I am kind of blown away today to see two different news stories that talk about new “features” from two different big companies that translate into “they are listening to you and everything around you automatically now”. With all the uproar about so many different places spying on people, sucking in their personal info and using it in ways that most will never understand, to see two big companies with new listening features built in is kind of surprising. Maybe they are trying to push news stories to the top of the pages that offer “benefits” of their spying on users, hoping that the other news stories where these companies were giving away data to governments in massive amounts and selling off data to others might get buried further down.
I just glanced over these stories and have not read into all the details, but from what I gather at the moment, they say that google’s chrome browser will not automatically hear everything that is picked up by your microphone, and so will the facebook app for phones and tablets. I remember reading about a chrome bug a little while back that would give almost any web site the ability to turn on your microphone and listen in to you and your surroundings, not sure that ever got patched or even changed a little bit. This new feature that facebook is rolling out with will definitely keep me from ever installing their facebook apps.
I have not seen all the details on the chrome browsers listening in yet to know if it is an automatic feature and if it is enabled on phones and tablets yet. This needs to be figured out, because I am not sure that you can delete chrome from an android device that is not rooted. Definitely some more research needs to be done here. I know the headline of the story is that google will be helping people to use voice search by always listening in and waiting to hear “ok google” – but if these apps are listening for that, what else are they listening for and when will that change? To think that other people around you could be affected by the data collection of these apps makes it even more important to understand exactly how these things are working.
I read a while back that using google’s voice search on android (I can’t remember if it’s all voice search, just google chrome, or even when using the stock browser or mobile firefox, etc) – that google uses your phone or tablet to convert the audio, send it to google’s servers where it decodes what you said, converts it to text and then comes up with the search results. I was kind of surprised to see that google was taking all the audio to their servers for this. I had thought the phone or tablet was converting the audio to text, and only sending the text search term to google. Well them getting the audio is a big deal – for one that is more data / bandwidth you may have to pay for if you are using a cellular connection, than just plain text. Two – who’s to say they are not extrapolating other audio in the background and storing info about that?
I also wonder if google or facebook is encrypting the audio that is snatched from your device before it sends? If they are not, that means anyone can take your audio file between your system and theirs, snatching it out of the air or via packets as they travel around all the internet routers.
The two sentences that are blowing me away right now:
Facebook will automatically listen to you, but you have to opt-in to get its suggestions.
The app uses microphones built into iPhone and Android phones, and can recognize a show within 15 seconds.
So this is happening in the background, perhaps without anyone’s knowledge. It’s turned on automatically. Didn’t they get into some trouble for changing people’s privacy options more than once in the past? I suggest uninstalling any facebook app you have on your phone or tablet, and if you must use fakebook, then surf it with your regular web browser, not the app. Now I guess we also need to be concerned if someone is sitting near us and they have a facebook app running, as someone else’s facebook app could be pilfering anything we are saying or hearing.
Meh.
http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2014/05/21/facebooks-mobile-app-is-listening-to-what-you.html
http://www.theverge.com/2014/5/22/5740946/chrome-ok-google-voice-search
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@Crystal – if you are looking for some posting / commenting type chatting with others in with a system similar to this, then I suggest you look into the anti-facebook social networking thing for like minded adults at adults only space.
Most of the comments and replies on this page will be few and far between. Most of the people who visit this site spend 99% of their time in the various real time chat rooms. The comments on this area of the site do not see any near the kind of action what we see in the chat rooms, or that people are posting back and forth on AO Space.
There is another section to this site where people do post some open comments and get replies in a similar manner, you can find that in the “peeps” social section here.
Another interesting piece on Facebook
Interesting and certainly an invasion of peoples privacy *meh’s too*