and i don’t mean the typical failure of popsci reporting to fully capture the finer details of a study, i mean literally the popsci headline doesn’t even match their own article body.