Comment by simonw
1 year ago
"We know from leaks, reverse-engineering"
I would be VERY interested to hear details of those leaks and that reverse-engineering. I've only ever heard the personal anecdotes.
(If you'd read my article you would have seen this bit at the top: "Convincing people of this is basically impossible. It doesn’t matter how good your argument is, if someone has ever seen an ad that relates to their previous voice conversation they are likely convinced and there’s nothing you can do to talk them out of it.")
I truly wish I had a bibliography to give you but it has been so obviously true to me that I hadn't bothered to catalogue all of this information. I'll try to get you started though. Start by familiarizing yourself with the Snowden leaks and how the government buys data from private companies to violate the constitution. Second, look for articles like this one: https://www.pcworld.com/article/2450052/do-smartphones-liste... This kind of thing is published periodically. Apple lost a lawsuit over Siri spying "inadvertently" very recently: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/apple-agrees-to-... There is no reason to believe that your phone is ever not listening. The audio can at least be transcribed and catalogued.
If companies are willing to track your every click and mouse movement, every footstep and slight movement you make with your phone even while you are asleep, build and bundle keyboard apps to capture what you type, monitor you with AI, etc., are you seriously surprised that they would not also listen to you? None of that stuff I just described is fiction. It's established tech that has been documented over time. The only reason it's not 100% illegal is because the EULA probably covers it.
I swear people who think they aren't listening when they can seem like people who would be shocked to learn that an armed carjacker might demand your wallet in addition to your car. Unreal...
Oh yeah one more tip. Try to use the data export feature from Google or Facebook. You might just be surprised what you find. I've heard of people finding recordings of private conversations picked up by Google devices. I personally found hundreds of Facebook messages and posts that I deleted with a tool, and aren't visible to anyone (OK maybe the messages make sense but not the posts).
> Apple lost a lawsuit over Siri spying "inadvertently" very recently
That's what my article is about: it's about how I'm certain people will use this settled-out-of-court lawsuit as "evidence" that Apple are spying and targeting ads, but it's very clear that's not what was happening here.
Apple settled because they knew they would lose. Winning is good PR since they (falsely) claim to be favorable for privacy. They are only superficially better than Google in that regard. I did skim your article and it's not as bad as I thought. I think you really mean it when you say these are just coincidences. But they're not.
Another one I forgot to mention: Google explicitly tracks your location history unless you turn it off, and you'd be foolish to think that they won't (or couldn't) save the data anyway. People have done experiments showing dramatic improvements in battery life using AOSP without Google telemetry and spyware.
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Now you should read the details of Apple's Siri lawsuit.