A longstanding conspiracy is the tale of how Facebook is listening in on your conversations, but the way it is actually serving you ads is much more unsettling.

A longstanding conspiracy is the tale of how Facebook is listening in on your conversations, but the way it is actually serving you ads is much more unsettling.

  • infeeeee@lemm.eeEnglish
    27·
    1 day ago

    An earlier version of this article was published in 2019.

    While the content of the article is true, and I had to explain it to other people on the internet and irl multiple times in the last decade, the article doesn’t write about the new TPU chips nowadays appearing in devices. With them full on-device STT will become more and more possible, so the tests mentioned in the article won’t detect eavesdropping, as they won’t need to send sound files to datacenters, only the transcript.

    It would have been useful if they wrote about this new vector in the article, as TPUs were not that common in 2019.

    • MudMan@fedia.io
      7·
      1 day ago

      Okay, but if the myth was false then and the behavior of the legit user interaction with the voice assistant versus idle is different… why would they wait until they have on-device processing to implement it that way? Why would they implement expensive server recognition for intended use but sneak in on-device processing JUST for advertising purposes they are already mining you for well within the EULA’s terms? That and you’d definitely see it in battery consumption, if not in data throughput. NPUs/TPUs are hungry bois, so it wouldn’t be a particularly smart workaround for quiet detection.

      It’s not that I think they wouldn’t spy on your conversations, it’s that I think it’d be bad business to do it that way.

      This is always shocking to me. I mean, the researchers in this example are out there going “no, seriously, these third party apps are taking screenshots of your phone whenever you give screenshot permissions and sometimes sending video of what you do and they track you to the smallest detail and it’s messed up” and everybody brushes that off and goes BUT SIRI IS LISTENING THO!!! and you just can’t convince them to care about the real bad thing or to stop caring about the probably false less bad thing.

      It’s very confusing to me.

      • infeeeee@lemm.eeEnglish
        1·
        24 hours ago

        I guess there is some, but not too much valuable content in spoken personal conversations. Current tech is not there yet, so it would be more costly in money and reputation to build some datacenters for this yet. If the money cost would go order of magnitudes lower they would wrap it in some marketing bullshit like “you can search in your all memories”, lot of people would gladly allow it (iirc there was a black mirror episode about a device like this)

        I think it won’t happen tomorrow or in the near future, my point was they just reposted a 6 years old article without writing about a new and relelevant development in the topic.

        • MudMan@fedia.io
          2·
          24 hours ago

          Well, I do agree that it’s weird to update a five year old article by injecting new content without fully rewriting it. They did update it, they are reporting some stuff that Cox Media Group did in 2024, the backlash to it and the eventual backtracking. But they’re not providing version control, so it’s hard to know what’s new and old in the piece. They probably should have just made a separate follow-up.

          Still, you can’t be mad at something that isn’t happening because you think maybe it will happen some day but not be mad at things that are happening that are worse than the thing that isn’t happening. That makes no sense. Why make up a false outrageous scenario and not discuss the real, current more outrageous one?

          Incidentally, this whole line of questioning is why I absolutely loathe Black Mirror in both concept and execution. Yeah, speaking of unpopular opinions.