Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by janrinok on Friday September 06 2019, @02:09PM   Printer-friendly
from the Didn't-Search-Deep-Enough dept.

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-49585682

A recent study has "proven" that Android and Apple phones do not eavesdrop on conversations.

A mobile security company has carried out a research investigation to address the popular conspiracy theory that tech giants are listening to conversations.

The internet is awash with posts and videos on social media where people claim to have proof that the likes of Facebook and Google are spying on users in order to serve hyper-targeted adverts. Videos have gone viral in recent months showing people talking about products and then ads for those exact items appear online.

Now, cyber security-specialists at Wandera have emulated the online experiments and found no evidence that phones or apps were secretly listening.

I think this is the classic can't prove a counterfactual thing, ("we've proved that no birds swim from this survey of life in a nearby park"). However, I thought this would be an interesting article, and possibly start some good conversation... if nothing else, due to poking potential holes in their experimental techniques and data analysis:

Researchers put two phones - one Samsung Android phone and one Apple iPhone - into a "audio room". For 30 minutes they played the sound of cat and dog food adverts on loop. They also put two identical phones in a silent room.

The security specialists kept apps open for Facebook, Instagram, Chrome, SnapChat, YouTube, and Amazon with full permissions granted to each platform.

They then looked for ads related to pet food on each platform and webpage they subsequently visited. They also analysed the battery usage and data consumption on the phones during the test phase.

They repeated the experiment at the same time for three days, and noted no relevant pet food adverts on the "audio room" phones and no significant spike in data or battery usage.

The activity seen on phones in the "audio room" and the silent rooms were similar. They did record data being transferred from the devices - but it was at low levels and nowhere near the quantity seen when virtual assistants like Siri or Hey Google are active.

James Mack, systems engineer at Wandera, said: "We observed that the data from our tests is much lower than the virtual assistant data over the 30-minute time period, which suggests that the constant recording of conversations and uploading to the cloud is not happening on any of these tested apps.


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 2) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Saturday September 07 2019, @08:34AM

    by jmichaelhudsondotnet (8122) on Saturday September 07 2019, @08:34AM (#890893) Journal

    Indeed, this seems designed with a very generalized, very sanitized study, to give the maximum impression that people can control their phones. Don't worry, this isn't the vulnerability you are looking for....

    It's noteworthy how the phones in the lab are treated like alien artifacts, we can't actually take them apart like other things to study them, they are precious and monolithic. How reverent the testers are of IP. This whole problem even exists because people like me *cannot* escalate our admin privileges of this miniature i386 form factor to look at its processors, transmitters, ram and hard disk. To me, the need for studies like this is the entire purpose these privileges are not available, otherwise all of the tracking would be out in the open and we would be designing open source tools to remove them that you did not need a heavily restricted and tracked 'app store' (aka corporate repository) to install, just like the rest of the i386 platform. But no, we can't have nice things, we have to trust the hand that feeds us if we want a pretty phone.

    This I eventually declined and I recommend everyone do so as well. For me getting a 'smart' phone would be like getting a windows xp computer i had to attach to my hip. I write about it on my site, 'smart phones and wild bears'.

    I agree with both of your two points but find other points more compelling.

    3 the nso group and friends can send you a single text message that comprimises your phone completely, without any action on your part

    4 the data profile of the fictional person holding the phone in the tests is empty, so it isn't interesting to anyone. the dragnet of surveillance will kick in and start setting off passive flags for marketers or spy agencies to target you once you start acting like a human being.

    So for all of these points, I find the test this organization ran to be anti-scientific and awful, it is there to shut down intellectual inquiry while providing little to no information. The organization that did it is likely somehow connected to the people doing the tracking themselves, although the people doing the testing could be well meaning.

    I might call this kind of science, like the 5g tests of a single transmitter under optimal conditions, 'don't worry your little head' science, inappropriate for humans but directed at us nonetheless.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2