Comment by nivertech
1 year ago
I won't disclose names.
But thinking from the first principles, do you really think that all this phonetic keyword spotting[1] IP developed for defense tech in the late 90s and early 2000s was abandoned once recording entire phone conversations and doing full speech to text on them became technologically possible?
I still remember lots of startups who did this stuff openly a decade ago, before Cambridge Analytica scandal[2]. After that it became impossible to get funding or get acquired, so the few that stayed in this field became very secretive.
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[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyword_spotting
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_A...
You know users have to authorize apps to use the microphone right? That pretty much limits the theoretical exposure to VoIP, camera, and translation apps.
On iPhone, activating the microphone causes an icon to appear, which the app can’t hide. I think if the app is in the background, it turns the whole status bar bright red.
Secondly, there is power use attribution and it would be very obvious if an app were keeping the device awake and the microphone on based on battery drain and runtime accounting.
So you are asking us to accept on faith a shadowy ad SDK that is both widely used but also cannot be named, one that somehow subverts multiple layers of the system security architecture? Ok. We believe you.
A lot of apps ask for it up front upon installation.
On iOS apps must provide a reason for requesting it which appears in the prompt. App Review makes sure the reason is justified. A library might be able to opportunistically piggyback on this permission but again the mic indicator would be on. It would more than likely be discovered and the app banned.