One of my weirder hobbies is trying to convince people that the idea that companies are listening to you through your phone’s microphone and serving you targeted ads is a …

Not my title! I do think we are being listened to. And location tracked. And it’s being passed on to advertisers. Is it apple though? Probably not is my take away from this article, but I don’t trust plenty of others, and apple still does

  • FoxEnglish
    918·
    3 days ago

    I’m not so sure. When my partner and I were on a road trip we had android auto connected and were singing along to songs we listened to via Spotify. At some point though, when I tried to fiddle with some settings the connection between the car and the smartphone bugged out and while trying to fix it we suddenly heard his voice being played back on the speakers “whispering” some lyrics he had sung 30 to 60 minutes earlier.

    I put whispered in quotes because he certainly didn’t whisper those lyrics and I recalled the moment he sang them quite clearly. Beside his singing and the music playing there were no other sounds at that time.

    My best guess is that he was actually recorded while singing and something was stripping all the background noises and music to make his speech more clear for speech to text analysis. It was creepy as fuck.

    We both work in IT and I truly have no other idea what this could have been given the circumstances. He said there is actually a company that provides a framework that listens to, records and analyses whatever is spoken near smartphone microphones and all the big tech players like Google are using it. I don’t remember the name though. Would have to ask him.

    • ByteJunk@lemmy.worldEnglish
      143·
      3 days ago

      That’s the most unlikely story I’ve heard in a minute… Even assuming there’re some deep rooted kernel level shenanigans, which no one has found yet, how would you fiddling with some settings expose that?

      Probably just got a dropped call, and it resumed the playlist in shuffle, I’ve had it happen where the music comes out as if in a phone call (messes up frequencies) for a few seconds before it goes back to normal. Occam’s razor and all

      • FoxEnglish
        45·
        3 days ago

        Believe what you want, I don’t really care. The whole connection bugged out and the car’s infotainment system including android auto became unresponsive. There was no call, it wasn’t shuffle and it was definitely his voice, not the music playing. Especially since there was only the whispered singing. No other instruments at all.

        • AtariDump@lemmy.worldEnglish
          22·
          2 days ago

          I believe it was sunspots that caused bit flips on the phone CPU and regurgitated data from the L5 cache. /s