this post was submitted on 29 Dec 2023
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And yet we /still/ have people who assume that a corporation that routinely pulls shit like this, that has more or less complete control over your Android phone, default to tying everything on your phone to your Google account, and then also put an enormous amount of effort to making the default easiest option to log in to nearly any online service or app also be your Google account...
...we still have people that do not believe that the phones are always listening when seemingly any website or app you use gives you advertisements about what you were just talking about in the other room with the phone locked.
Its possible to go in and reset or delete your advertising id and use firefox and deny hardware access to every possible google process you can without breaking the OS to stop this, but 1) the capability to eavesdrop shouldnt even exist 2) it should be disclosed /plainly/ 3) it should be waaaaay easier to disable.
Oh come on. Don't bring this into conspiracy territory. Yes, eavesdropping does happen, but it's not something an uncompromised Android phone will do when locked. Even when it does happen in the case of spyware, the people doing it aren't selling your transcriptions to advertisers.
People should still opt out of as many of GAPS's spyware-like features as possible, as you suggest, but not because it's a special anti-listening-device warding spell.
conspiracy theory
Get out.
https://bgr.com/tech/marketing-company-says-it-can-eavesdrop-on-conversations-through-our-devices/#:~:text=CMG's%20purported%20tech%20isn't,%2C%20Google%2C%20and%20Bing%20Search.
Read the document:
Key word is "technology partner". They're buying voice transcripts ripped from someone else's spyware and selling the service of scraping it for keywords and maybe somehow tying that back to an individual by cross-referencing the hit against data from traditional above-board ad platforms.
Google isn't buying transcripts, Facebook isn't buying transcripts. It's Cox Media buying shady recordings stolen from spyware-compromised devices and then trying to whitewash it into something sellable with their (unverifiable) cross-analytics middleware.
Oh sure, so now you're gonna insist they're buying shit that totally doesn't exist.
No, I am not contradicting myself. Let me say it again with the ambiguity removed:
I'm sure you still believe this is a load of apologia and frankly you can think what you want, but you should probably know that I'd already read about the Cox story when it first broke and specifically chose my words with that knowledge in mind.