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

This article reminds me of this excellent tongue-in-cheek piece of writing by Jonathan Zeller in McSweeney's:

Calm Down—Your Phone Isn’t Listening to Your Conversations. It’s Just Tracking Everything You Type, Every App You Use, Every Website You Visit, and Everywhere You Go in the Physical World

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/calm-down-your-phone-isn...

There is so much time spent “debunking” audio recordings being shared with various entities it makes me more suspicious.

Just like Facebook’s “we never sell your data (we just stalk you and sell ads using your data)”. I’m sure there’s a similar weasel excuse… “we never listen to your audio (but we do analyze it to improve quality assurance)”

I can just say that I knew an entrepreneur in early post Y2K who developed apps to track music played in clubs in SF for folks like ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC. They gave out "free" phones (these were the small expensive candybars and nice flip/slideups) to the influencers of the day. They compressed the audio for orthogonality, and had a huge number of hashes to match. If they got more than a few consecutive matching hashes at a location that wasn't paying royalties, they got an enforcement call.

So the idea that it takes a huge amount of computing resources, battery life, permissions, or bandwidth to do matching of keywords is hilarious. That's what "siri", "hey google", "alexa" etc are all doing 24 hours a day. Just add another hundred and report them once an hour. You don't need low latency. It's just another tool in the bag!

Of course the cat food example is bad, because if they weren't looking for that you wouldn't get a response. Who would be willing to pay big for clicks on cat food. Now bariatric surgery? DUI? HELOC? Those pay.

>That's what "siri", "hey google", "alexa" etc are all doing 24 hours a day.

You might have just convinced me that the “phone is listening” is total bunk, because these dedicated devices are just so bad at recognizing the very specific, short, phrases when explicitly directed at them that I can’t imagine they are listening for much more. Listening to my in-laws try to activate their Alexa and Google Homes is something the CIA might consider for their next torture method.

You expect 95% accuracy matching activation phrases. You don't need that for ads. It only needs to work some of the time for some of the people, especially if it makes $/click.