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Your phone isn't secretly listening to you, but the truth is more disturbing

(newatlas.com)
369 points zeech | 2 comments | 26 Apr 25 00:26 UTC | HN request time: 0.552s | source
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Am4TIfIsER0ppos ◴[26 Apr 25 02:35 UTC] No.43800423[source]▶
I seem to recall that state of the art audio encoding can compress voice to 8kbit/s which is a single packet per second, insignificant compared to how chatty your device is. Trivial to buffer and send during a period of activity. It sums to 1.7MB over the 30 minute window in the article graphs which should be visible if it is actually counted. Why would apple or google actually make it count though? They want to spy on you either for their own benefit or because the government forces them to. You say you found it taking screenshots and phoning them home. Of course! It is a surveillance device. Is it worse? Maybe. You should consider it sends everything home. Every keystroke, every touch of the screen, every sample of the accelerometers, every sample of audio. Perhaps only the sheer quantity of data in video prevents them from sending it all. Might be "remedied" with 5G bandwidth.
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1. sampullman ◴[26 Apr 25 03:02 UTC] No.43800532[source]▶
Audio, screenshots, and some of the other stuff I can believe, but I think batteries need a big upgrade before the data snatchers can get away with streaming video, even at a low bitrate.

I'm also not sure how easy keylogging is these days, is there even a permission that allows it? I supposed there's ways to do it with custom keyboards. Google/Apple doing it themselves would be a pretty big deal.

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2. Am4TIfIsER0ppos ◴[26 Apr 25 11:09 UTC] No.43802589[source]▶
I think everyone acknowledges that chrome sends every keystroke in the address bar home. I don't keep up with the spyware so perhaps it is now every keystroke in the rest of the browser. It isn't much of a leap further that their operating system does the same.