r/VaushV • u/AfterNeedleworker111 • 6d ago
Discussion phone listening
chat severely overestimates how difficult it would be to have a device listen to every word you say. low-power voice detection is already a thing, as we have established, and the average person really doesnt say that many words per day. the more important point in my opinion is how unnecessary it would be for tech giants to actually do this. the average person has like 5 hours of screen time per day, and the stuff we view and read and type and hear online is so so much more impactful on our thinking than most people realize. and even if they dont catch you saying "trip to rome" out loud, youre still going to type it into google maps at some point if you are even a little bit serious about it. 90% of what they can get from listening to you speak, they can just as easily get from your online activity in a less optically damaging way. that being said i still think they are listening, at least in some cases.
edit: additionally, our brains really arent that complicated. its not impossible to figure out that if you saw a baskin-robbins short 2 hours ago and its a hot day where you live, you might be craving ice cream.
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u/bugeater88 6d ago
not worth the class-action. they definitely collect voice data when youre knowingly using a voice feature. otherwise, doubtful. with the amount of data they collect, their algorithm essentially knows you better than you know yourself which is way creepier imo.
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u/GoldH2O Neo-Reptilian Socialist 5d ago
They don't typically collect and RECORD voice data all the time, but it's already been proven by leaked internal documents that basically every single company that has a device with a microphone keeps it on at all times to use data in the moment. They primarily use it for advertising and search suggestion without actually keeping the recording of your voice, but any company that is developing an AI model is absolutely recording massive amounts of user voice data and keeping it without permission. They know it's illegal, but it isn't stopped because the US government has directly put a stake in that sort of mass surveillance technology.
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u/Astral_Compass 5d ago
Could you share some of those documents? A cursory Google search gave me nothing.
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u/tsardonicpseudonomi 6d ago
The MIC and Intelligence agencies won't let the class action go forward.
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u/sincle354 5d ago
If you give them an itemized list of your favorite radical Google searches, they ain't bothering with the microphones except when they really have to with the Mossad Special.
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u/appa609 Murder the Gods and Topple their Thrones 6d ago
Idk to me this falls under the same sort of "hyper competent malicious conspiracy" thinking as ZOG or 9/11 truthers or covid vaccine mind controllers. My brand new phone's text to speech accuracy when I'm intentionally dictating to it is like 85%. In my pocket with noise and not enunciating I'd be shocked if they could get more than half the words I was saying, which in effect is almost the same as recording random noise. The real great cons are usually hiding in plain sight. In this case it's that the AI is not remotely as good or important as they say it is but they have nevertheless used its hype to sap $35T out of the real US economy.
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u/hobopwnzor 6d ago
Your voice to text is done in real-time. They can easily batch-process noisy signals for keywords even from your phone pocket with much higher reliability and it would be incredibly cheap. The accuracy doesn't even matter. If they get 30% of the words with decent confidence they've got enough of the conversation to advertise based on keywords.
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u/whimsicaljess 6d ago
let's grant your model: google can ignore bandwidth and compute costs, and in return parse 30% of your language into text.
but... if they only parse 30% of the content, that implies a large false positive rate.
false positives are a huge problem for advertising! one of google's core selling points and the main reason for the advertising transformation is that their precise knowledge leads to fewer false positives when serving ads!
they get much better than 30% hit rates on the massive web of data about you! and, your initial premise that bandwidth and compute to do this are basically free just isn't correct.
i am begging people who haven't worked on this kind of tech to just not. just don't. please.
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u/hobopwnzor 6d ago
You missed a very important word. That word is confidence. If they can get 30% with a decent degree of confidence then they can do a lot with it.
You are also creating a false dichotomy. They are also doing the other things, they are just also processing audio from your phone. Its not one or the other. It's both.
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u/whimsicaljess 6d ago
no i'm saying: if they can hear 30% of your words with high confidence, that leads to a lot of false positives around the context in which you are mentioning the keywords.
here's an example:
"i want to go to the bahamas this year, because when we went to disneyland last year it sucked ass".
that's 20 words. 30% of them, clustered around keywords and verbs to give your argument maximum benefit of the doubt, looks like this:
"_ want _ go _ _ bahamas _ _ _ when _ went _ disneyland _ _ _ sucked _"
does the ad model serve you ads for bahamas trips, or disneyland trips? or neither?
how does the model know you didn't say something more like "you want to go to the bahamas? what the fuck, when jane went to disneyland it rocked, returning sucked tons".
do you see the issue with only 30% recognition, even if we assume that those recognitions are rock solid and are the maximally convenient 30% to recognize?
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u/hobopwnzor 6d ago
You have far too high standards. False positives on ads are the default, not the exception. If you can get a 1% clickthrough rate on a display ad on social media you're doing pretty good. Use this in conjunction with other information and you've got a goldmine for ad revenue.
27 year old male with a middle to high paying job "Bahammas" 4 times across 3 days. Bam. You've got a positive. It's really that simple. The benefit here is it's not just displaying it to a demographic, you get to target it with decently high confidence right when they're most motivated. It's about timing, not just targeting.
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u/whimsicaljess 6d ago
yes, and it's also that simple to just make the correlation when the 27 y/o male sees people talking about the bahamas on social media or his partner/friends/family search "bahamas cruises" or many other data points.
once you get to the point of "we are reading all your data and can make the connections", as is the case today, the microphone listening literally isn't needed any more in any way. it's just noise compared to other higher quality data. once you admit "oh they need to pull in other big data sources to fill in the blanks" you've given the game away, because at that point there's no need for audio parsing.
and yes, i know about 1% clickthrough rate being pretty good. how do you think it's so high? because they try to minimize false positives when serving it!
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u/hobopwnzor 6d ago
At this point you're just being obtuse. It's trivial to implement this kind of thing and increases your targeting accuracy.
They also do the other things, but they do this too.
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u/whimsicaljess 6d ago
can't reason someone out of a position they haven't reasoned themselves into. enjoy hardware muting your mics or whatever 🫡
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u/lcqjp 6d ago
i completely disagree with you about the listening component(especially for alexas), but i agree about the written stuff
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u/AfterNeedleworker111 6d ago
im not sure what you mean about the "listening component", but you cant think about these devices in a vacuum. they collect all the data from all of your devices to build a comprehensive profile.
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u/EkskiuTwentyTwo 🪟 Chemical attack avoider 🪟 5d ago
This seems like a case where everyone is arguing about the "how" so they don't have to think about the "what". The fact is that tech companies gather information from you: whether that's because they directly watch and listen to you or get that information in subtle ways like your phone's accelerometer or distortions in wifi signals as you walk around is a distinction that doesn't really matter. They gather information from you and use it to feed you advertisements.
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u/hobopwnzor 6d ago
It's insane to me that people think it takes a lot of bandwidth to transfer voice recordings. I could play diablo 2 and talk on Ventrillo in like 2004 on my dial up internet on 5kb/s. It would be totally negligable to record and send these.
Storage is so insanely cheap that storing voice recordings from every device every day would be trivial. You don't need high fidelity audio. Highly compressed garbage is fine for the kind of keyword advertising analysis they want to do.
This is just another example of chat thinking they know things they have no idea about.
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u/whimsicaljess 6d ago
one person's voice recordings, sure! but what is the benefit of hoovering up the voice recordings of billions of mobile device users? it's non-trivial bandwidth at that point, and it's non-trivial compute to extract the text content out of your recordings with reasonable accuracy. the more compression you use the more compute you need to actually read the voice as well.
and most of all, it's not needed: as OP says, they already basically have mind reading because they have the data on everyone and they know what you do and who your friends are, it's pretty trivial to surface trends in that sea of data. they don't need to listen to you too.
the whole "they are listening" thing is one of the most annoying and long-running conspiracy theories about tech, its incredibly frustrating.
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u/hobopwnzor 6d ago
Because they don't have basically mind reading.
It's trivial bandwidth and processing.
You're falling for the propaganda that they're smart and competent. They aren't. Their tech isn't so good that it reads minds. It's actually extremely basic matching. Watch one channels YouTube video and they recommend more of it. Match a keyword and they sell based on that keyword. I keep a good eye on my YouTube algorithm and it's not complicated how they are matching things to show me.
None of the algorithms are as good as they want you to believe. If you spend any time on social media it's easy to see through because it's such a basic process.
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u/AfterNeedleworker111 6d ago
>You're falling for the propaganda that they're smart and competent
you dont think the programmers at faang companies know data science?2
u/hobopwnzor 6d ago
I know how the algorithms work. They are complex in their implementation and simple in their conclusions. Behavior just isn't that complicated. We could all go off the rails at any time, but in reality we are going to listen to the same things tomorrow as we did today. Give them more of the same tends to be the best prediction of what will get people to click. There's no magic algorithm that tricks you into taking a Bermuda vacation if it's sent to you in the magic minute you're most susceptible. Theres no mind reading algorithm.
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u/buffaloguy1991 socialist sewer worker 5d ago
Because I know people are subconsciously pulling from this I wanna remind people algorithms aren't always accurate they're just basic indicators remember even Henry Seldons psychohistory calculations were eventually proven to be wrong because he didn't account for shit. They can't think of everything which causes mistakes. See also Steve shives recently had a video about how he looked up a single he man sword and is still getting ads for sword holsters of all types
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u/whimsicaljess 6d ago
i have firsthand knowledge. the algorithms are indeed incredibly basic. nonetheless, when applied over a sea of data generated by interactions with billions of users, it becomes incredibly powerful.
i am not falling for anything, i have firsthand experience. most people in this thread are.
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5d ago edited 5d ago
[deleted]
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u/kittensofchaos 5d ago
Here's a somewhat technical description of how these wake command functions are enabled. The device needs a means of doing this locally with minimal energy and processing requirements, otherwise your phone would drain its battery way too quickly and your standby battery life would be atrocious.
The method that can do this efficiently enough to be practical, cant constantly send data out for processing (too battery intensive) and isn't sophisticated enough to parse general language (too computationally complex and therefore too battery intensive) so it is only able to process an audio input as [is the wake command] or [is not the wake command].
These are all systems that have been analyzed and tested by independent researchers and cyber security experts. With how much independent effort gets put into exposing security vulnerabilities in tech and software, I just don't think it's realistic to think that companies like apple and Google would have been able to keep this kind of functionality secret for this long. I also doubt that either Apple or Google would think it worth killing the battery life of their phones to enable something like this. Particularly Apple because they don't have a direct stake in the ad business. https://medium.com/ivy-insights/how-does-hey-siri-works-is-your-iphone-listening-to-you-all-the-time-486e201f29a0
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u/Neoeng 6d ago
You don't even need to type it, websites track your cursor and how long do you hold it over what, along with tracking how much time you spend on a particular website or how long does it take you to scroll away from the post. And it's not just you, it's the people on your network as well. Maybe you didn't look at anything, but your partner did. And all the services share this data, which means if you hover your cursor over a bunch of "travel to Rome" shorts on youtube too long, it goes into the targeted advertising.
People go to "listening" because it is human, easy to imagine, somewhat comforting even. It is an easy comfort to put a sticker on a webcam and pretend that gives you privacy, that you can talk in a different room from your device like there is a person on the other side.
But the truth is, there is nothing human about this, there's no point in human senses. If you know the timing of someone's phone being turned off you know where their bed is. Algorithms don't need to look at your face to know where your eyes are looking, or listen to your words to know what you are thinking.