“What would it mean for your business if you could target potential clients who are actively discussing their need for your services in their day-to-day conversations? No, it's not a Black Mirror episode—it's Voice Data, and CMG has the capabilities to use it to your business advantage.”
And yet thousands of security researchers can't find a shed of evidence. This shit is tiresome and counter productive. The general public is weary of hearing this made up bullshit.
The technical practice isn't hard. That's the claim. The reality is nobody is buying shit doing this and this is just another repost from the same 404 article months ago.
The company added that it does not "listen to any conversations or have access to anything beyond a third-party aggregated, anonymized and fully encrypted data set that can be used for ad placement" and "regret[s] any confusion."
We know what you’re thinking. Is this even legal? The short answer is: yes. It is legal for phones and devices to listen to you. When a new app download or update prompts consumers with a multi-page terms of use agreement somewhere in the fine print, Active Listening is often included.
The Ars article literally analyzes this exact claim and shows that it was over-exaggerated marketing to mislead advertisers, and when they were called out for their bullshit CMG pulled their crap from the Internet — you even link to an archive.org page, which corroborates what happened.
Selectively ignoring contradictory evidence in favor of evidence that supports your argument is cherry-picking.
According to the company this is all from regular 3rd party stuff. Being legal or not is beside the point when you are not actually doing something.
You're argument is based on what a marketing company put in their marketing.
Read the article, with clarifications from the company
ETA : if this were true I would either see it in my firewall logs, or it would blow through my data cap in a week. Surveillance capitalism is bullshit, this is just a grift.
Fight as long as you want, when they were called out on it they backed off. The technical aspects of this are not trivial, nor is the amount of data needed as anyone who has had an Alexa or similar spyware in their house will tell you.
Like I said
if this were true I would either see it in my firewall logs, or it would blow through my data cap in a week.
if this were true I would either see it in my firewall logs, or it would blow through my data cap in a week.
Audio is literally trivial amounts of bandwidth. You wouldn't notice it at all. Using something like Opus, you could stream audio 24/7 and reach about 300MBs uploaded. Now do some basic trimming/word processing... That number can easily be less than 10MB a day.
Bro, I'll literally be having a conversation with someone about a topic, and all of the sudden Google starts recommending me products related to the discussion afterwards. Smart phones and smart speakers without a doubt listen in on our conversations. There's the evidence.
Eh, surprised that's happening to someone in this community. Strip Google off your phone and throw out any hardware with a microphone that doesn't run open source software and this will stop happening.