Is my phone actually listening in on me?

Thread starter DaveC426913
Start date Nov 21, 2018

AI Thread Summary

The discussion revolves around the phenomenon of smartphones potentially listening to conversations and influencing search suggestions. Participants shared anecdotal experiences and conducted a personal experiment to test whether a phone could pick up on a conversation about Nike and subsequently suggest related searches. The experiment yielded no results, leading to skepticism about the idea that phones are actively listening to users en masse. While some believe that phones, particularly those running Android, have the capability to listen if apps have microphone access, others argue that such behavior would likely be detected by security researchers and would violate privacy laws like GDPR. The conversation also touched on the broader implications of technology tracking user behavior, with some participants expressing concern over privacy and the potential for misuse of data. Overall, the thread highlights a mix of skepticism and concern regarding the extent to which smartphones might be monitoring conversations, with calls for more controlled experiments to validate claims.

Oct 13, 2019

Stavros Kiri

sysprog said:

Only what is sent to them and received by them can be logged by them,

We've concluded that at least the search engine and computer's logs record (and make statistics [at least for the first]) even by typing ...

sysprog said:

but we can say that if we send it, we should be confident that we can never not have sent it, and we didn't try to make machines that are good at forgetting things.

You probably want to say that once we send it we cannot unsend it (or 'undo' it). That's usually necessarily true; however, recent updates of Gmail app have the feature to 'unsend' a mail [before it's been read, if you cancel it in time (disappears from the receiver's mailbox [?] ...) - I've never actually used it] ...