fuck offffff
OK, how do you disable it permanently? Besides Graphene or mobile Linux?
Interesting how the majority of the comments refer to you being monitored on your own phone, ignoring that you will be monitored on everyone else’s phone as well.
Which is also an important issue with google mail.
But this also violates the expectation that spoken conservations are private.
This will be quite illegal in all countries and states that require 2 party consent at minimum.
Incoming Google lawsuits in 3, 2, 1.
The internet is becoming a hostile place, filled with predators and hazards, a privilege only of the wealthy, the powerful and their slaves, was not on my bingo card for things I’d live through. I feel I may have no choice but to genuinely disconnect from all of it in my private life.
Setting aside corporate surveillance, I have started to have a love/hate relationship with AI transcriptions in meetings. My auditory processing isn’t great, so it is nice to have notes. And it’s not replacing a job that someone was doing before. At the same time, it makes me feel more on edge. Everything I say becomes part of a permanent record. And I am part of a public institution, so that is subject to FOIA requests AFAIK.
This is really about training AI, isn’t it. They’ve tapped nearly all the sources of human text output already, so now they want to create as much more of it as possible, as quickly as possible. They will tap into conversations and use it as a new data source, mark my words.
They are so lazy they want an LLM to tell them what is hot and the only way they can do it is by massive spying. The surveillance state brought to us by fucking advertising of all things. So bizarre.
“There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part; you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!” — Mario Savio, 1964
I got GrapheneOS
GrapheneOS, asap Pixel owners.
Thank me later.
Before it’s somehow no longer an option. I fear the Motorola deal will somehow get blocked.
Creeps
I saw this title and immediately said “fuck off” then clicked, and …glad to see OP sharing my immediate sentiment.
Do not want
The people who called me crazy because “there’s no way your phone can be listening in on you all the time” are the same people who are going to be the most excited about this “feature”
How did these people expect “Hey Siri” / “Hey Google” to work?
Im a perfect world, as they claim, its a secondary system listening that isn’t recording or transmitting anything, and is meant to be low power. If it hears the wake up word, it wakes up the other mic and starts recording.
Thats how they claim the smart speakers work anyway.
This would be different.
It can’t hear if it isn’t already listening.
“How they claim?” Is there no way to confirm that?
I have a memory of people black boxing it and seeing power usage and network traffic that supported the claims but that was a snapshot in time and as others note its all proprietary.
It takes a lifetime to build a good reputation, but you can lose it in a minute.
They ship with proprietary code, this would be the point of open source.
In practice in my experience, every company is at least skirting the law regarding privacy, and I never worked for one big enough that could lobby itself out of a fine.
would this not be detectable by tracking the data sent through your network?
I used to run forensic network capture and analysis tools.
First thing, traffic is encrypted. All you will see is a blob of traffic passing through. You used to see hostnames with TLS, but now with quic, you see nothing. This makes it hard.
You could root the phone and install a root ca certificate for a decrypting proxy, you might see more, but the data itself (not just the transport protocol) could be encoded or even encrypted within the network encapsulation.
Next, you’d have to reverse engineer the protocol if they’re using something nonstandard. Also, malware can often be set up to “behave” when it can detect analysis. I’m all but certain Google would do this.
Maybe you could do statistical analysis of the traffic and attempt to baseline normal vs when it’s transmitting audio. It would be a bit of a blind guess at best.
If I had more time, I’d love to try it. I have an old pixel7 pro. Maybe I can sort something out.
If its real time monitoring you, but not if its logging data to send later when it would be expected to be doing so.
Audio doesnt take up much space.
Even if it was open source, you’d need to be able to verify what they ship matches the specs. Allowing you to flash whatever you want onto it helps, but you still need to validate the hardware.
I dont know. You’d need to reverse engineer the hardware and software to be confident, and could a OTA update then sneak a bypass in anyway?
Edit: i think Amazon might have abandoned this as well and always records on echos now too.
Doesn’t need to track you all the time to know exactly who you are and what you’re up to.
Continuously monitoring is such a waste of their resources, they already know everything about you, they just need to check in now and then to make sure you’re buying the correct t-shirts.
JFC, I don’t need tech tracking every goddamn word and fart.
I will happily send them all the farts they want.
