+36 We've all just accepted that our phones listen to us, amirite?

by roobstanford 1 week ago

Our phones are too useful to do without. Cures boredom, holds the answers to almost any question, our communication with friends and loved ones. It's hard to just set that aside when we don't see any harm

by Anonymous 1 week ago

What would happen if all the cell phones went dead for 7 days?

by PayDeep 1 week ago

Party like it's the 1990's

by Sudden-Alfalfa8387 1 week ago

Page me the number of the house when you get there in case I can't find it

by Anonymous 1 week ago

I haven't seen a payphone in years

by Isom86 1 week ago

Last time I saw a phone booth/pay phone was in 2013 in some podunk town in Nevada. I hadn't seen one in years prior to that. Had to pull into the gas station to take a picture.

by Altruistic-Load2636 1 week ago

I'd rather party like it's 1999! 🎸

by Consistent-Base3916 1 week ago

Aka everything being far more complex in terms of being able to plan

by Yleannon 1 week ago

Yea, you would just do less stuff. Might be nice.

by Funny-Guard 1 week ago

So everything being way less convenient. I could get behind that. But it'll take some getting used to. I just worry about my friends.

by Dense-Ant 1 week ago

Nah just pop on MSN and see what they're up to

by Anonymous 1 week ago

I mean, letting them the phone during the bus and in the eventing when playing imo kinda defeats the purpose of the bet.

by Myriam45 1 week ago

To me doesn't feel like an "earned" win if you help them. But you do you, you are the parent, and you are not hurting them, so it's fine nonetheless.

by Myriam45 1 week ago

I don't necessarily agree with that, but as I said, you are the parent.

by Myriam45 1 week ago

Would you have set up a harder to reach goal, so you are setting them up for easier failure and to not have to buy food and build some confidence in your kids? I'm curious as to your approach, cause I don't mind listening to other good ideas.

by Nhudson 1 week ago

Just put the alarm thurther away from your bed so that would have to get up to turn it off.

by Efficient_Jicama_350 1 week ago

I've had speakers hooked up to an iPod in another room and I still regularly crawled back into bed. Hell even now I'm pretty good at mindlessly doing multiplication, it's the quick succession of verification steps that get me up.

by Arloshanahan 1 week ago

You can get used to that too. I have been keeping it in another room for years now. Now I am perfectly capable of jumping out of bed the second it goes off, run in to turn it off, and jump back into bed without realizing. I still go back to sleep in 10 seconds.

by Anonymous 1 week ago

Bucase phone

by Anonymous 1 week ago

I had my phone in service for 2 weeks so I bought a Nokia brick for 20€ and I'll tell you. Yes at times I felt like I wasn't up to date but the peace and quiet I had those 2 weeks was amazing.

by Anonymous 1 week ago

It would be 6 days of absolute bliss.

by Live_Adhesiveness826 1 week ago

You DO realize you can get off your phone literally any time you want right???

by Yleannon 1 week ago

You can get off it whenever you want, my dad doesnt have a smartphone he uses a flipphone because he likes it better for work if he needs the internet he uses his computer, you really can get off it whenever u want the internet however is a different story

by Living_Cod 1 week ago

Well I'm not your dad and I depend upon my brother for support. This is my only phone for work, school, and family. So again, really big No, I can't.

by Live_Adhesiveness826 1 week ago

See above. Oh, I actually visit people to get things done. Hard to do now and all.

by leora81 1 week ago

Watch Leave the World Behind on Netflix

by langworthgerard 1 week ago

Chaos for 2 days then just live. It's not that bad

by Anonymous 1 week ago

And what? Then turned back on with ring images and a creepy old well on the screen?

by Anonymous 1 week ago

I'd have to travel half way across the country to see my family. Would be trash.

by Anonymous 1 week ago

This is what phone companies want you to believe.

by Live_Adhesiveness826 1 week ago

Nah, that's FOMO. You are completely capable of not having your phone. No matter what you think.

by americo58 1 week ago

doesn't cure bordom.. Only answers questions correctly if you ask correctly or go to the correct source. Communication hub obviously. It's a time suck. Most people spend too much time on their screens and it has deleterious effects

by Anonymous 1 week ago

.......Yet, dont "see" the harm....... yet

by Anonymous 1 week ago

For me, add "core tool for my job" to the list

by Jaded_Effective_3149 1 week ago

"...we don't see any harm" We all know what that harm is...

by Cadendubuque 1 week ago

We need real politicians not the ones we have now. Boomer generation leaders are all fat stupid and bribed. They need to retire or our phones will soon have the god given right to listen to us.

by Anonymous 1 week ago

The moment you accept the phone's or other devices' TOU, you agreed to whatever the company wants to do, including active listening!!

by kihnfelicity 1 week ago

"Soon"? This happened years ago with Siri & Google Assistant. If you have either app, they are always listening & capable of recording/transcription. The company has the right to sell the aggregate data from those recordings.

by Fit-Jacket 1 week ago

I remember walking by a computer shop last year. Had this really cool wooden PC case in the window. Didn't say anything, but admired it as I walked by as I'd never seen a wooden case before. Pulled out my phone.. guess what's the first ad I see is for? I'm not even in a big city, I'm in a small countryside town. Freaking scary times.

by Anonymous 1 week ago

THIS. it's way more computationally expensive to parse speech than to use big and aggregate data to profile the users. They're not actively acting on what they hear on the microphone; we are just way less special and unique than we think.

by Anonymous 1 week ago

We need real politicians not the ones we have now. Boomer generation leaders are all fat stupid and bribed. They need to retire or our phones will soon have the god given right to listen to us. You think another generation of politician will not be brided and stupid somehow?

by Anonymous 1 week ago

nah we just need smarter constituents. you guys are the dummies thinking that your phones are listening to you lol talk to anybody in marketing at any major company. this outright isn't happening anywhere.

by Anonymous 1 week ago

Include some Gen X in there too

by rodriguezlauria 1 week ago

I mean sophisticated programs monitor your aggregated metadata and then use that info for targeted advertising to you and people you spend time with. They don't listen to your audio generally.

by One-Investigator54 1 week ago

Your audio is 10000% included in that metadata. Way too many instances of advertising being relevant to ongoing conversation. Now that audio might be limited to phone calls, voice-to-texts, video calls, etc, as opposed to "active listening", but active listening has also been proven to be possible.

by Similar_Chocolate 1 week ago

As an advertiser myself, I can't imagine your phone would gather any good data by listening. Imagine how many irrelevant product names it would pick up, just by hearing your TV blasting ads. That's why I don't think they listen in on your phone, it just isn't wise to do.

by Anonymous 1 week ago

It's the location data. Meta can see you spend time at the same time and place with your French family, and the algorithm well see that as a sign of potential relevancy

by Anonymous 1 week ago

This, either the French relatives data shows them in another country, or you in theirs.

by Anonymous 1 week ago

Or… you share WiFi with them

by Affectionate_Day3901 1 week ago

I've tested this dozens of times and never actually had it happen, so I guess the active listening on my phone is broken.

by Outrageous-Song 1 week ago

I've definitely had this happen with products that I never searched for or typed into the phone in any way. Just casually mentioned a beverage brand that I got for free as a promo at an event. Next thing I know, I'm receiving ads for it.

by ezekiel38 1 week ago

It works in general location too. I was admiring someone's jacket from a cross a room, never talked about it or asked them about it, but suddenly getting ads for them. I'm assuming they talked about it near my GPS location lol.

by Strange-Training9152 1 week ago

If you wanted to make your own and didn't just come up with it randomly - maybe you're more predictable than you think. I'm sick of this conversation because I can't change anyone's mind, but I am as certain as I can be that they are absolutely not listening to you. They can predict your habits, and it seems that no one is willing to accept this. In my opinion the reality is scarier than that they are listening, which is maybe why no one is willing to accept it. Or everyone is so confident that they aren't that predictable - I think we are. As a tangible example, see how well Oz the Mentalist can predict people just by reading up on them beforehand, planting ideas, and reading cues. People really are that easy.

by Certain_Reading8021 1 week ago

Yes, predictive linguistics are insanely good.

by Anonymous 1 week ago

Just point out the predictive text box above the keyboard you're typing with on your phone. Use that as an example and maybe people will get it....

by Anonymous 1 week ago

This.

by Anonymous 1 week ago

I've never had this happen. Not a single time. I've had things I've searched and such become advertising. There are 5 phones in our house all day too.

by Anonymous 1 week ago

I always just smile and nod when it happens in person. I'll only chime in if they ask me directly what I think about it. Since they asked they usually can't get mad about what I say.

by Certain_Reading8021 1 week ago

Don't you understand?? I need to feel watched so I can be important!!!!!!1!!!!!1!!1!!!!!one!!!1!!!

by Yleannon 1 week ago

Why would it send audio when it can process it client side and send keywords?

by Anonymous 1 week ago

These people man, it's too late for them, they ngmi

by Anonymous 1 week ago

That would be a seriously sophisticated program which would run your battery like crazy, it would use too much battery for us to have the battery life we do at the physical size of the battery. There's no way they could be actively running a program like that all the time without the processors heating up too.

by Status_Dance1078 1 week ago

... You think there's a program that can clearly pick up random keywords through a phone microphone from within your pocket in any room condition with any accent or speech pattern with no training? And that this program is installed on all phones, secretly, totally hidden and without ever being found?

by Anonymous 1 week ago

Active listening. The device doesn't have to listen or rather record 24/7. It listens for speech, like Siri and Alexa and Google waits to be alerted. It then picks out keywords "blah blah blah — man I could use a COCO COLA", speech-to-text the keywords, compress the file. Then offload it via the data sharing policy for quality purposes you had to agree to for use of the device and/or app.

by Anonymous 1 week ago

this is the stupidest thing I've ever read

by Anonymous 1 week ago

It isn't. It's not a question of whether they can but whether it's cost-effective. Storing the text is 100x less expensive than storing the audio even if only storing the calls. And the advertisers sure as hell won't get 100x more effective in targeting the ads compared to text-only metadata.

by Anonymous 1 week ago

You're thinking about this with an outdated perspective. There's no need to store actual audio files if it can easily be characterized as text instead. Even 5-10 years ago there were graduate student projects that use microphones around Boston to characterize sounds to text, which would would then be centralized and mapped out. You could look at map and see where traffic, birds, conversations, music, etc were happening, all without any actual audio files being transmitted. Now imagine what competent agencies can do with AI to compress your conservations into marketable terms they can sell.

by Anonymous 1 week ago

No I'm not. Speech-to-text is not free or cheap. It's very computationally expensive to convert audio to text, even more so when conversation is not happening next to the microphone and the voice is muted and/or masked by the noise. The fastest AI-assisted STT platform out there, NVidia Parakeet, runs at about 130x speedup on RTX 4070 when annotating clearly spoken text (I don't have a link handy but can find it if needed). Which means it takes about 30 seconds to process an hour of audio from just one person. Compare that with the cost of processing an hour's worth of searches by the same person which will take fraction of a second and you can see where the 100x figure comes from.

by Anonymous 1 week ago

who would even want a green bay packers butt plug

by Yreinger 1 week ago

Sigh. No they do not. You're just paranoid, a side effect of poor critical thinking.

by Anonymous 1 week ago

A reminder to slap your dick on your phones mic every day

by DifferentCountry 1 week ago

And what should the women do?

by Anonymous 1 week ago

Strap-on and a fat suit

by DifferentCountry 1 week ago

There's nothing that I say that anyone outside of my circle would remotely care about

by Melodic-Ad 1 week ago

I think it's the fact that people and companies are preying on you. If you yawn you get sent an ad for coffee or energy drinks and they know which ad to send. It's invasive and not natural. Pretty much everyone isn't a threat to national security.

by Background-Pound-800 1 week ago

Mehhhhh. Ads don't work on people with self control.

by Anonymous 1 week ago

This isn't a joke: this is exactly what they want you to think. Ads work on EVERYONE.

by Yleannon 1 week ago

So what about people who don't buy or use name branded products or services? How are ads working on them?

by Outrageous-Song 1 week ago

No, they definitely do. I have a lot of self-control, and I can admit ads have worked on me. Even if they only work on people without out self control that doesn't make it right for phones to listen and prey on people.

by Background-Pound-800 1 week ago

We get outraged that our data is being used and sold without our consent while forgetting that we gave our data away freely to begin with

by Entire-Ad 1 week ago

And TVs. And door bells. Even light bulbs.

by This-Expression8922 1 week ago

I run a MOTOROLA RAZR. No issues but it is hampering my Words With Friends

by Anonymous 1 week ago

Sure they do… Meanwhile, ads are supposedly so sophisticated that they know you're pregnant before you do, but are so dumb that they'll bombard you with product ads for an obvious one-time purchase that you just bought hours ago.

by AwarenessMany9788 1 week ago

Hours? I spent 5k on an e-bike last summer, and they have ever since tried to sell me another

by kasandrahammes 1 week ago

I never cared in the first place.

by Anonymous 1 week ago

It's fine as soon as they don't tell anyone else.

by AffectionatePlay9795 1 week ago

That's how phones work? They need a microphone to pick up our voice for the phone calls?

by MaximumSympathy8289 1 week ago

If they listen to everyone, then I am not worth listening to

by DevelopmentReal5077 1 week ago

Just like we accepted that cars occasionally kill people

by Wbernier 1 week ago

Well no, I don't have facebook and turned all other voice features like google off.

by Anonymous 1 week ago

But they don't usually

by Anonymous 1 week ago

Of course they do, otherwise how would the person on the other end of the call hear us?

by Additional-Tune-3609 1 week ago

Apple say they don't send anything to apple servers until the hey siri part. And it's all processed on the phone until then and disregarded. Whether this is true or not I don't know. But I must say apple are extremely good at marketing if they can get some one like me to have everything turned on that i handnt in android

by Gregorio76 1 week ago

That's not how it works.

by Limp_Status 1 week ago

You're not using soundproofing?

by Sufficient-Chest 1 week ago

I think your tinfoil hat is slipping...

by Anonymous 1 week ago

I really wish my phone had a physical kill switch for the mic, and a 2nd for the camera.

by Disastrous_Judge 1 week ago

Never noticed this on iOS. Is this some Android thing?

by Anonymous 1 week ago

We wouldn't be depressed if we've accepted it. How do you unite roughly 4 billion people to just drop technology? I could put my phone down, but every phone around me is still soaking up environmental data. Short of destroying everything, we can't go back. So, I don't think we accept it. We just don't have a solution that spares our neighbor.

by Anonymous 1 week ago

+Not if you can play with thr settings right and pock the right phone disable everything and degoogle. You will still get tracked bit it'll be like really annoying.

by Imaginary_Jacket 1 week ago

I haven't accepted it because it still hasn't been sufficiently proven

by GloomyFlow 1 week ago

Your smartphone does listen to you through virtual assistants when the microphone is enabled, which might be all day long. Whether or not some governments could use it to listen to people isn't much of a question either, since the US famously passed the Patriot Act for national security after 9/11. It wouldn't be a big surprise if other governments followed the example. Unless you're a suspicious person, the only impact would be your conversations being tracked for advertising purposes.

by Scary-Increase-5485 1 week ago

But it definitely isn't enabled all day long.

by GloomyFlow 1 week ago

No,lol 😆they don't need to

by Anonymous 1 week ago

At least someone listens to me!

by ryanstanford 1 week ago

I use a degoogled e/OS Fairphone. Nobody's listening to me!

by Anonymous 1 week ago

to be fair, its satan worshippers that are listening to you, the phone is just a tool.

by Anonymous 1 week ago

Find out how to open your phone and physically disengage the built in microphone if possible, then only use a blutooth headset. That way they can´t turn the microphone on and listen without you knowing. I only use mine at home, i never bring it with me when i go somewhere, store it in an sound isolated case when i´m not using it.

by North_Knowledge 1 week ago

At least 1 thing that listens

by Anonymous 1 week ago

They dont need to listen. Other data about you tells it enough about you to predict your spending habits

by Competitive-Gap 1 week ago

They don't and only dumb people think that.

by tony57 1 week ago

Smartphones don't listen to you. Instead, sophisticated program injected it to create anonymous metadata from your apps and browser you're using and "sell" them to advertisers and serves you personalized ads (e.g. Android's Ad Privacy, when turned on)

by Anonymous 1 week ago

Remember Snowden? Nobody does

by Unhappy_Guest 1 week ago

And knows what we look like, and knows where we are at all times.

by Alizebeahan 1 week ago

They don't. They listen for "Hey Google" or "Hey Siri", but there is no evidence whatsoever that shows that they store any other conversations. The reason why you see ads right after you talk about something could be because of two reasons: You have either searched for something related to it, or confirmation bias. Think about the billion irrelevant ads you see, if one of them just so happens to be related to something you talked about earlier it is probably a coincidence. But you notice that more than you notice the irrelevant ads, which leads to the impression that the ads are somehow related to your conversations.

by Anonymous 1 week ago

This is true and I'm for damn sure not using a flip phone

by Anonymous 1 week ago

Once A.I. really takes off, more than it is now, the problem will be much worse. For an A.I. assistant to be useful, it needs to know everything about you. It needs a lot of context to understand quick commands. That means feeding it as much data about you as possible. Someone will probably reply with "we're already there", but we're really not. Not the extent it will be in the next few years.

by Anonymous 1 week ago

But like who cares if it does? Like "oh no don't make my ads relevant to the things I want oh noooo"

by No-Dust1149 1 week ago

Right? I'm not a huge fan of targeted ads, but if you've ever turned off personalized ads on YouTube/Google, you'd see very quickly that the non-personalized ads are even worse and many of them are downright scams

by Anonymous 1 week ago

Most have. All is a stretch. Some of us are aware and in control of our tech.

by Janis05 1 week ago

I haven't, why have you? You have more control of this than ever. Permissions are well integrated, and also, there are apps that show indication when the mic is actually being recorded. This indicator might even be integrated into the OSs as well

by Anonymous 1 week ago

It speaks to our powerlessness. We no longer fool ourselves into thinking we're in control. We visit fast food establishments knowing we're justifying their price increases. We do nothing but shrug as phones listen in on our private moments. We accept political corruption and do nothing, because we know if we take the time, we'll lose our lifelines to survival.

by Ok_Product331 1 week ago

many have lost faith in our institutions to bring about change. it's this that many cynical people in power look for when the populace themselves feel powerless. that doesn't mean we give should give up like so many have done. all progress is inevitable, we just have to be willing to fight for it

by HourWoodpecker 1 week ago

Let me guess, you're an iPhone user?

by Anonymous 1 week ago

What's the implication here?

by Anonymous 1 week ago

I still remember when this was a conspiracy theory.

by Anonymous 1 week ago

Still is…

by AwarenessMany9788 1 week ago

They're not listening 24/7, only whenever you say ok google/hey siri. But they don't need to be, all of your usage & location data is logged, which is even more useful than just listening to you. They know what apps you use, how often, where you spend your time, they know you better than yourself. There's no need to leave a mic recording 24/7, and that would be easily detected. They just take all the usage data which you accepted in their ToS.

by Allieleannon 1 week ago

We've also just accepted that we will be molested, harassed, herded like cattle and prohibited from carrying various essential and innocuous items onto planes because freedom.

by Low_Replacement 1 week ago

Yeah who gives af. Wtf am I saying that I really care if some government weirdo randomly sifts through it after sifting through 10 billion other hours of audio from crazy people and seeing 100 million dick pics. I don't even care if Snapchat saves my dick pics. If we're all in the same boat who cares anymore?

by Anonymous 1 week ago

The issue is not what is being recorded, but who can access it. A parallel is if say a president you really trust passes a law that means that all Americans can be listened to without a warrant, sure that president wouldn't do anything bad with it. However, what if a president was elected who wanted to be a dictator and start listening and censoring criticisms? It's the potential of it being bad and getting into the wrong hands. Right now it would be feasible for a government to force companies to provide all of these audio data to them and use it in whatever way they want.

by Damorehester 1 week ago

So something similar to the patriot act?

by murraymaritza 1 week ago

Not just listen! Don't forget location tracking, similar to beacons, constant environment scanning (from the sensors I believe ), search tracking, photos, so much more

by Alive-Tangerine1153 1 week ago

My 99 dollar Moto doesn't

by Anonymous 1 week ago