+36
We've all just accepted that our phones listen to us, amirite?
by roobstanford1 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 Anonymous1 week ago
What would happen if all the cell phones went dead for 7 days?
by PayDeep1 week ago
Party like it's the 1990's
by Sudden-Alfalfa83871 week ago
Page me the number of the house when you get there in case I can't find it
by Anonymous1 week ago
I haven't seen a payphone in years
by Isom861 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-Load26361 week ago
I'd rather party like it's 1999! 🎸
by Consistent-Base39161 week ago
Aka everything being far more complex in terms of being able to plan
by Yleannon1 week ago
Yea, you would just do less stuff. Might be nice.
by Funny-Guard1 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-Ant1 week ago
Nah just pop on MSN and see what they're up to
by Anonymous1 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 Myriam451 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 Myriam451 week ago
I don't necessarily agree with that, but as I said, you are the parent.
by Myriam451 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 Nhudson1 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_3501 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 Arloshanahan1 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 Anonymous1 week ago
Bucase phone
by Anonymous1 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 Anonymous1 week ago
It would be 6 days of absolute bliss.
by Live_Adhesiveness8261 week ago
You DO realize you can get off your phone literally any time you want right???
by Yleannon1 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_Cod1 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_Adhesiveness8261 week ago
See above. Oh, I actually visit people to get things done. Hard to do now and all.
by leora811 week ago
Watch Leave the World Behind on Netflix
by langworthgerard1 week ago
Chaos for 2 days then just live. It's not that bad
by Anonymous1 week ago
And what? Then turned back on with ring images and a creepy old well on the screen?
by Anonymous1 week ago
I'd have to travel half way across the country to see my family. Would be trash.
by Anonymous1 week ago
This is what phone companies want you to believe.
by Live_Adhesiveness8261 week ago
Nah, that's FOMO. You are completely capable of not having your phone. No matter what you think.
by americo581 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 Anonymous1 week ago
.......Yet, dont "see" the harm....... yet
by Anonymous1 week ago
For me, add "core tool for my job" to the list
by Jaded_Effective_31491 week ago
"...we don't see any harm" We all know what that harm is...
by Cadendubuque1 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 Anonymous1 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 kihnfelicity1 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-Jacket1 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 Anonymous1 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 Anonymous1 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 Anonymous1 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 Anonymous1 week ago
Include some Gen X in there too
by rodriguezlauria1 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-Investigator541 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_Chocolate1 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 Anonymous1 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 Anonymous1 week ago
This, either the French relatives data shows them in another country, or you in theirs.
by Anonymous1 week ago
Or… you share WiFi with them
by Affectionate_Day39011 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-Song1 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 ezekiel381 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-Training91521 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_Reading80211 week ago
Yes, predictive linguistics are insanely good.
by Anonymous1 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 Anonymous1 week ago
This.
by Anonymous1 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 Anonymous1 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_Reading80211 week ago
Don't you understand?? I need to feel watched so I can be important!!!!!!1!!!!!1!!1!!!!!one!!!1!!!
by Yleannon1 week ago
Why would it send audio when it can process it client side and send keywords?
by Anonymous1 week ago
These people man, it's too late for them, they ngmi
by Anonymous1 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_Dance10781 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 Anonymous1 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 Anonymous1 week ago
this is the stupidest thing I've ever read
by Anonymous1 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 Anonymous1 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 Anonymous1 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 Anonymous1 week ago
who would even want a green bay packers butt plug
by Yreinger1 week ago
Sigh. No they do not. You're just paranoid, a side effect of poor critical thinking.
by Anonymous1 week ago
A reminder to slap your dick on your phones mic every day
by DifferentCountry1 week ago
And what should the women do?
by Anonymous1 week ago
Strap-on and a fat suit
by DifferentCountry1 week ago
There's nothing that I say that anyone outside of my circle would remotely care about
by Melodic-Ad1 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-8001 week ago
Mehhhhh. Ads don't work on people with self control.
by Anonymous1 week ago
This isn't a joke: this is exactly what they want you to think. Ads work on EVERYONE.
by Yleannon1 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-Song1 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-8001 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-Ad1 week ago
And TVs. And door bells. Even light bulbs.
by This-Expression89221 week ago
I run a MOTOROLA RAZR. No issues but it is hampering my Words With Friends
by Anonymous1 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 AwarenessMany97881 week ago
Hours? I spent 5k on an e-bike last summer, and they have ever since tried to sell me another
by kasandrahammes1 week ago
I never cared in the first place.
by Anonymous1 week ago
It's fine as soon as they don't tell anyone else.
by AffectionatePlay97951 week ago
That's how phones work? They need a microphone to pick up our voice for the phone calls?
by MaximumSympathy82891 week ago
If they listen to everyone, then I am not worth listening to
by DevelopmentReal50771 week ago
Just like we accepted that cars occasionally kill people
by Wbernier1 week ago
Well no, I don't have facebook and turned all other voice features like google off.
by Anonymous1 week ago
But they don't usually
by Anonymous1 week ago
Of course they do, otherwise how would the person on the other end of the call hear us?
by Additional-Tune-36091 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 Gregorio761 week ago
That's not how it works.
by Limp_Status1 week ago
You're not using soundproofing?
by Sufficient-Chest1 week ago
I think your tinfoil hat is slipping...
by Anonymous1 week ago
I really wish my phone had a physical kill switch for the mic, and a 2nd for the camera.
by Disastrous_Judge1 week ago
Never noticed this on iOS. Is this some Android thing?
by Anonymous1 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 Anonymous1 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_Jacket1 week ago
I haven't accepted it because it still hasn't been sufficiently proven
by GloomyFlow1 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-54851 week ago
But it definitely isn't enabled all day long.
by GloomyFlow1 week ago
No,lol 😆they don't need to
by Anonymous1 week ago
At least someone listens to me!
by ryanstanford1 week ago
I use a degoogled e/OS Fairphone. Nobody's listening to me!
by Anonymous1 week ago
to be fair, its satan worshippers that are listening to you, the phone is just a tool.
by Anonymous1 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_Knowledge1 week ago
At least 1 thing that listens
by Anonymous1 week ago
They dont need to listen. Other data about you tells it enough about you to predict your spending habits
by Competitive-Gap1 week ago
They don't and only dumb people think that.
by tony571 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 Anonymous1 week ago
Remember Snowden? Nobody does
by Unhappy_Guest1 week ago
And knows what we look like, and knows where we are at all times.
by Alizebeahan1 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 Anonymous1 week ago
This is true and I'm for damn sure not using a flip phone
by Anonymous1 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 Anonymous1 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-Dust11491 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 Anonymous1 week ago
Most have. All is a stretch. Some of us are aware and in control of our tech.
by Janis051 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 Anonymous1 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_Product3311 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 HourWoodpecker1 week ago
Let me guess, you're an iPhone user?
by Anonymous1 week ago
What's the implication here?
by Anonymous1 week ago
I still remember when this was a conspiracy theory.
by Anonymous1 week ago
Still is…
by AwarenessMany97881 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 Allieleannon1 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_Replacement1 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 Anonymous1 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 Damorehester1 week ago
So something similar to the patriot act?
by murraymaritza1 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
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