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Yes I’m awake. This is literally my field of study but it’s easier to state the obvious in a single sentence than it is to explain the depths of depravity megacorps take with our tech. You seen the fucking cars that spy on the drivers? Insurance companies must get a crazy hard-on for those.
Have you heard of the guys who's insurance went up randomly? When he looked into it, his car was selling his data to Lexis Nexis. His car was reporting that he had a near miss with a small moving object every day. It was his cat that waited in the driveway for him.
No one has ever been able to find any evidence to the contrary. Apple wants market dominance and to do that they need people to trust the brand so they are incentivised to not break the core brand principles like Privacy.
Plus if Apple didn’t actually care about customer privacy they wouldn’t keep giving their customers tools to get around government privacy violations. No more Advanced Data Protection in the UK? Here’s encrypted local backups.
Claimants seem to say they were talking about Air Jordan's and then were (presumably) presented with ads for Air Jordan's. That part of the article has a link to MSN which is now dead. There's no evidence presented in the current link as to what happened, or if there was any actual proof. Seems like if Apple was selling voice transcripts to advertisers then a journalist can just pose as an advertiser, or partner with an existing advertiser and get their proof.
Otherwise you just have to consider coincidence at scale. Whatever reason they were discussing Air Jordan's (say a teenager in the home who played basketball) might match up to known demographic information (kid has an Apple account, their age is known, Nike buys ads for Air Jordan's to their age group in their region). They happened to be having a conversation related around the same time the ad went out. Doesn't mean Siri was spying and Apple sold the voice recordings. There's plenty of ways to make educated guesses based on known information without directly listening, much less selling the original recordings.
Apple claims no wrongdoing, they settled. If they fought bigger story, if they lost bigger cost.
You can read this as Apple was caught and paid up, or that they considered the cost of litigation plus the Streisand effect on their brand and decided to pay less now and make it go away.
Cost of litigation was not a priority given they spent more than 5 years fighting this case before deciding to settle, but to your point, Apple themselves issued this statement when the case started:
First, by default, we will no longer retain audio recordings of Siri interactions. We will continue to use computer-generated transcripts to help Siri improve.
Second, users will be able to opt in to help Siri improve by learning from the audio samples of their requests. We hope that many people will choose to help Siri get better, knowing that Apple respects their data and has strong privacy controls in place. Those who choose to participate will be able to opt out at any time.
Third, when customers opt in, only Apple employees will be allowed to listen to audio samples of the Siri interactions. Our team will work to delete any recording which is determined to be an inadvertent trigger of Siri.
Nowhere does that say they were sharing data with third parties, just that they internally use recordings of your Siri conversations (so not that it was ever listening to you without your consent, just recordings of your interactions with Siri) and that they internally use some recordings to work on improving voice to text transcription.
My understanding is that what is in your phone is constantly listening for the "Hey Siri" wake word (assuming Siri is enabled and the listening is turned on, you have the option of only manually triggering via button). Nothing leaves your phone until that triggers.
After the trigger, your voice goes to their cloud servers to process.
Apple was holding on to those recordings to use to improve Siri's voice processing. Actual people hearing the actual recordings, but within Apple and not for sale. That still sucks if not explicitly opted in. They don't do that anymore.
Not trying to defend a corporation here, just trying to distinguish specifics.
Apple settled a lawsuit where Siri’s start word was too often being confused for other words*
You can hook up wireshark to your network and view all traffic while saying whatever you want to your iPhone. This is something that can be easily proven false.
Apple violated their privacy by recording their conversations through Siri without a “Hey, Siri!” voice command or a button press. The plaintiffs say users weren’t aware that humans, and not just computers, are reviewing audio.
The plaintiffs say Apple disclosed these conversations to human third-party contractors to review them to improve Siri or otherwise shared the data with advertisers to strengthen ad targeting.
this is misleading
there is a function, where you say “hey siri” and it activates siri. But it’s not totally flawless, so sometimes Siri activates accidentally. Siri is cloud based service, so when it is activated, it sends the audio. So sometimes they got private information they shouldn’t (and didn’t want to) have (same for Google and Alexa and any other voice activated assistant)
They also stored the audio, sent it to third parties for human review and settled a lawsuit for more than 90 million. So not a nothingburger apparently
yes, that’s normal process in improving voice assistant - by reviewing random samples and finding where to improve upon it.
Apple settling for 90 million just proves nothingburger. If it did have any merit, it would be in billions. 90 million is just “we don’t want to waste time on this” kind of money. Other party wouldn’t accept that if they had the chance of winning
Not saying Apple is innocent, but I definitely prefer using their software over Google's, whose core business is advertisements. Brings about much stronger perverse incentives to harvest your data.
It doesn't matter whether they're telling the truth or not, though. What matters is that eventually they could change their mind.
When we normalize a technology like this, and everyone uses it, and some new brilliant mind takes over at Apple and figures growth through hardware sales is impossible and decides to use all the data they're gathering as the next way to make profit.
The truth of the matter is, that we don't know what happens to the data when they record it. With stuff like this, it's always fine until it suddenly isn't.
I imagine it works how wakewords do. it's listening, not recording, using something like a ringbuffer to write chunks of audio. When triggered, that audio is then converted to a contiguous vector and handed off to another process to do the (I'm guessing ongoing) transcription
The LG Smart TVs we've tested have first-party ACR (automatic content recognition) functionality that can pry into your personal life with greater precision than you might realize, with LG Ad Solutions' executives and leadership saying, on camera, that LG "owns the glass." Not you -- even though you bought it -- but them. They also talk about knowing everybody in the household, knowing the secondary devices, moving from TVs to smartphones and other screens, and more in their B2B discussions. Beyond just the fact that we think the TV's native behavior parallels malware, the LG Smart TVs we tested also have a number of security vulnerabilities that can be exploited to convert the TVs into covert listening devices.
They even found 'hidden' mics that keep recording despite not even being connected to internet or the power.
“Things are bad so who cares if they get worse?” That’s not how you solve problems. You solve problems by stopping them and then reverting them and not repeating them, this isn’t it, therefore we should not do it.
I think we live in the post-future right now. Marty McFly's future was in 2015, and that's about when the future ended. Since then, the thought of a "better tomorrow" defies logic and people only dream of the past.
The government doesn't even need flock cameras. Create subsidizes for watches and meta glasses for everyone and theyll be walking around and monitor everything around them
The American government just bought from Israel 1000 vans that force people's phones to connect to their network to spy on people. It's not a one-stop shop for spying, the American government is using multiple ways to create the panopticon.
The technology comes from the Israeli surveillance company Cognyte, which has a knack for creating tools that might remind one of a spy novel. These spiffy vans are equipped with a gadget called Falcon Net, which can mimic a mobile phone tower. When the nearby phones connect to this simulator, law enforcement can keep a watchful eye on anyone’s location whether they are a suspect or just an unsuspecting citizen going about their day. This ingenious setup can either be stealthily hidden within the vehicle, tucked into a cozy backpack for patrol officers, or even mounted on a helicopter for aerial surveillance missions. It seems that the Texas police are stepping into the future—whether people are ready for it or not!
I know right. Everyone is already tracked via phones. Cameras already on every street corner. Dumb folks posting everything they do on Tik tok and insta. Yet people are still “omg flock cameras. Thems the devil”
They can lie all they want, but I know for a fact FB listens to what you fucking say and targets you with those ads. Never have I seen such blatant privacy violations.
I wish I was making this up. Will mention one thing over the phone or near my phone and boom! After that the next day, an ad for it. Mind you I don't go search for the same thing in any way. It's too specific to be a coincidence.
Edit: flock cameras are even worse because they can tag your plate in real time while also pulling your info off using WiFi and Bluetooth. It's just a whole new level of privacy invasion.
I swear, I’ve even just thought about something I want/need, no mention of it to anyone verbally or via text, a simple thought and I start to get ads for it. WTF!
I've been in the Military until last year and got a mew job after that. Sknce my new job works for the Military as well I talk a lot about that and my new company.
Reddit won't stop showing me ads for either a Military career or at my current employer.
And I don't even have Facebook (but WhatsApp, so I guess that doesn't matter lol)
The plausible explanation here is that your user profile at whatever ad broker knows you're military. It doesn't need to listen to do that - location data would be so much more than enough.
EDIT: Also put on an adblocker. ublock origin works on Firefox and Firefox mobile, and the only time I see ads anymore is during hockey games. Works on Youtube and platforms with embedded ads like Amazon and Roku as well.
It’s not a coincidence but they don’t need to be listening to you for the algorithms to predict what ads might be relevant to you. They can also do it by what people in your network and vicinity have also searched online.
They're listening. I am Canadian. I turned on a spanish radio and left my phone by it. When I woke up the next morning, Facebook was suddenly showing all of its ads in spanish. I do not speak spanish nor had ever listened to a spanish radio station before that.
You're looking the wrong way - it's not even the government, it's businesses. The government will eventually use the tech once it's there, but it's businesses which are pushing it and government regulation is the only option to stop it
Well the only thing that counts is making profits for those who already have a lot.
If we put our energy into improving things, it could be completely different.
Right? Imagine if all of this thought, creativity and invention was harnessed towards improving life for everyone? Utopia. It's right there for the taking. Humans are ridiculous.
The problem is those that want money and power are the most motivated group to gather more money and power. To the detriment of the rest of us. But as long as the rest of us is not motivated enough to take action. Nothing will improve. And those in power will do anything to prevent us from attaining any coherent momentum. So yeh, keep people dumb and divided.
Utopia is fancy word for communism and we can't have that.
They warned us communist countries are corrupt, run by pedos, full of wealth hoarding oligarchs and average person can barely afford to eat and is as good as being homeless... oh wait... that sounds familiar lol
I watched an interesting YouTube video about the Fermi paradox, i.e. why is the universe so huge with so many seemingly habitable planets, but we haven't made contact with any other intelligent life?
Somewhere along the chain of evolution there is The Great Filter, which wipes out a species. One theory is that the great filter is intelligence, and that evolving 'higher thinking" is actually very poor for long term survival.
As our knowledge grows, so does the chance that we could destroy ourselves.
We invented weapons that can annihilate the entire planet at the push of a button.
We know climate change is going to wreck the world but are doing very little to stop it.
We know that there is a pretty decent chance that an AI super intelligence will kill us all but continue to pump billions of dollars into that industry.
In the example Apple used - the first thing they showed us was a couple sitting down at a restaurant. The waitress was speeding through the specials. Buddy used his watch to go back and hear it again. He could have just asked her to repeat it. We don’t need this. We don’t need more fucking things listening tracking and watching us at all times.
Wasn't it apple that had that commerical with that horrible wife who forgot her husband's birthday and used her phone to make a quick low effort slide show and then walked away like she was queen shit?
The assistive tool for this case already exist and I'm sure Siri already has an accessibility feature for this exact thing. This isn't an accessibility tool though, it an always on recorder enabled by default so that nobody has to ever pay attention to anything or interact with anybody.
Yup, same story with Prime, a while ago they added adds to an already paying subscription, pay more monthly to turn off the adds. Some things like that and also this gives me serious black mirror vibes
My first thought too, but I would have to try it once just to set a precedence that conversation could be brought back up. Could actually help in the long run 🤣
Mate, why are the apps like Instagram, Facebook, Whatsapp so big in size? Why do you get ads for products you talked about a few hours before? This is for sure already happening - filtering locally on your device for keywords which where said.
I once mentioned an obscure videogame i once loved many years ago to a friend over snapchat, opened youtube 10 seconds after cus i remember a good video on that game, from years ago, guess what the first result was? More recently, mentioned a youtuber i havent watched in a while, opens youtube, guess whos the first result?
The other scary thought asking ourselves why are we were talking about the product an hour before. Subliminal messaging or getting us to think of things without us knowing the influence ahead of time.
they aren't listening and using your conversations for ads. T
hink about it. What about all the stuff you have said that you haven't seen ads for?
Your phone collects a shit load of other data though which is what targets ads. Your location, spending habits, friends, your proximity to your friends, google searches, demographic etc etc
People don’t like being confronted with the fact that they’re not unique in the slightest. You like Slay the spire, Jujutsu Kaisen, and listen to nihmune? No way! I never would have guessed! Tell me about your social anxiety next! I bet therapists just don’t understand what you’re going through. I bet showing her your futa porn collection will help though
Someone is going to read that and be like, “Holy shit it’s me”, but I’m actually talking about one of my friends. You’re just not unique. Neither am I. And that’s okay, I promise
I know that it’s very easy for there to be confirmation bias here (we’re likely to notice the unusual ad that contains something we were just talking about and not notice other random ads) but I don’t think that’s what’s happening.
I’ve seen far too many completely out of pocket ads over the years (not frequently) that made no sense at all based off of everything about me, including internet searches on any device, things that were so out of left field that they stood out based on that alone, far more than the most out there ads I get, that are only explained by them parsing things said around my phone. These were things I had never seen before or since.
I know companies have long done similar things that, when it’s done too well, we find creepy.
They want to do it as well as possible without it being too obvious. So this stuff seems few and far between, but I 100% believe they’re actively doing it.
If the only concerns were about getting fed ads I think it would be a lot less concerning
The truth is... they're probably not. Your phone probably has a little icon that comes on when a camera or mic is in use, mine is a green dot on my Samsung. This is a built in feature which, as far as I'm aware, there is no way to disable (even for hackers). If that icon ain't lit then the camera/mic are not in use.
Secondly and more convincingly, there has never been a credible leak or good evidence nor examples of this happening. This would take an incredible number of people to keep secret with no one saying a thing.
I suspect if you grant them “full access” to your camera roll that they run image recognition on your photos even if you didn’t upload them to the app.
I got an advert for the exact label of wine that my spouse had taken a photo of recently. Not uploaded to Insta, just captured with camera.
I've tried an AI transcriber at the workplace and itd get things wrong like 60% of the time. It would claim people said things that were never said and we immediately got rid of it because of the obvious dangers
30 yrs ago the russians and many other intelligence agencies would have loved the level of surveillance we have effectively given up, we are monitored shopping via Bluetooth and apps , Internet providers, driving and so on, the kgb, stassi, mi5/6 & any others you care to mention would have creamed themselves and worst we have welcomed this ourselves, yeah freedom (snorts to himself)
I'd imagine it will be able to record the last 15 seconds every 15 seconds. So probably you can record the whole day, not like text takes much space, battery life on the other hand...
Imagine talking to a friend and asking them a question, and instead of answering, they immediately start scrolling on their watch and then answering instead of asking, "Huh?" Like a normal human being.
I don't even know why Flock exists, we are already spying on each other for the sake of a little dopamine hit and/or being totally lazy and not wanting to use our brains.
This particular feature was only added recently at the request of this White house. It will be used to track down anyone who disagrees with the regime.
Used in tandem with Flock and online tracking they can build a database for the future purges.
This thing will be straight up illegal in states that have two-party consent wiretapping laws. The details vary in the US and I'm no lawyer but as I understand it there's a good case for this feature being illegal to have enabled in at least 8 states, and likely several other entire countries.
It itself isn't illegal but using it under certain circumstances would be. Tape recorders aren't illegal in two party states. It would get a lot of people in some serious trouble for sure though. I'd bet dollars to donuts that there's a line in their TOS agreement that says to be sure all parties consent and that they're not responsible when it's used incorrectly.
“Hold on, I missed what you said. No, don’t repeat yourself, just sit there and be quiet while I stare at my watch and read a poorly-transcribed version.”
In the privacy information for this feature, they mentioned that certain topics will automatically disable the summary for a conversation, and that the government can list specific trigger words and topics that are part of that list. The scope creep here could be crazy - imagine an iCloud-photos-scanning-esque system where law enforcement/Apple is automatically notified when you talk about certain things?
Guys, if they wanted to listen and stalk us they would. it makes a noise you cant turn off, it’s only the last 15 seconds, realistically when are you going to use this? Just starting an audio recording is already a thing.
Based on the hilarious responses here, I can surmise that people in this sub a: don’t read how things work before bitching about them and b: are young and naive enough to think their memory will always work perfectly.
I can’t wait til you MFs have your first “why have I come to the fridge” moment… 🤣
Couldn’t we just ask the person to repeat themselves? Their scenario showed a waitress saying the specials of the day and the guy going through his watch to recap. Just ask the waitress to repeat it. Such a stupid feature.
Once a Siri Recap or Live Rewind text is generated, you decide what to keep. No raw audio is ever saved or synced. If you use iCloud with two-factor authentication and have a device passcode, any Audio Intelligence text you choose to save syncs across your devices end-to-end encrypted. Only you can access this information, and only on devices where you are signed in to iCloud.
Apple does not hold the encryption keys. No one else, not even Apple, can access the end-to-end encrypted data you saved in the Siri app. If you delete a saved Siri Recap or Live Rewind text, it is permanently removed from all your
devices and from iCloud.
most fucked up part about surveillance is that the people are not only willing to do it for the billion dollar companies, they even pay them for the hardware to do it with.
A few months ago, I suffered a series of seizures that left me with a few broken bones and some permanent brain damage :/
I have been told from a few neurologists now to expect a lifetime of pretty moderate to severe memory loss, especially in the short term. My memory was pretty crap before, but it’s even worse now. It has been a hard few months adjusting to this new normal as I feel like a crazy person leaving notes for myself everywhere and transcribing important details from every conversation I have and organizing it into a folder on my phone and iPad. It’s stressful and sometimes I get too frustrated because it’s hard to keep up. I have days where I start to wonder if I can do this the rest of my life. It feels pretty bleak at times honestly.
I had zero intentions of getting the new Apple Watch until I saw this feature. I feel so cringey for saying I almost cried when I saw it.
While I can understand where most everyone is coming from with the potential creepiness factor of this feature, I see it as an accessibility option that has made it an instant buy for me. I think it will greatly improve my life and I purchased it immediately.
This and the Meta glasses bring us closer and closer to that one black mirror episode with the glasses allowing you to rewind to any point.
Only upside is, both wearing the glasses and looking to your watch to pick up on something a real person saif to you seconds ago makes you look like a gigantic jerk. Maybe we manage to treat this in the society similar to other typical jerk activities like wearing sunglasses indoors or failig to remove headphones in a conversation. If you want to do it anyway - fine. But you're the asshole in that situation
Our memory allows us to live rewind lol. What about people who do not accept to be recorded by a fucking smartwatch while taking to a person with one? This is fucked up
out of the whole presentation, this one was the one that had me confused and weirded out that it was even thought about and then included as a feature they thought people would want
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