Cox deletes ‘Active Listening’ ad pitch after boasting that it eavesdrops though our phones
(www.fastcompany.com)
from L4s@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world on 27 Dec 2023 12:00
https://lemmy.world/post/10023832
from L4s@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world on 27 Dec 2023 12:00
https://lemmy.world/post/10023832
Cox deletes ‘Active Listening’ ad pitch after boasting that it eavesdrops though our phones::undefined
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this was such a weird claim, and I never really understood how it could be true specifically for phones, where they aren’t in control of system software. there’s like a gradient of possibility here:
so: I’m careful about what I use so my risk felt pretty low, but I also feel like if this were true security researchers would’ve discovered it. let alone the fact that what they describe is bandwidth and battery intensive (off-device or on-device respectively, I don’t remember what they claimed as I read the 404 media report some weeks back) but it still makes me wonder: what led them to make these claims then? fascinating, pretty scary.
My take is two fold: 1- Marketing over selling their product (common practice) 2- The “always listening” devices are mainly their Smart Remotes that have a microphone built in.
#2 Seems the most likely as is a device fully in their control and can pull as much ad marketing / information gathering details from it as they want.
The spying that’s openly admitted in terms and conditions should be alarming enough — if anyone actually read and understood all the legalese. Consider this: time.com/5568815/amazon-workers-listen-to-alexa/
I’ve seen Android phones activate Google Assistant seemingly at random many many many times. They’re only supposed to activate when called by a specific phrase like “okay Google”, but there are plenty of false positives, and every time that happens, an audio recording gets sent to Google. Same deal with Alexa and Siri. This is, of course, allowed by the terms and conditions.
At least Android makes it visible to the user when this happens. I wouldn’t bet on smart TVs doing the same.
At this point there’s not much you can do about it. Even if I secure my own devices and my own home network, that all goes out the window the second anyone else walks in my door with their own smartphone.
That said, I agree that the claim is likely false with third-party apps on modern smartphones from major brands. It’s not easy for background activities to access the camera or microphone without the user’s knowledge on iOS or Android. First-party and second-party spying is hard to avoid, though.
Except Siri processing is actually done on your device, as of iOS 15. Which kind of blew my mind when it was announced.
Nothing is sent to Apple unless you request an online service (such as weather, maps, etc.) or unless you allow your recordings to be sent.
Try it: in airplane mode on an iOS 15 device: Siri still works at a basic level. Language processing happens locally.
Thanks for the correction. More details here: www.macrumors.com/guide/ios-15-siri/
And you can even do Google takeout and see all the recordings they took of you. Many of which you’ll notice doesn’t have you asking or doing anything remotely related to a voice search.
It’s especially weird when the existing targeting can be so effective for much cheaper.
For tvs for example, they can see what you watch, when, what ads you mute and which you don’t, what you display over HDMI (content ID), the other devices on your network, your location, your accounts for every streaming service, what you search for. Then if you install their companion app they learn the other apps on your phone, your location habits, the media you play on your phone (looking at you Bose connect app…), bluetooth and network devices you are near (connecting you to other profiles they know), and probably a lot more.
content id is a wild one that I only discovered a year ago: I had always used my own Chromecast when traveling, and I plugged it into a Roku TV which kept saying “did you know you could watch [content that I was currently watching] on Roku” which really freaked me out, so I looked into it. honestly not sure why they tipped their hand like that: I found the setting and turned it off. otherwise I would’ve been none the wiser.
creepy af though. the amount of tracking you implicitly accept by using random devices out in the world is staggering. even if you read every privacy policy and opt out of everything (I do) you have no chance.
Wouldn’t be bandwidth intensive if the device had onboard TTS. Seems pretty doable to me.
that’s fair.
Bold added for emphasis, Apple claims privacy as a feature and OS control of the mic to prevent this exact sort of thing. Not only would someone have found it, it would be a news cycle on the mainstream news, and basically just the wallpaper for any tech-centric website.
I mean, fucks sake, iFixIt alone would find mics in places they shouldn’t be and this would be a story.
Unfortunately, the truth is more boring, and basically pretty much every app/website most of us use are tracking us in some way unless you really seek prevention. They don’t need the mic.
I’m confident this is built in to many smart TVs these days.
Well. Wireshark would confirm that if it were true.
I’m sure it will show HTTPS traffic outbound from your TV.
It would show the encrypted out bound traffic right? You wouldn’t be able to identify it by reading the bits, but you could by the volume and not doing anything else.
Maybe. They might do some processing locally and just upload as text so it might be easy to batch the data, making the upload volume and pattern less obvious.
It also saves them network bandwidth so I’m sure that would motivate them too. Uploading raw mic data from all TVs would be expensive.
You’re getting down voted, but this seems the most likely. TTS is trivial anymore.
I’m sure it will show no traffic whatsoever if you don’t connect your TV to your network
There’s a dozen ways they could jump the air gap.
Ultrasonic to a phone or Alexa/Siri/etc, connect to an unsecured network, send data to a neighbor’s smart TV which is connected to Internet, Bluetooth or other to a phone
But this would be proven then?
Something that can be done easily and may be done in the future, if it hasn’t been discovered yet
Clandestine methods have been known since the 2000s. We know they’re scummy and want our data. Why does this seem too crazy?
Because it would result in a scandal and it seems easily discoverable (by professional investigators/engineers). I don’t know. It’s likely done on a small, targeted, scale, but can’t imagine this rolled out on a large scale. Too little gain for the potential lashback, quite some factors need to be right, too.
The economics aren’t there. A cellular chip and a subscription will not pay for the private conversations of a random house.
You could be right, but I’m not alleging they would use cell.
Presumably the smart appliance already has wireless capabilities like WiFi/BLE. And then it’s just a software exercise on how to code an interface between devices of the same manufacturer.
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Low-bandwidth cellular chip…
That would add a ludicrous amount of cost to the device in both material cost and R&D. It’s so incredibly unlikely that any company would make that investment just to spy on the conversations of ordinary citizens when there are far cheaper and easier ways for them to build and sell advertising profiles.
Ludicrous R&D?
Ultrasound is used by Microsoft teams, some apps use it to transmit data between phones. Back in the day there was a chrome app to transfer links.
Amazon sidewalk already connects devices together. Samsung Smart things already bridges Samsung devices. Apple Air tags already use “primary” Internet connected devices to transmit data about “secondary” devices.
None of this is new tech, it’s all feasible.
its not unlikely, devices were already shown doing shit like this
At that point the customer acquisition cost is t worth it.
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Source?
Either way, open networks are very uncommon in residential areas (and honestly in general)
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Source that it happens obviously.
You claimed that they connected to open networks.
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That is just a bunch of more speculation.
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No, there is no proof of it happening and it’s extremely likely to be coincidences or even made up. It’s the internet after all.
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Either way, I need some evidence or at least some slightly realistic and reputable observations before I will believe it.
And with DNS requests and timing you should be able to figure whats in those packets.
Sorry if this is a noob question, but…how?
DNS will tell you the server name and address, which would just be some server owned by the company. Nothing weird there unless they have the chutzpah to name it something telling. They could even bypass DNS entirely with hardcoded IP addresses.
Timing wouldn’t be a great indicator either if they aggregate requests.
They could slide anything nefarious in with daily software update checks or whatever other phone-homing they normally do, and without deep packet inspection or reverse engineering the software, it would be very difficult to tell.
I don’t think Wireshark can do deep packet inspection, can it? Assuming the client is using SSL and verifying certs, maybe even using cert pinning?
Size would be a big indicator if they’re sending full voice recordings, but not if they’re doing voice recognition locally and only sending transcripts, metadata, or keywords.
I’ve never actually done this kind of work in earnest, and my experience with Wireshark is at least a decade out of date. I’m just approaching this from the perspective of “if I were a corporate shitbag, how would I implement my shitbaggery?”
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.
Try it out. Setup dnsmasq and connect your phone to the network. You’ll see a ton of requests initially, that gives you some idea of what apps/services/accounts are on the phone. Let the phone go to sleep, and watch what is sending requests in the background. Many services use very specific host names which indicate what is being processed.
On the TV, it would be similar. You walk into the room and it starts sending packets? You say something unrelated to its trigger word yet Wireshark shows activity? Suspicious. If you can get a certificate onto the TV you can use mitmproxy to view the HTTPS traffic, but that’s probably kinda difficult.
I do not use smart TVs but I have been doing stuff like the above for a while. If they are recording and storing stuff some engineer eventually figures out, it’s not an NSA backdoor.
I’m not saying they are/aren’t, I do not know, it just seems very unlikely and improbable especially given smart phone ubiquity. What is known to be actually occuring is a complete violation of consumer privacy for marketing purposes, but OPs form of spying is so far unsubstantiated.
Now, can that TV be hacked and used by your neighbor to spy on you? Or can your government access your mic/camera? That’s an entirely different question and field of expertise.
More info
In this case, it would be pretty hard. We have wiretap laws, which would mean you have to tell the user you’re doing this. Even though no one reads the ToS, someone does, and it would be news if someone was doing this.
Even then, it would be a hard enough problem that companies would think twice about it for a few reasons. Number one, processing 24/7 of all audio in your home is going to be rather difficult/expensive, so you’d have to go with something like keyword-triggers-processing the way that your phone listens for “hey google/siri” or Amazon listens for “Alexa.” It works kinda like game video sharing - they are always listening and recording for a short time frame* but they only send the data somewhere if they hear the trigger phrase. That’s not easy in itself, they’ve spent a ton of time getting the right algorithm so that it correctly hears the right trigger phrase and you don’t get a ton of false positives to varying degrees of success. And keeping in mind these are companies that are best suited to it, they still struggle sometimes with even that. The ad companies would have to listen for dozens/hundreds/thousands of triggers…
And then you get to the data retention policies. Google is an ad company, Apple is not. One of the reasons that Apple can tout privacy as a feature is simply that they don’t need the data, so they don’t collect nearly as much, and they save even less. They get the bonus of not dealing with law enforcement and all that.
So, assuming they solve that, solve some big issues with the laws of the land and physics, now we’re to the point where they have to think about network traffic. Which is going to be trivially easy for nerds to figure out and circumvent, so they would have to have their own ad-hoc network which comes with another 137 or so difficulties.
That’s not how that works lol
I dont add it [edit: smart tv] to the wifi or drop a cat 5 cable to it and my smart phone will still see it in the house and ask if I want the two devices to connect. I miss when TVs were a bit thicker and easier to take apart so you could easily take out the wifi and Bluetooth cards.
If it were, it would be pretty common knowledge and there would be several news cycles about it. I don’t doubt that they could bury it in the terms of service, but we have wiretap laws in enough places that are two-party consent that it would have had to come out by now. Not to mention nerds like me running pi-hole and monitoring their traffic, repair people who could easily regonize a mic in the device, etc.
The privacy agreement in them covers it, just like Alexa.
Check yours, if you don’t agree to the privacy agreement, things like cable and broadcast channel recognition don’t work.
It also breaks Automatic Content Recognition, which enables the manufacturer to monitor what you’re watching.
Granted that’s not the same as listening, but it’s close enough. And we know Google employees have been caught listening/watching people. There was another article just the other day of another company caught doing the same.
Just because something’s illegal doesn’t stop people from doing it.
As for catching it with monitoring… We know Microsoft has hard coded domain names into certain DLL’s since XP, so you can’t block the domains with a hosts file. There’s some talk in the Pihole community about smart tv’s being able to bypass your DNS with hard-coded IP destinations - they only need one to be able to then deliver their own DNS.
Some smart TV’s will connect to others via wifi if they don’t have connectivity, yet another way to bypass our efforts to block their connections.
That manufacturers are so blatantly adversarial makes it pretty clear they’ll try to get away with anything they can. And anything I can think of, surely their dedicated teams of engineers thought of it long before me.
Edit: then there’s apps like Netflix, Prime, Peacock, Hulu, YouTube, etc, that make encrypted connections to home. It would be trivial to permit those apps to deliver alternative name resolution for the entire OS on TV’s since we don’t control the OS.
Chance that it’s just marketing people talking out of their asses again, but then again, we have a lot of cheap smart devices with dubious firmwares so it might be possible on those sketchy devices.
I mean, it’s possible on any device with a microphone that’s connected to the internet. But can people advertising a service just lie? That’s when the law actually works, when it’s a company hurting another company. So if false advertising laws were ever going to be enforced, it’d be against a claim like this. I don’t think they’d take the chance of the bad PR of this getting out and the potential suit if they weren’t able to do it when a different deep-pocketed entity took them to court over the false claims to get their business.
It’s fully possible, there’s no question about that. The government has been using cell phones to do this for a long time, as evidenced by the Snowden leaks. There were CIA “broken eagle” leaks (if I’m remembering that correctly) claiming any smart tv was a possible bug, but this was back when it seemed like there were unreasonable hurdles in the way for them to actually achieve it when, now, it’s all the more possible as we connect more “smart” devices that have become cheaper and cheaper. Have you read the privacy policy on all of the different smart device apps? Because I don’t use any of that IOT bullshit but i read the policy for my new ear buds last month and I ran those fuckers back to the store as fast as I could. The allowances have become genuinely insane.
So, it’s technically possible, we’ve become way more lax as products have become cheaper and more permissive with the permissions we allow them (have you noticed how everything needs access to your location now? Like…to use Bluetooth or Wi-Fi, I’m told I need to give it access to my location. What’s that shit?), and the privacy policies state they can have access to pretty much any information the product has the potential to gather.
So…are they doing it? I can’t be sure. But it is entirely technically possible and they’re asking permission to do it and there is widespread anecdotal evidence that it’s happening and they’re now claiming they’re doing it…so…at what point do we just have to accept that they’re doing it?
I don’t know why anyone would believe anyone would like that.
I’ve worked with marketers for years. many of them have a blind spot for what they create: they can realize something is irritating, or invasive, but not when it’s their marketing, which is obviously superior and what people want to see. it’s some sort of artist+marketer brainrot.
sorry to generalize, I’ve just seen it a lot over the years.
I imagine this is something like it: we’ll reach them with the perfect message, it’ll be exactly what they want! won’t that be delightful?
…completely ignoring how horrifying it is.
This was a pitch to their customers. They just forgot that we could hear them too.
Many companies already do this, but advertising it is unpalatable. Just be like Google and Facebook. For awhile the Facebook app was so bad about it that it caused significant battery drain and the only way to avoid it was to remove the app.
Tom Wamsgabs in shambles.
We here for you.
We hear for you
Their claim was bullshit from the beginning:
So typical advertising mechanisms, not “active listening”. Someone from marketing was too eager to sell their service.
Yeah but I already believe they are listening because one time I talked about something and it advertised it to me, and let’s ignore all of the hundreds of things I also said just that day alone that it didn’t advertise to me, so this was clearly “saying the quiet part out loud.” And now they are just trying to cover their asses.