Technology

And do what? Sentiment analysis on the conversation you were having?

Remember semantically aware models are still fairly new and even they lack the context for a particular field of text. That's something even the new fancy LLMs struggle with.

Unnecessary when there's way better targeted models trained on years of data that people willingly send as part of everyday smartphone use.

If you use android google grabs your GPS data regardless, you have to root and disable it.

Apple does the same thing but they didn't have their pants occupied by third-party network's fingers like google did until the pixel came out.

Google maps is basically a beacon for AdMob to target you nearly perfectly.

Also using "fine location" in any app grabs the nearby wifi list and sends it to Google/apple if it's not cached.

Also most ad providers these days have made deals with major networks that let them tell what tower your IMEI pinged off of.

It's why google tried to push android/ad IDs, way less info for the networks to advertise over, and it also put the tracking in their hands instead.

App Ops still works? I haven't used it in over a decade.

Comments like this try to make you give up on privacy by making it look like all is lost from the get to.

They are lying, don't believe them, there is a lot you can do to protect your privacy.

Both of these apps have device-level notifications to let you know when an app is listening. I promise they're not. There was a service a while back that was claiming this in their advertising and it went public and their partners all scattered like flies. No one wants to be associated with that sort of thing. It's unnecessary anyway.

Eh, you can be reasonably sure that GrapheneOS or other Android ROMs without any Google Play apps is private.

This link proves how robust the security research is and how quickly bugs like that are patched.

Past vulnerabilities doesn't mean there is active mpdern vulnerabilities especially ones in widely tested operating systems that's exploited by as many apps as people claim are listening when security researchers also regularly reverse engineer and analyze the source code of popular apps to figure out what they're doing. You can decompile Android apps pretty easily to see what they're doing. Some are obfuscated so it takes some effort.

Its one thing to claim there's some a system level bypass for the icon that the NSA uses to spy on its enemies, it's another thing to claim that it's being exploited on a wide scale by a tech companies on different apps, iOS and Android, multiple versions/devices.

The reality is that we leak tons of info through other mediums that are easier and cheaper to collect than through microphones.