Reason n+1 for me being thankful for switching to GrapheneOS.
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Welcome to your "I only buy vintage tech" era.
Mine started when 3.5 mm audio jacks started disappearing. We all draw a line.
Motorola needs to release those GrapheneOS compatible phones now 💀
The people who called me crazy because "there's no way your phone can be listening in on you all the time" are the same people who are going to be the most excited about this "feature"
How did these people expect "Hey Siri" / "Hey Google" to work?
Im a perfect world, as they claim, its a secondary system listening that isn't recording or transmitting anything, and is meant to be low power. If it hears the wake up word, it wakes up the other mic and starts recording.
Thats how they claim the smart speakers work anyway.
This would be different.
Constant surveillance 😡
Audio memories 😍
I already get "random" ads for things that were only part of a verbal conversation that happened to be near the phone.
What I want is a physical kill switch for the mic and camera, less surveillance not more.
That's been happening for well over a decade now, and while "respectable security researchers" call it bullshit... there's simply too much anecdotal evidence for it to happen organically.
The reality is they don't need to listen.
They have so much data on users.
- how old you are
- where you are
- what you last bought
- when you just bought it
- who you are near
- what they bought
- what the people around you are searching and what ads they are seeing
- what is being bought and sold by everyone around you
- when you sleep
- what you eat
- the things you are chatting about on MMS
- where you go
- when you're home and when and where you work
It just goes on and on and on.
People think they are unique but they are not as unique as they think.
If a song isn’t recognized, a short digital fingerprint may be sent to Google to securely search the cloud. Background conversations and audio are never sent to Google.
And, of course, Google will honor this and any other setting, as always, right? Right?
As soon as they got away with "federated learning" (basically use your phone to train ai then just phone the results home rather than your data) 🤢 they knew they could just keep pushing and pushing and pushing until they have it all
Illegal in Germany. You may not record conversations, if you try to enter something like that as evidence you'll get punished as well.
I suspect there are many countries with laws like that, and if your phone actually disables the feature when you enter them or just let's you hang to dry...
Honestly, I thought they already did that.
One of my motivations for becoming more privacy minded, was the amount of times a subject of conversation was delivered through an algorithm later.
It was creepy, talk about hose pipes> receive hosepipe content/ads.
Um, oh fuck no.
The reams of personally-identifiable information that will leak is insane.
We're not allowed to have Siri and Alexa listening when we're working, lest a stray word on a phone call from the home office risks a privacy breach.
I saw this title and immediately said "fuck off" then clicked, and ..glad to see OP sharing my immediate sentiment.
GrapheneOS, asap Pixel owners.
Thank me later.
JFC, I don't need tech tracking every goddamn word and fart.
This would be such a cool thing, too bad it will only be used to scrape our data in order to sell us more ads. There are far too many technologies and concepts that have been ruined already due to bloody greed.
Hey, don't be so pessimistic.
For sure it will be available for government agencies to subpoena or even outright purchase.
This is the free market. Everything about you is for sale.
Any soviet officials still alive must be going crazy: "wait, they actually pay to be surveilled???"
Dumb phones are about to start trending more and more every day.
This will be quite illegal in all countries and states that require 2 party consent at minimum.
Incoming Google lawsuits in 3, 2, 1.
I believe that the idea is genuinely good; however if you think about all the data that leaves your phone and that can be used for tracking, spying and so on, it gets disgusting.
It's easy to imagine scenarios where something like this could be useful. Sometimes very, very useful. "Hey Google, I spent the last 20 minutes speaking to a police officer, be sure to keep and transcribe all that."
But no one's going to trust it (no one should trust it) because it's offered by a big tech company. "Of course this new service is designed to be used against us," we correctly assume.
Google: sorry, we work for the police, so that audio was not recorded.
“There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part; you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!” — Mario Savio, 1964
This is really about training AI, isn’t it. They’ve tapped nearly all the sources of human text output already, so now they want to create as much more of it as possible, as quickly as possible. They will tap into conversations and use it as a new data source, mark my words.
OK, how do you disable it permanently? Besides Graphene or mobile Linux?
So what could be a really useful thing is now just a 24/7 surveilance device that will record everything, even when you have sex, when you talk about fantasies and so on.
I guarantee you that in no time the justice department will be interested in having access to all that
Even if no one else could access it because it stayed on my device, I'm sure it'll be used for categorizing "advertising cohort" stuff again.
It sucks having to be so skeptical. With my severe ADHD something like this would be enormously helpful for remembering conversations others I talk to remember just fine but I don't.
I already have a voice recorder app on my phone, thanks.
Because they weren't already listening in?
They don’t need to hide it anymore thanks to all surveillance legislations. So it can be marketed as feature.
Really looking forward for graphene firmware for Motorola phones.
I love the idea. Having a sortable, searchable list of everything that hits my plate day to day would be an awesome boon, I simply don't want anyone else to have that data :(

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