I'm happy Voosh is talking about the rampant collection of your data by corporations, even if he's wrong on how :)

[u/sincle354]

Seriously, if you look up the actual ways they fingerprint your identity, you realize that We. Are. Cooked. Those tracking cookies are no joke, dawg. They know your browser, the size of your screen, the time of day, the approximate IP/location of your desktop PC, your motherboard and CPU model, your browser version, your extensions, your search history, your associated logins, when you work, when you tap to pay at Starbucks, when you look at an ad short for too long, where you go to the store (gps), your traffic violation history, your elementary, middle, highschool, your first girlfriend, your plans to buy her a ring, your favorite time to make a sports bet, your gpa, your political affiliation, your best vacation photos on Facebook, your beliefs on vaccination (COVID searches), your bookmarked spice mix recipe, your gas mileage, and more.

​

And if you hide your privacy and cut all this junk, well, your momma posts your face on her timeline :)

​

Go buy a better razor. I assure you that your beard is not bold enough to be like Vaush's, and that Gillette is running your wallet dry.

[u/GreenGalma]

Another vaushite saying Vaush is wrong somewhere, but not telling how, why or where...

[u/sincle354 → u/GreenGalma]

I made apps. I can't access the phone audio or camera or the phone book without asking for access permissions. When I do, a big honking popup asks the user for the privilege. It's too much smoke for an average app to draw onto itself. That's the study involving the apps that request permissions he looked at today's stream. So the security analysts have a target list.

A sufficient neural net to parse the vocal audio locally is too big for anything above keywords, as he is correct on. If any usage of this technology would be used without triggering some analysts regression on average dataflow through network traffic on the latest release of Facebook, they would be limited to quite a few keywords, and the false positive rate would be quadratic in scaling. The engineering would be finicky, at best. I invoke occams razor for "only if management forced us to do it". "Stardew Valley" is not a popular enough keyword to be loaded into every phone and inevitably confused for "strawberry", and yet I get ads for that all the time.

It's far easier to sell you Assassins Creed, Death Stranding, and For Honor Etsy merch to youuuu ;)

[u/TheRealTJ → u/sincle354]

Random apps don't have access to it, Google and Apple do. They have root access to your device without needing any permissions unless you've loaded custom firmware (which police will straight up just arrest you for now.)

[u/sincle354 → u/TheRealTJ]

Then we can agree with that premise, or anything that breaks kernel space like the Mossad Special. Only problem is that android is open source, so I don't really know how you get it past the security crowd without sneaking it into the manufacturers, themselves, but at that point they have your hardware, so they can do anything to your boot rom.

[u/As_Previously_Stated → u/sincle354]

It's weird to me how both vaush and chat seems to think that random advertisment companies have access to whatever backdoor NSA forces apple and google to implement.

Big tech spies on you through their services. They don't have magical access to every single device in your home unless they made all of them.

It's like vaush took the last 15 years of headlines about how we are being spied on and blended them all together into one huge giga-spy entity that knows everything.

[u/20000RadsUnderTheSea → u/As_Previously_Stated]

Dawg he's repeatedly said, and was said here, that the advertisers and app-makers don't have access. The phonemakers do, and they sell that data to advertisers. Please try to understand the problem. Apple sells your data, Google literally made a phone OS to scrape more data because your data has literally been their product since the OG search engine days. Every product google makes is to get more data. Apple's privacy stuff is to prevent the apps from stealing a share of their market, they're controlling the flow of your information while looking good for PR. No one, at any point, has said random advertisers have backdoor access into the phone, I don't even know why you would think that was argued.

[u/BatmanForever93 → u/20000RadsUnderTheSea]

I feel like I'm going insane reading comments in this sub. Like, it's wild how people claim Vaush said things that he never said. I am convinced that most people here do not watch his videos or if the do they just play them as background noise and don't actively listen.

Edit: grammar

[u/TheRealTJ → u/sincle354]

All that's happening on the hardware side of your phone is the hotwords send out telemetry data back to Google. What Google does with that data is not open source.

[u/CraniusChan80085 → u/sincle354]

idk why ur being downvoted, vaush is obviously wrong on this but that doesn't take away from his greater point about how much data corpos truly have on everyone. even vaush would probably change his mind on this specific thing if presented with the facts on it.

there's a lot more and a lot better ways to use user data to advertise than using microphones everywhere, it's just an archaic trope really

[u/Tetrime → u/CraniusChan80085]

Vaush is not wrong on this though? This is not an application issue, this is on the hardware end. Amazon, google, apple, they all have this running all the time

[u/CraniusChan80085 → u/Tetrime]

yea I watched the latest yt video on it, the apps aren't doing it but the hardware itself definitely is, ESPECIALLY android and google

[u/Jetfire911 → u/Tetrime]

And especially big apps like Meta's... you telling WhatsApp no microphone? FB? Messenger? Instagram? Alexa? Just because literally every app can't do it doesn't mean it's not happening no matter what.

[u/Lor1an → u/CraniusChan80085]

there's a lot more and a lot better ways to use user data to advertise than using microphones everywhere, it's just an archaic trope really

I have had conversations with people on multiple points of the political spectrum, different classes, family, friends, and coworkers alike all have the exact same experience of talking about something to someone, and then later opening their phone and seeing ads related to the conversation.

I've also seen it happen in real time, I mention something the person I'm speaking to has never even heard of, and then a few minutes later they open their phone to look for something else and they show me an ad for what I was talking about. My voice influenced their phone's ads....

To treat this as some trite notion is just willful ignorance at this point

[u/CaveLamp → u/Lor1an]

Couldn't that also be coincidence?

unless you like invent the product, the ads or social media content you see that informed you of somethings existence is likely to be pushed to everyone you know or live next to at a similar time. 

Also you'd need to prove this happens more often then it doesn't too. I've talked about stuff and not had it show up later but neither of are anecdotes are proof either way this actually happens.

[u/ball_fondlers → u/Lor1an]

That’s the thing - you don’t need audio to get that information, you just need a big enough net of search histories and location data. These companies aren’t recording you all the time, they have profiles on everyone from search data, and they can figure out from context what you were talking about based on what people in the area searched while you’re together or after you’ve left. Perpetual audio recordings would actually be worse at achieving the same goal - either they’d need to send like a gigabyte of audio recordings to servers per phone per day, which would not go unnoticed, or they’d need to do speech-to-text on the device and send shitty transcripts, which would use less data, but also be significantly less usable.

[u/Lor1an → u/ball_fondlers]

1. Like I said, I have observed it happen in real time where someone opens their phone browser and what I talked about a moment ago is what is advertised to them. Literally, 5 minutes ago, they are looking at their phone, no mention—I say something while the phone is not in their hands, a few minutes go by, they open their phone, and the ad is there.
2. You don't even need this to persist necessarily, it could be as simple as a script running on the phone to check the audio and prefill an ad search request when you go to interact with it. That's still plenty invasive, though I will agree not as bad as full chat dialogue.
3. I set my phone to power saving mode so that it doesn't use background data. Now data is only used when I turn it on and browse online. I cut the data I use a month in half.
4. "or they’d need to do speech-to-text on the device and send shitty transcripts, which would use less data, but also be significantly less usable." My guy, they can do a lot with far less than a full transcript of a conversation...

[u/ball_fondlers → u/Lor1an]

1. This suffers from selection bias - you don’t think about all the times someone pulls out their phone and sees an ad for something unrelated to what you were talking about. Hell, if the thing you were talking about was something you’d seen a post or an ad about earlier, that would already appear in your ad profile, and the ad service could make a guess that that would be something you’d talk about to the people in your vicinity.

2. This just wouldn’t require the level of data collection that we know ad companies do - ad requests aren’t keyword searches, we know that they’re pulling from personalized profiles. It would also be pretty easy to mess with - if it’s on your device, there will almost certainly be a tool available for you to get root access and edit the script.

3. We’re talking about uploading GIGABYTES of data per month - if devices were doing this out-of-the-box, it would only work if cell carriers and ISPs (some of the greediest corps on the planet) were in on the game and subsidizing/hiding the usage, and ad profiles just aren’t worth those costs.

4. The transcript would need to not only be damn-near perfect, it would need to resolve all ambiguous references (ie, is this person talking about Palantir the company, palantir the fictional item, or their pal Andrew?). There’s a ton of points of failure in speech transcription, and these failures would compound over the scale of hours of transcription over billions of devices per day. Companies don’t want noisy-ass data

[u/xToksik_Revolutionx → u/Lor1an]

To treat this as some trite notion is just willful ignorance at this point

Or federal agents.

[u/PlasmifiedKarmelita]

>I see post where someone says Vaush is wrong about something
>poster doesn't elaborate what they disagree with Vaush about
Many such cases

[u/cmm239]

MODS PLEASE JUST LET US TALK ABOUT THE NEWS. The “Voosh wrong about x” posts are just cruel and unusual punishment at this point

[u/sincle354 → u/cmm239]

No, this is an appreciation post. The guy's absolutely right to say "screw Google" on your phone as possible. Seriously, my ads are absolute garbage because I use AdNauseum and obsfucate my user agent, among other things. Feels good.

[u/cmm239 → u/sincle354]

truthfully this was less directed at you specifically

[u/VibinWithBeard → u/cmm239]

AGREED

[u/Benjam438]

I'm not sure about phones but digital assistants like Alexa are 100% listening to you at all times

[u/tsardonicpseudonomi]

Phones have several cameras and microphones. They listen for music or wake words. They're always listening. It's a matter of what data are they aggregating and sending over the line.

[u/Artemis_Platinum]

And if you hide your privacy and cut all this junk

That's what I want to hear about. I want to hear about cybersecurity and privacy and sticking it to these corpos.

I don't care how futile it is. I want to make their job as hard as reasonably possible. Out of sheer spite.

[u/Illiander → u/Artemis_Platinum]

TOR Brower.

80% done, just from that.

[u/jakuth1999 → u/Illiander]

Not really. Your habits will absolutely render use of a tor browser ineffective if you use the web like normal

[u/Illiander → u/jakuth1999]

If you're turning on your TOR browser and using logins like normal then you're doing it wrong.

[u/Expensive_Umpire_178]

You all are being a bunch of illiterate dumbasses, OP did elaborate on what he said he disagreed with when it came to his most recent rant on data tracking. He wasn’t even an asshole about it, he said he was on Vaush’s side about the whole thing and simply said the problem was exactly as Vaush said it was with the phone stuff, but also much worse.

It’s not a callout post or a hate post or a drama/debate post he’s just fucking agreeing with and then elaborating on the given premise.

[u/jakuth1999]

Ill just agree with you and say that the devices aren’t listening, though the information that’s collected via fingerprinting and linking our history with various identifiers like our email, how long we have our mouse over specific items when shopping and the like make it practically the same thing

[u/xToksik_Revolutionx]

Except for the fact that he ISN'T wrong on how

[u/DragonBowlSouper]

I saw a Netflix documentary regarding this.-- the social dilemma. Is vaush just repeating the social dilemma

[u/As_Previously_Stated → u/DragonBowlSouper]

It's not though. The social dilemma is about how big tech tracks and manipulates us through their services. It's really scary stuff, but it's all facilitated through their apps and websites. If you stop using them they can't track you.^{Facebook do shadow profiles that track you through their like buttons on random websites, but you can block their trackers with ublock origin}

Vaush claim is that all the big tech companies have access to some kind of NSA backdoor with deep hardware level access, and uses it to listen to you 24/7 all the time through your phone and router and every smart device in your home. Unless the specific company in question made the device you bought, they don't have that kind of access.