Administrator of thelemmy.club

Nerd, truck driver, and kinda creeped that you’re reading this.

  • 9 Posts
  • 374 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Cox got caught buying that data, and when confronted about it, Google, Amazon, and Meta all failed to deny that they also buy that data from those malicious app makers

    But what is that based on? This paragraph?

    A spokesperson for CMG told Newsweek that “CMG businesses have never listened to any conversations nor had access to anything beyond third-party aggregated, anonymized, and fully encrypted data sets that can be used for ad placement.”

    I don’t think that explicitly means they had datasets made up of clandestinely recorded conversations in the wild.

    third-party aggregated, anonymized, and fully encrypted data sets that can be used for ad placement.

    Really could describe ANY possible set of tracking data… Unless you put this quote into a clickbaitey article and strongly imply it’s something sinister.


  • Someone back this up with proof. Security researchers would’ve noticed this. They’d’ve had to have hacked their way around the microphone permission systems and microphone use indicator (depending on OS) on your phone and upload that data without being caught by security analysts. That kind of bug would probably be worth a fairly decent bounty too.

    The article talks about a slide in a PITCH to advertisers. But not a concrete system. Then it goes on to say advertisers bought a dataset from other sources. What dataset? From where? It doesn’t say. Transcriptions from voice assistants? Maybe. But without hard evidence I don’t believe random apps are just recording clandestinely in the background. But people want to believe this so writing shitty unsourced articles with click bait titles and tenuous-if-I’m-generous linking of weak facts lacking entirely in context generates lots of clicks.