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Huh oh. As a committed anti-conspiracy-theorist for the "phones listen to your microphone and targeted ads based on what you say" thing I can tell this is going to be exhausting

From the Reuters story: www.reuters.com/legal/apple-... "Two plaintiffs said their mentions of Air Jordan sneakers and Olive Garden restaurants triggered ads for those products. Another said he got ads for a brand name surgical treatment after discussing it, he thought privately, with his doctor."

... but since the case is being settled, I don't think we get to hear if that ended up being proven or not It's actually a detail that originates with the original lawsuit filing back in 2021 www.reuters.com/technology/a...

I bet that detail ends being used as "proof" that this happens from now on out, and nobody will ever try to explain how Apple's Q&A recordings of snippets of wake words were somehow fed in realtime to the world's ad networks in a way that resulted in as targeting shortly afterwards

It would be interesting to see what happened if USA congress tried to pass a law banning ad targeting via surreptitious microphone recordings, mainly because I would love to see who came out to lobby AGAINST that

I’ve always thought the truth is much creepier — we emit so much data through our online behavior and we’re predictable enough that people don’t need to eavesdrop on us to know what we’re into at the moment.

💯 That is a big part of why I care so much: I want people to understand the real threats The microphone thing is particularly pernicious because it teaches people there's nothing they can do - they just accept an imagined surveillance because the alternative is not using a phone at all

It's easy to dismiss conspiracy theories but it does not do them justice. The truth here is not the material truth about whether or not companies listen to you. The truth is what people believe these companies are capable of and willing to do.

I'm not sure if I'm just missing sarcasm, but I believe the exact opposite of every one of the above sentences. 😀

Dismissing conspiracy theories rationally is just a way for the dismisser to get to feel smarter than somebody else.

That's what's so frustrating about this: companies violate user privacy in a whole host of complex ways, but people are getting distracted by the ONE thing that they aren't actually doing! If we want to advocate for better privacy we need to campaign on the issues that are real, not imagined

Does it really matter if you want to raise popular support to sanction these companies? It all points in the same direction.

I think it depends on the app you have open with a specific set of permissions, but I have seen at least one case that was hard to explain otherwise specifically because of the timing and the hyperspecificity of that subject to only that moment. It for sure didn't demand any on-device processing

or access by anything outside of reach of the app, but it could basically have not been anything else but something via the microphone. Can't remember what it was though. I definitely know that I haven't had any of that with Facebook gone. I use adblock and don't use Facebook anymore, and no such

issues with Instagram or Whatsapp. I think I also opted out of the option for this I think, which is legally required here in the EU. I definitely think that me as a tech-savvy person figured at the moment that the conditions were such that it would absolutely be technologically possible for then.

Wow there are a lot of credulous people on Hacker News news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4258...

1,400 reposts and 3,800 likes on this quote of the most inflammatory paragraph from the Ars Technica article, which was an irresponsible reframing of an unproven claim bsky.app/profile/karl...

I really need to stop looking at my referral traffic, the quality of skeptical thinking on /r/skeptic turns out not to be great www.reddit.com/r/skeptic/co...

I thought that part wasn’t admitted…

The alarming bit for me is that all we have to go on is word of mouth and there is “practically zero” regulation and transparency enforced on corps making assistants and such.

Apple just had to pay out $95 million because they sent audio snippets from "Hey Siri" wake words back to their server without disclosing that to their users

It used to be easier to argue against this (read: still impossible) because it was trivially technically infeasible. On-device voice recognition wasn’t a thing and the bandwidth to process audio from a billion devices wouldn’t have been worth it. Now that on-device voice recognition is good, though…

Obviously what anyone has to offer is opinions but one thing is for sure: Apple is not privacy minded. They just like control on their own devices. They'll give up your privacy if profitable and as a matter of fact one of the iOS syscall gives you an advertisment ID for the user. Not white-knight-y

That's the ID that you can only get if the user has said "yes" to the question about allowing apps to track them, right? developer.apple.com/documentatio...