this post was submitted on 23 Dec 2023
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Privacy

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Are Phones and Smart Speakers Listening to You? Cox Media Group Claims They Can | Cord Cutters News (cordcuttersnews.com)
submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by Zerush@lemmy.ml to c/privacy@lemmy.ml
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[–] Septimaeus@infosec.pub 48 points 9 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (7 children)

I usually wear the tin foil hat in these debates, but I must concede in this case: the eavesdropping phone theory in particular is difficult to substantiate, from a technical standpoint.

For one, a user can check this themselves today with basic local network traffic monitors or packet sniffing tools. Even heavily compressed audio data will stand out in the log, no matter how it’s encrypted, streamed, batched or what have you.

To get a sense of what I mean, run wireshark and give a wake phrase command to see what that looks like. Now imagine trying to obfuscate that type of transmission for audio longer than 2 seconds, and repeatedly throughout a day.

Even assuming local audio inference and processing on a completely compromised device (rooted/jailbroken, disabled sandboxing/SIP, unrestricted platform access, the works) most phones will just struggle to do that recording and processing indeterminately without a noticeable impact on energy and data use.

I’m sure advertising companies would love to collect that much raw candid data. It would seem quite a challenge to do so quietly, however, and given the apparent lack of evidence, is thus unlikely to have been implemented at any kind of scale.

[–] WetBeardHairs@lemmy.ml 14 points 9 months ago (2 children)

That is glossing over how they process the data and transmit it to the cloud. The assistant wake word for "Hey Google" invokes an audio stream to an off site audio processor in order to handle the query. So that is easy to identify via traffic because it is immediate and large.

The advertising-wake words do not get processed that way. They are limited in scope and are handled by the low power hardware audio processor used for listening for the assistant wake word. The wake word processor is an FPGA or ASIC - specifically because it allows the integration of customizable words to listen for in an extremely low power raw form. When an advertising wake word is identified, it sends an interrupt to the CPU along with an enumerated value of which word was heard. The OS then stores that value and transmits a batch of them to a server at a later time. An entire day's worth of advertising wake word data may be less than 1 kb in size and it is sent along with other information.

Good luck finding that on wireshark.

[–] Septimaeus@infosec.pub 8 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Hmm, that’s outside my wheelhouse. So you’re saying phone hardware is designed to listen for not just one but multiple predefined or reprogrammable bank of wake words? I hadn’t read about that yet but it sounds more feasible than the constant livestream idea.

The echo had the capacity for multiple wake words IIRC, but I hadn’t heard of that for mobile devices. I’m curious how many of these key words can they fit?

[–] Fungah@lemmy.world 9 points 9 months ago (2 children)

My own theory is that they tokenize key words and phrases with an AI so that they're not sending the actual audio data. Then it's stored in a form some AI can parse but isn't technically user data so they can skirt legislation around that.

A tokenized collection of key phrases omitting delimiters in text format is going be much, much less than audio, or a transcript.

[–] ben_dover@lemmy.world 12 points 9 months ago

as someone who has played around with offline speech recognition before - there is a reason why ai assistants only use it for the wake word, and the rest is processed in the cloud: it sucks. it's quite unreliable, you'd have to pronounce things exactly as expected. so you need to "train" it for different accents and ways to pronounce something if you want to capture it properly, so the info they could siphon this way is imho limited to a couple thousand words. which is considerable already, and would allow for proper profiling, but couldn't capture your interest in something more specific like a mazda 323f.

but offline speech recognition also requires a fair amount of compute power. at least on our phones, it would inevitably drain the battery

[–] Septimaeus@infosec.pub 2 points 9 months ago (3 children)

That certainly would make the data smuggling easier. What about battery though? I assume that requires inference and at least rudimentary processing.

How would a background process do this in real time on a mobile device without leaving traceable evidence like cpu time?

[–] steveman_ha@lemmy.world 6 points 9 months ago (2 children)

What if its not streaming? What if its just cached for future access, e.g. next time the user opens the app (and network traffic spikes anyways) maybe?

[–] Septimaeus@infosec.pub 3 points 9 months ago

That’s possible too, and in general I’d think a foreground application currently in use alleviates most of the technical restrictions mentioned (read: why we never install FB).

But again we must assume some uncommon device privileges and we still haven’t solved the problem of background energy usage required to record and/or process a real time feed.

[–] Mossheart@lemmy.ca 3 points 9 months ago

Or plugs in their phone at night, bypassing energy use concerns?

[–] BigPotato@lemmy.world 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Cox also sells home automation bundles which advertise "smart" features like voice recognition which are always plugged into the wall.

[–] BrownTree33@lemmy.ml 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Can it be implemented on pc? They often turned on and people speak around them too. Cpu activity much harder to trace when there are a lot of different processes. Someone can blame their phone, while it listening pc near by.

[–] Septimaeus@infosec.pub 4 points 9 months ago

Yeah outside mobile devices I imagine there’s a lot more leeway technically speaking. I’d be far more inclined to suspect a smart TV or a home assistant appliance like Amazon Echo, for example. And certainly there are plenty of PCs out there that are 100% compromised.

But it’s the phone that people often think of as eavesdropping on their conversations. The idea is stickier perhaps because it’s a more personal violation. And I wouldn’t put it past data brokers by any means. They would if they could. I’ve just yet to hear a feasible explanation of how they can without being caught. Hence my doubt.

[–] Zerush@lemmy.ml 8 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

Smartphones by definition are Spyware, at least if you use the OS as is, because in them all aspects are controlled and logged, either by Google on Android or by Apple on iOS. Adding the default apps that cannot be uninstalled on a mobile that is not rooted. As COX alleges, they also use third-party logs and therefore can track and profile the user very well, even without using this technology that they claim to have.

Although they feel authorized by the user's consent to the TOS and PP, the legality depends directly on the legislation of each country. TOS and PP itself, to be a legal contract, must comply in all its points with local legislation to be applicable to the user. For this reason, I think that these practices are very different in the EU from those in the US, where legislation regarding privacy is conspicuous by its absence, that is, that US users should take these COX statements very seriously in their devices, although in the EU they must also be clear that Google and Apple know exactly what they do and where users live, although they are limited from selling this data to third parties.

Basics:

-- READ ALWAYS TOS AND PP

  • Review the permissions of each app, leaving only the most essential ones
  • Desactivate GPS if not used
  • Review in Android every app with Exodus Privacy, maybe Lookout or MyCyberHome in iOS (Freemium apps !!!)
  • Use as less possible apps from the store
  • Be aware of discount apps from the Supermarket or Malls
  • Don't store important data in the Phone (Banking, Medical...)
[–] Septimaeus@infosec.pub 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

Agreed, though I think it’s possible to use smart devices safely. For Android it can be difficult outside custom roms. The OEM flavors tend to have spyware baked in that takes time and root to fully undo, and even then I’m never sure I got it all. These are the most common phones, however, especially in economy price brackets, which is why I’d agree that for the average user most phones are spyware.

Flashing is not useful advice to most. “Just root it bro” doesn’t help your nontechnical relatives who can’t stop downloading toolbars and VPN installers. But with OEM variants undermining privacy at the system level, it feels like a losing battle.

I’d give credit to Apple for their privacy enablement, especially with E2EE, device lockdown, granular access permission control and audits. Unfortunately their devices are not as affordable and I'm not sure how to advise the average Android user beyond general opt-out vigilance.

[–] Zerush@lemmy.ml 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)
[–] Septimaeus@infosec.pub 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Yeah those push token systems need an overhaul. IIRC tokens are specific to app-device combinations, so invalidation that isn’t automatic should be push-button revocation. Users should have control of it like any other API on their device, if only to get apps to stop spamming coupons or whatever.

It’s funny though: when I first saw those headlines, my first reaction was that it was a positive sign, since this was apparently news worthy even though the magnitude of impact for this sort of systemic breach is demonstrably low. (In particular, it pertains to (1) incidental high-noise data (2) associated with devices and (3) available only by request to (4) governments, who are weak compared to even the smallest data brokers WRT capacity for data mining inference and redistribution, to put it mildly.)

Regardless, those systems need attention.

[–] andrew_bidlaw@sh.itjust.works 8 points 9 months ago (1 children)

most phones will just struggle to record and process audio indeterminately without a noticeable impact on energy and data use.

I mean, it's still a valid concern for a commoner. Why my phone has twice the ram and twice the cores and is as slow as my previous one? I'd love to fuel this conspiracy into OS, app makers to do their fucking job.

There's no reason an app can weight more than 50mb on clean install*, and many socials, messengers fail to fit in. A client I use to write this is only 30+, and that's one person doing that for donations.

If there could be a raging theory that apps are selling your data to, like, China, there would be a push to decline it and optimize apps to fit that image.

* I obviously exclude games, synths, editors of any kind with their textures and templates.

[–] WetBeardHairs@lemmy.ml 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

The filesize of most binaries is dominated by text strings and images. Modern applications are loaded with them. Lemmy is atypical in that it doesn't need tons of built in images or text.

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[–] Cheradenine@sh.itjust.works 5 points 9 months ago

Fucking thank you. As I said in another reply, if this was true my firewall logs would be full, or my data cap blown in a week.

[–] library_napper@monyet.cc 5 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (2 children)

What if the processing is done locally and the only thing they send back home is keywords for marketable products?

[–] Septimaeus@infosec.pub 5 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Yeah they’d have to it seems, but real time transcription isn’t free. Even late model devices with better inference hardware have limited battery and energy monitoring. I imagine it’d be hard to conceal that behavior especially for an app recording in the background.

WetBeardHairs@lemmy.ml mentioned that mobile devices use the same hardware coprocessing used for wake word behavior to target specific key phrases. I don’t know anything about that, but it’s one way they could work around the technical limitations.

Of course, that’s a relatively bespoke hardware solution that might also be difficult to fully conceal, and it would come with its own limitations. Like in that case, there’s a preset list of high value key words that you can tally, in order to send company servers a small “score card” rather than a heavy audio clip. But the data would be far less rich than what people usually think of with these flashy headlines (your private conversations, your bowel movements, your penchant for musical theater, whatever).

[–] Goun@lemmy.ml 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I agree.

What could be possible, would be maybe send tiny bits. For example, a device could categorize some places or times, detect out of pattern behaviours and just record a couple of seconds here and there, then send it to the server when requesting something else to avoid being suspicious. Or just pretend it's a "false positive" or whatever and say "sorry, I didn't get that."

I don't think they're listening to everything, but they could technically get something if they wanted to target you.

[–] Septimaeus@infosec.pub 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Right, I suppose cybersecurity isn’t so different than physical security in that way. Someone who really wants to get to you always can (read: why there are so many burner phones at def con).

But for the average person, who uses consumer grade deadbolts in their home and doesn’t hire a private detail when they travel, does an iPhone fit within their acceptable risk threshold? Probably.

[–] LemmyIsFantastic@lemmy.world 29 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (5 children)

And yet thousands of security researchers can't find a shed of evidence. This shit is tiresome and counter productive. The general public is weary of hearing this made up bullshit.

The technical practice isn't hard. That's the claim. The reality is nobody is buying shit doing this and this is just another repost from the same 404 article months ago.

[–] Saik0Shinigami@lemmy.saik0.com 11 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (2 children)

The advertisement literally tells you that they're doing it... The fuck are talking about it's made up? (https://www.cmglocalsolutions.com/blog/active-listening-an-overview as an example)

from the same 404 article months ago.

Dec 14, 2023 (https://www.404media.co/cmg-cox-media-actually-listening-to-phones-smartspeakers-for-ads-marketing/) is months ago? Shit man... What the fuck are you high on?

[–] Dr_Toofing@programming.dev 16 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I still wouldn't believe it. Even the 404 article does not confirm anything and the ad company does not provide any details.

This whole thing feels like marketing, claiming something outrageous to get people talking about your company.

[–] Saik0Shinigami@lemmy.saik0.com 5 points 9 months ago

That's entirely possible. But they did say it themselves on their own site. Look at the link I've posted in response to the other guy.

Even if they're just joking about it they deserve all the negative press they'll get.

[–] Cheradenine@sh.itjust.works 10 points 9 months ago (7 children)

The company added that it does not "listen to any conversations or have access to anything beyond a third-party aggregated, anonymized and fully encrypted data set that can be used for ad placement" and "regret[s] any confusion."

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/12/no-a-marketing-firm-isnt-tapping-your-device-to-hear-private-conversations/

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[–] LainOfTheWired@lemy.lol 19 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Of course they do. It's just they're no longer afraid of telling us they are

[–] Saik0Shinigami@lemmy.saik0.com 21 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

It’s just they’re no longer afraid of telling us they are

They're also lying to themselves...

https://web.archive.org/web/20231214235444/https://www.cmglocalsolutions.com/blog/active-listening-an-overview

Is Active Listening Legal?

We know what you're thinking. Is this even legal? The short answer is: yes. It is legal for phones and devices to listen to you. When a new app download or update prompts consumers with a multi-page terms of use agreement somewhere in the fine print, Active Listening is often included.

They believe that just because the phone's owner agrees that it's legal. If my wife accepts a ToS that allows them to monitor her, and her phone is in my room listening to me... That's definitely NOT legal. This really needs to hit court sooner rather than later. This is wiretapping, this is illegal REGARDLESS of the ToS/EULA nonsense they want to claim covers them.

Edit: Even in one-party consent states this is illegal.

[–] DarkDarkHouse@lemmy.sdf.org 16 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Let's also remember that these phones are sold worldwide, and it's foolish to declare something globally legal.

[–] neuracnu@lemmy.blahaj.zone 16 points 9 months ago

As originally reported over a week ago by 404 Media: https://www.404media.co/cmg-cox-media-actually-listening-to-phones-smartspeakers-for-ads-marketing/

They’ve actually posted several follow up articles and a podcast about it since then.

[–] library_napper@monyet.cc 12 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Very surprised by all the advertising and data broker company boot lickers that are ITT

[–] datavoid@lemmy.ml 6 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Does anyone know of a good wireshark alternative for android?

[–] rainerloeten@lemmy.world 3 points 9 months ago

Imagine it's guerilla marketing haha.

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