Hundreds of smartphone apps are monitoring users through their microphones

Article is from 2018. Someone must have pasted the url from hacker news where the same story was dug up recently.

Is that to say that it's no longer valid? Or just that it's old news? The list of apps associated with the software is still pretty extensive; Google Assistant even showed up.
- 7 years is a long time in tech.
  Google Assistant is supposed to listen for the "Hey Google" trigger word. How else do you expect to use your device hand-free.
- Old news. It was old news in 2018

ok thanks, but where's the list of these apps?

These type of articles never list the apps they're discussing.
iOS and Android. If you have one of those people are listening.
- 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.

I used to work for a mobile advertiser, and we installed hella bloatware on phones.

This idea was floated a couple times but was deemed not very effective cause you'd have to store and process hours and hours of audio data that didn't tell us much more than just having a week or so of GPS data, your Facebook profile, and your phone IMEI.

It's pretty easy to see if you're near a Popeyes and what other IMEIs are connecting to the same tower, extrapolate that to you being near your wife and you and your wife thinking about shit on the Popeyes menu.

Boom targeted ad/video for fried chicken.

The rest is general tech paranoia leading to Apophenia.

There's no microphones or cameras, it's just the already gigantic mountain of data anyone who uses a smartphone is constantly broadcasting getting ground through the big data machine that has been the pillar of all tech since the last recession.

you'd have to store and process hours and hours of audio data that didn't tell us much
I mean that could be solved as simply as a local transcription service...
- 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.
Also, have you ever been butt-dialed by someone? 99% of the time you can't understand a single word, let alone enough to make any semantic sense out of.
But wouldnt it be a moot point if I restrict access to GPS for all apps?
How much of that data is from Google/Apple (e.g. Google Maps)?
- 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.
If it's trying to figure out if you're watching Stranger Things it can look for when you're stationary at home and just needs to record a few seconds at a time every few minutes. I don't know how the fingerprinting works. It might be able to run locally and not use a ton of power. We're talking Shazam, not full text transcription.

But… they can't access the microphone without the user explicitly allowing

Tell that to Facebook. Shit, I'll talk about something with my wife and see ads about it ten minutes later. Been happening for years.
- I tested this with my Facebook app in 2013. Found a Spanish radio station, set my phone down next to it overnight, and for several weeks I was seeing ads exclusively in Spanish. Deleted the app the first day I saw them in Spanish, and deleted my account not long after that.
  My wife still uses them after 5 years together and me pointing out all the times it's obviously eavesdropping on us, and she's even been creeped out by it before. Still uses it...
  Unless my microphone and camera have physical switches, I will assume they are being used. Those little "your camera and microphone are off" icons in the corner of the screen don't reassure me.
- It's more likely that your wife or someone nearby was further researching the same topic you were talking about.
  Facebook and other ad companies use your location, relationships, and other data they already had on you to serve you relevant ads.
  At this stage, they know more about you than the government, or your wife.
- That's monitoring you and your closests' other behavior, as well as monitoring then nudging you towards wanting certain things. The ad itself is the last nudge in that chain that tries to go "you wanted this, don't you?" after all of the other thinking it's making a case for your life being better with it.
Only on iOS. Also a lot of apps can present valid uses for microphone access, which prompts users to allow unlimited malicious use
- I can be absolutely certain no apps can access my mic in the background. Even when in the foreground, there is a hot-mic indicator.
- Not only on iOS. I use Android and my microphone is always off unless I allow a specific app to use it, and even then, I have the option of only allowing it for that one time. Including the phone app.
  Mic and camera are always off.
- Because it is software-based access control, it is impossible to guarantee that access really has been disabled. Thanks to Apple's design, we now live in a world where users are not supposed to detach batteries or physically turn off microphones and cameras; it's all software-controlled. The problem is that software can be hacked and have backdoors. Also, thanks to Apple's smart design, users can no longer upgrade the memory sticks on their Mac Minis and MacBooks. Why do I say it is all Apple's fault? Unfortunately, other manufacturers copy these design ideas...

I thought Android has a non bypassable green dot in the notification bar when the micro is on ?

Users need to know what this dot means, and some like children or the elderly will likely not understand the ramifications
I feel like you're missing the point. Showing a green dot still doesn't solve the problem or make it ok, especially when this technology works in the background and can capture sound even while the device is in your pocket, like the article says.
I don't think we should have to be on the lookout for a little dot showing up on the screen constantly. It shouldn't even ask for microphone access unless it's absolutely essential for the app's main purpose. "Features" like this should always be off by default and buried deep in the settings. If people really wanted it (they don't), they'd go in and turn it on themselves.
- You're absolutely right but that wasn't my point. I thought that if one of my installed app was doing this, at some point I'd have seen it without even being on the lookout.
- This is literally how it works. In modern android you need to explicitly grants microphone permission to apps the first time you use them. Now, if they are clickjacking the permission notification, that's something different, but the article doesn't mention this. You can download your own microphone logs and verify if you are curious about this.
It's probably bypassable too. And, anytime the microphone is used, you have no idea the multiple extents that data is being used for.
- Apps can use the microphone in secret and there's no way to know when they're using the microphone? This is a major security flaw in Android!
- afaik Android System Intelligence and apps using that will not show the mic icon

About things the other person has searched for and visited and when their networks touch it spreads. It's easy to do without a mic

I keep my phone in a chip bag and only pull it out to LARP the preparation for the assassination Franz Ferdinand in general terms without naming actual places or names.

That's a good way to always keep chips on hand.

On the other hand, it's amazingly easy for advertisers to figure out what topics / products you're talking about without the need for constantly recording via your microphone. In most instances, it doesn't even really make sense to constantly record audio via the mic to monitor folks, other means are much more cost efficient while being just as effective. That's not to say that some app isn't or hasn't done it, just that historically speaking, it hasn't been as ubiquitous as a lot of people seem to think or imply.

Sometimes with these things, you have to apply Occam's Razor.

I stayed with some family during the holidays a few years ago and they are conspiracy theory fanatics unfortunately. The type that swear their phones are listening to everything they say. They get ads for things they've only ever talked about in person. That sort of thing.

As proof, they pointed out how the prior night the topic of old timey candy from our childhoods came up and all of a sudden they were getting news stories and facebook ads about those liquid filled wax bottle candies. To them, the only plausible explanation is that our phones were listening to us.

Except, as I pointed out, I specifically looked those wax bottle candies up later that night because I was curious if they were still for sale. They live way out in the country and there's limited cellular data, so basically everybody there that night was using the same wifi connection. Which means, our internet activity is all linked because to the outside world, we're all on the same network/IP address. Even more curious, though, nobody got ads for any of the other candy that we talked about and which I didn't specifically look up. So, if our phones were actually recording us and serving up ads based on the things we talked about, then why didn't we get ads for Blackjack gum, wax lips, and Brach's? Only the very specific one I happened to search for.

This is what a lot of people don't get. Plus often people see an ad or content and forget. Later they bring it up without realizing the thing is trending. It's all self feeding.
- So much of social media (and online in general) is just ads in disguise and people shilling products, intentionally or otherwise, and it ultimately spills over into real life conversations. So I agree with you completely.
  You might have given a thumbs up to your aunt Gina's photo of her and her friends at the office party celebrating her promotion. Ad networks see it as you interacting with a photo that contains a bottle of Schmudd soda, even if that's a detail you didn't even notice.
  You have dinner with your dad that night and the topic of Schmudd comes up due to the latest forced controversy (ermagerd the trans) so naturally when you start seeing Schmudd commercials the next day, you might assume your phone was listening to that conversation. But actually the reason you're seeing the ads is because of the thumbs up to aunt Gina's post.
  And yes, the tracking and analytics tools find those types of patterns and relationships, and so much more. And they've been able to do that for over a decade. No telling how good it's gotten since I was last working adjacent to that field.

Right around the confinement my sister and I were talking about getting some seeds for my mom. Neither of us searched for seeds. From that point we both started to get ads for seeds, many for the ones we had talked about in particular. This thing was so unequivocal that it proved to me that our phones listen. Maybe they don't analyze, but they definitely listen for words actionable for an advertising purposes.

That's why i always forbid access to my microphones by apps. Many AI apps will also remember what you discussed long ago.
More likely, your late'ish habits and searches combined with age and another mountain of data correlated with people that have the same thought. We are no snowflakes.
Edit: I should say, if this example is true. I'm not saying you are lying, just that if you are, it's not a "gotcha". This thread is making me paranoid! :)
- The thing is you can test it, simply never search anything related to it and see if you get ads, maybe I accidentally searched something but it works, or it could be wifi based maybe they searched something and it effected everyones ads, this could make sense if my roommates searched stuff and it effected my ads

Good thing everyone diligently reads the T&A of Pool 3d before using it. You are reading every line of text before you hit agree, and then uninstall, right?

Go ahead, make TVs more smart. We literally removed our TV thus weekend. If you want me to upgrade it, please removed the spyware.

My tvs are connected to an SSID that can’t hit the internet. I blocked them before but my dumb ass neighbor left their WiFi unprotected and my tvs just connected to them because it couldn’t get out the internet on my network. So I created an SSID logged them in and blocked it from the internet. It doesn’t bounce to open WiFi anymore. If I block it completely from the network the WiFi just disconnects from the network because it can’t hit anything. I have LG’s.
- The fact that they just desperately jump on any network is absurd. Its acting like malware.
- That is an insane thing to have to do. Having to manipulate your TV into not doing something you don't want or require it to do.
- Why is it even legal for it to just hop open networks automatically? Sure, if you leave your wifi unsecured you're dumb and anyone can access it, but it's still not a network you have permission to access
Next TV that breaks and we won't have one. I'll do a projector for movie night and that's it.

This might just push my fear of targeted ads enough to give in to my idea of a nearly soundproof box for my phone when I'm not using it. :(

yeah, alphonso appeared on my mibox, eset called it a trojan right after the update. had to delete it through adb, cause its a "system app"

is this still a surprise to anyone here?

Yes.
Not to you or me, but there are tons of people, even here, that are absolutely incredulous towards the idea that its possible.
- I mean it implies that these apps are both violating permissions (in many cases) and the android visual indication of an active microphone. So far I have seen no actual proof that this is the case. Mic activity is logged. You can debunk this yourself easily.
I remember a bunch of people freaking out about this a few years ago and an equal number telling them they were paranoid.
You can talk about stuff and your phone will just magically start suggesting related items. Why would anyone be surprised the monitoring device in their pocket is monitoring them?
Not helpful
Anyone whos said anything outloud and then immediately got an ad should know by now that it isnt some conspiracy, its easily testable by not searching something and just talking about it while having an app open, the more obvious one they track is dms, if I dm someone something (text based not posts) ill get ads or posts related to it.
- Im assuming they target your wifi too, because my ads change to reflect what I do on other devices too (always noticable as a hobby hopper)

No they dont , they dont have to. Far easier to get things other ways.

Yes, but also no. You're underestimating advertisers' greed for data.
It's actually trivial nowadays to build a background service like that.
- Which would show up in network traffic , which it doesnt. There is no need for it.

Beer pong

Yeah that sounds like an app user who would be okay with his audio being recorded...

An app where all you end up recording is "Bro! Bro! Bro! Broseeeeph! Let's gooooooo, Bro!"

May be even dozens

How can they tell I'm popping?.... Oh....what if I stopped flushing? So is that why some people don't flush? They're trying to be stealthy!