315
Cox deletes ‘Active Listening’ ad pitch after boasting that it eavesdrops though our phones
(www.fastcompany.com)
this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2023
315 points (99.1% liked)
Technology
59261 readers
3403 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The answer is: it wouldn’t. You’re right on the money, you couldn’t do anything other than speculation.
Just spitballing here but you might be able to try and correlate the amount of data sent with how much real life activity there was. Say, have silence for a week around the TV then play recorded speech near it for a week and see if that changes the frequency or size of the data being sent back home. Then do this for random 1/2/3 day periods. If offline text to speech is as crap as I've heard then the increased data transfer should stick out pretty clearly.
That’s a completely unhinged level effort for what would still ultimately boil down to speculation lmao. Smart TVs phone home frequently, semi randomly, with varying data amounts, both when used regularly and when off for months at a time, both when you’re walking and talking around it, and if you’re on vacation for two weeks. If despite all that you tried to control the environment around it you’d somehow need to… ensure absolute silence in the room that it’s in for DAYS at a time? Unless you live in the middle of the woods that’s not very likely, and even then, all it would be is guessing lmao
Oh entirely, but it's the best I could come up without disassembly. (And I'm fairly sure I've done worse debugging a prod environment)
First, someone would be able to prove that communication is happening. Second, if the keys are stored locally, and the original packets saved, the encryption can be reverse engineered.
Encryption prevents man in the middle attacks. If you have one of the ends, you can usually get the data. If you have the device that's doing the encryption of the data, and you have the encrypted data, you can decode the data. It's just a matter of getting through obfuscation at that point.
The reason this hasn't been done yet is that it's not happening yet. CMG was lying in their advertising.