this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2024
74 points (75.3% liked)
Privacy
31783 readers
334 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
Chat rooms
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
I don't understand how people are still in denial that this is happening when it's so obvious.
They're using data that people sent to their servers. If they were turning on peoples mics and sending the recordings to themselves then anyone that monitors their network traffic at all would notice all of that data being uploaded.
Which is why they process it client side and send keywords as text.
How? The data is locked up in Google servers? All the evidence I have is posted here.
Probably because no one has any proof other than anecdotal evidence. And the vast majority of times it's looked into it's because the person reporting it doesn't understand how else their information is collected (i.e. web searches, intranet data for other people, browsing histories, etc.)
Look at it this way, is it more likely that the majority of security researchers that look into it, find nothing, and deem these use cases as inefficient and improbable, are wrong; OR is it more likely that data collectors builds good profiles, mixed with some Baader-Meinhof, a little Dunning-Krueger, and a lot of coincidence?
Not everything is a big conspiracy, nuance is neccesary, or the sky will always be falling.
This is how we ended up with Q and anti-vaxxers.
I mean if you want to deny the sky is blue when plenty of experience says otherwise that's on you.
I agree that it would be very inefficient to send voice recordings, and those would be easy to pick out with some packet sniffing.
But a locally processed txt file of keywords would be such a small amount of encrypted data that it would easily pass under the nose of any security researcher and they would have no idea unless it was decrypted.
So no, this is not debunked.
There is a chance I guess he went off and researched the topic and our relations are tethered on googles back end so it figured I might be interested in his interests. But I'm stretching here. I should ask him on Monday!