• Fungah@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    My own theory is that they tokenize key words and phrases with an AI so that they’re not sending the actual audio data. Then it’s stored in a form some AI can parse but isn’t technically user data so they can skirt legislation around that.

    A tokenized collection of key phrases omitting delimiters in text format is going be much, much less than audio, or a transcript.

    • Septimaeus@infosec.pub
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      1 year ago

      That certainly would make the data smuggling easier. What about battery though? I assume that requires inference and at least rudimentary processing.

      How would a background process do this in real time on a mobile device without leaving traceable evidence like cpu time?

      • steveman_ha@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        What if its not streaming? What if its just cached for future access, e.g. next time the user opens the app (and network traffic spikes anyways) maybe?

        • Septimaeus@infosec.pub
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          1 year ago

          That’s possible too, and in general I’d think a foreground application currently in use alleviates most of the technical restrictions mentioned (read: why we never install FB).

          But again we must assume some uncommon device privileges and we still haven’t solved the problem of background energy usage required to record and/or process a real time feed.

      • BigPotato@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Cox also sells home automation bundles which advertise “smart” features like voice recognition which are always plugged into the wall.

      • BrownTree33@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        Can it be implemented on pc? They often turned on and people speak around them too. Cpu activity much harder to trace when there are a lot of different processes. Someone can blame their phone, while it listening pc near by.

        • Septimaeus@infosec.pub
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          1 year ago

          Yeah outside mobile devices I imagine there’s a lot more leeway technically speaking. I’d be far more inclined to suspect a smart TV or a home assistant appliance like Amazon Echo, for example. And certainly there are plenty of PCs out there that are 100% compromised.

          But it’s the phone that people often think of as eavesdropping on their conversations. The idea is stickier perhaps because it’s a more personal violation. And I wouldn’t put it past data brokers by any means. They would if they could. I’ve just yet to hear a feasible explanation of how they can without being caught. Hence my doubt.