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.

  • multiplewolves@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    People worried about “digital eavesdropping” aren’t paranoid. There’s an entire class-action lawsuit based on Apple’s Siri getting caught being activated without the trigger command and data that was captured being sent to third party providers.

    • MudMan@fedia.io
      0·
      2 months ago

      Not outright false, but out of context. That suit was settled with Apple denying any wrongdoing, for one thing, but more importantly, from what I can tell the point wasn’t whether Apple was turning on Siri without permission (which is unlikely) and more that accidental or unintentional activations were being recorded and processed for advertising.

      I presume that’s scarier for Apple, because a) it’s probably very likely to have happened, and b) if a court found they have to be 100% accurate in filtering out unintended activations the entire voice assistant thing may be completely impossible to implement legally.

      So we know they paid some money to settle that, but we don’t know what was going on (beyond research like the one in the linked article by the OP that says it’s unlikely anybody is sending secret voice data).

      • multiplewolves@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        2 months ago

        Nearly every settlement with a major corporation is settled without the company admitting wrongdoing. I don’t doubt that there was an accidental glitch involved. What confuses me is why that makes it ok to you.

        It’s generally a safe bet with cases like this that it would not have made it at far as it did in courts or been as hefty in compensation if the evidence hadn’t been damning.

        Here’s the original article in the Guardian that set the whole thing in motion. Apple formally apologized for it.

        In other words, we kinda do know what happened. There was a whistleblower on the contractor side.

        • MudMan@fedia.io
          0·
          2 months ago

          Yeah, we know what happened and it’s not that Apple was actively triggering Siri without prompting as a way to spy on people.

          The whistleblower you mention (and the article you link) raised that Apple was using human canvassers specifically to filter out accidental activations, or at least to grade the quality of the outcome.

          The concern was raised because they were hearing a lot of sensitive information and felt the reporting on it wasn’t thorough enough.

          Which is certainly bad. It’s a problem.

          But as the OG’s piece says, it is very much NOT an admission that Apple is actively triggering indiscriminate recordings. If anything, it’s the opposite.

          That’s the thing about these. They don’t need to be used nefariously to capture all of this crap. It’s still a microphone reacting to voice commands. On billions of pockets. Any amount of false positives is going to generate thousands, millions of random recordings. I have random recordings of myself from butt dialing my cam app or a voice memo app and I have NEVER turned on voice activation for a voice assistant (because it’s bad and intrusive and a privacy nightmare).

          See, I’m not saying it’s OK with me.

          I’m saying that Siri working as advertised is a privacy nightmare. People somehow feel the need to make up a fictitious exaggeration of what the issue is to make it feel bad to them, except that’s not what’s happening and it’s entirely unnecessary, because the entirely allowed, EULA’d up, publicly disclosed usage of data canvassing throughout the entire ecosystem is much, much, MUCH worse in aggregate.

          What confuses me is why that is ok to you.

          • multiplewolves@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            2 months ago

            My reply was addressing what you’d said here:

            So we know they paid some money to settle that, but we don’t know what was going on (beyond research like the one in the linked article by the OP that says it’s unlikely anybody is sending secret voice data).

            We do know what was going on. It wasn’t user-end research. A contractor whose job was to determine the efficacy of Siri approached the media because they could tell the audio capture for quite a bit of what they were hearing wasn’t intentional.

            To your earlier points, I hope Apple is terrified, and I don’t think that voice activation can be implemented in a way that protects its users from privacy violations.

            I don’t know what about my reply led you to believe I am ok with any of this, but to clarify, I am a proponent of strict privacy laws that protect consumers before businesses.

            I think “accidents” precede intentional action and I only trust Apple (or any other big tech company) as far as I can throw it.