correct.

the level of unsubstantiated cope in this thread is mind boggling. from people who should honestly know better.

cos the majority in this thread cannot even read the articles they cite mistakenly thinking it supports their unscientific claims that this topic is decided.

afaict no researcher has formally claimed a full coverage binary analysis.

if you know of such a study please link?

afaict the researchers are very upfront about the limits to the coverage of their studies and the importance of that uncovered ground being covered.

when the researchers themselves are saying the work isn’t over. why are all the super geniuses in this thread so smugly announcing this topic is wrapped up?

i guess they know better than the actual researchers do. amazing, someone should tell them not to worry cos the geniuses in the forums have it all worked out 🤣

[if you’re unable to reply with a direct excerpt from actual formally issued research (not some pop media headline) i will not bother responding]

yeah the level of technical competence on this site has plummeted since the influx of the reddit crowd.

just enough consumer tech enthusiast knowledge to delude themselves they can smugly and self righteously shit on the average non-tech person.

and now they’re the majority, drowning out legitimate curiosity by loudly parroting headlines from articles they didn’t even read. slowly turning lemmy into the regurgitated reddit pop media shithole they wanted to escape.

this topic is especially difficult because of the clear emotional desire for it not to be true. hence the degree of fragile cope in this thread.

thankfully not everyone here is a lost cause, and you’ve been given some good advice on delineating the other possible causes for what you’ve observed. when we do a careful analysis we must ofc consider all possibilities.

what i’ve not seen properly acknowledged in this thread, however, is that the possibility of alternative explanations doesn’t preclude the possibility of voice-based surveillance either.

always listening

i never claimed always, i specifically advised op to refrain from claiming always.

how can you pretend to represent a sound scientific approach when you misrepresent the scientific claims made in sources you cite

piss easy

many domain experts dedicating significant resources to it’s study

pick one.

when your sources repeatedly don’t say what you claim they say, maybe its time to revisit your claims ;)

Of course a researcher is never sure something is 100% ruled out. That’s part of how academic research works.

once again, that isn’t what they were reported to have said. [and researchers don’t need to repeat the basic precepts of the scientific method in every paper they write, so perhaps its worthwhile to note what they were reported to say about that, rather than write it off as a generic ‘noone can be 100% certain of anything’] it’s a bit rich to blame someone for lacking rigor while repeatedly misrepresenting what your own article even says.

what the article actually said is

because there are some scenarios not covered by their study

and even within the subset of scenarios they did study, the article notes various caveats of the study:

Their phones were being operated by an automated program, not by actual humans, so they might not have triggered apps the same way a flesh-and-blood user would. And the phones were in a controlled environment, not wandering the world in a way that might trigger them: For the first few months of the study the phones were near students in a lab at Northeastern University and thus surrounded by ambient conversation, but the phones made so much noise, as apps were constantly being played with on them, that they were eventually moved into a closet

there’s so much more research to be done on this topic, we’re FAR FAR from proving it conclusively (to the standards of modern science, not some mythical scientifically impossible certainty).

presenting to the public that is a proven science, when the state of research afaict has made no such claim is muddying the waters.

if you’re as absolutely correct as you claim, why misrepresent whats stated in the sources you cite?

no, they don’t

Please be careful with your claims.

In my experience, whenever investigating these claims and refutations we usually find when digging past the pop media headlines into the actual academic claims, that noone has proven it’s not happening. If you know of a conclusive study, please link.

Regarding the article you have linked we don’t even need to dig past the article to the actual academic claims.

The very article you linked states quite clearly:

The researchers weren’t comfortable saying for sure that your phone isn’t secretly listening to you in part because there are some scenarios not covered by their study.

(Genuine question, not trying to be snarky) Will you take a moment to reflect on which factors may have contributed to your eagerness to misrepresent the conclusions of the studies cited in your article?

Anyone saying they know for 100% certain it’s not happening is probably speaking from their emotional desire for it not to be true - rather than actual fact.

Anyone who has looked into the actual technical aspects, rather than spouting the usual surface-level “tech facts” or parroting headlines (rather than the actual academic findings), cannot seriously claim to know for certain its 100% not happening.

@op i would advise caution on stating ‘24x7’ until there is evidence of that specific claim. (unless you’re referring to while voice assistants are enabled.)

no idea

but google cache is being shut down, then google announces they’ll be participating with IA.

now this.

really not a good time in history for our ability to easily document web history to be getting messed with.

jami has so much potential. just wish it ran a bit more reliable

the PR and lawsuit risk

what risk? facebook & others conducted illegal human experiments. this is an enormous crime and was widely reported yet all fb had to do from a pr perspective was apologise.

as we all know, fb even interfered with with the electoral process of arguably the world’s most powerful nation, and all they had to do was some rebranding to meta and it’s business as usual. this is exactly how powerful these organisations are. go up against a global superpower & all you need to do is change your business name??? they don’t face justice the same way anyone else would, therefore we cannot assess the risk for them as we would another entity - and they know it.

So, while i personally disagree for above reasons, I can accept in your opinion they wouldn’t take the legal risk.

simpler metrics are enough

when has ‘enough’ ever satisfied these entities? we merely need to observe the rate of evolution of various surveillance methods, online, in our devices, in shopping centers to see ‘enough’ is never enough. its always increasing, and at an alarming rate.

local processing of the mic data into topics that then get sent to their servers is more concerning is not much more feasible

sorry i didn’t quite understand, are you saying its not feasible or it is feasible? from the way the sentence started i thought you were going to say it could be, but then you said ‘not much more feasible’?

Voice data isn’t

voice conversations are near-universally prized in surveillance & intelligence. There hasn’t been any convincing argument for any generalised exception to that.

I am not sure they could write it off as a bug

it’s already been written off as a bug. i didn’t follow that story indefinitely but i’m not aware of even a modest fine being paid in relation to the above story. if it can accidentally transcribe and send your conversations to your contact list without your knowledge or consent (literally already happened - with impunity(?)), they can 1000% “accidentally” send it to some ‘debug’ server somewhere.

Are they actually doing it? It ofc remains to be seen. Imo the fallout if it was revealed would roughly look like this

• A few people would say “no shit”
• Most people would parrot the “ive done nothing wrong so i don’t care” line.
• A few powerless people would be upset.

If they truly wanted to have mic access, they could for a long time

agreed

and it would have been known

are you sure?

The reality is it is too expensive

imo this commonly repeated view has never been substantiated.

we’ve yet to see a technical explanation for why it’s “impossible/too expensive” which addresses the modern realities of efficient voice codecs, even rudimentary signal processing and modern speech-to-text network models.

and risky

how so? previously invasive features are simply written off as “a bug”. they barely even need to issue some b̶r̶i̶b̶e̶s̶ fines (typical corporate solution to getting caught), that is the level we’re currently at:

“whoops it was a bug, we’ll switch it off”

“whoops another update switched it on again” (if caught, months/years later)

“whoops some other opt-in surveillance switched itself on again, just another bug ¯_(ツ)_/¯”

as long as they have deniability as a bug, there’s almost zero repercussions and thus virtually zero risk. that is perhaps why a company out and talking about it openly is such a no-no. discussing intent makes ‘bug’ deniability more difficult.

in my experience when reading past the “they’re not listening” headlines, and into the actual technical reports, noone has been able to conclusively rule it out. if you know of conclusive documentation, please post.

then there’s the “they have enough data already” argument. which is entirely without foundation, as we all know very well: nothing is ever enough for these pathologically greedy entities. ‘enough’ simply isn’t in their vocabulary. we all know this already.

[i didn’t downvote you btw]

no idea why you’re being downvoted.

you’re entirely correct, and i don’t interpret you as defending telegram’s lack of user protections

(noticing a real uptick in reddit hivemind around lemmy lately, it’s depressing tbh)

Everything that’s encrypted is generally more private and secure than the equivalent which isn’t encrypted

They gave a fuck about negative pr

seems roughly accurate.

but probably would add

the mayor is a good person, and genuinely appears to want to see the best in people. but most of the reported incidents involve thugs with overt connections to an organised crime syndicate which is currently so powerful they mostly don’t have to answer to anyone.

the same crime syndicate has been granted the contract to light the field, cut the grass and keep everyone safe.

the mayor has a fairly good record of delivering on good community projects. so on the one hand mayor has a good rep, on the other…it’s an organised crime syndicate who is literally one of the worst offenders when it comes to making the field unsafe in the first place.

That’s wrong. The creation of PPA isn’t about getting paid

ok that’s fair, thanks for the useful info i didn’t know that. until money or other resources change hands i’m happy to withdraw the view that while firefox is underfunded by the community, it may not have resulted in these kinds of collaborations.

what i’m not understanding is how average non-adblock running users will be better off?

i appreciate you’ve stated how the sole purpose of this collaboration is intended by mozilla.

yet unlike the current implementation which appears to be opt-out, afaict meta’s particpation here is entirely opt-in, isn’t it? if meta etc decide on a whim they want to have their cake and eat it too, what is stopping them?

imo we’re all lacking innocence, regardless of using adblockers or not. we all, myself included, haven’t funded mozilla fairly for FF.

even if viewing ads for a website was an ethically sound exchange (in principle? probably achievable; in modern implementations? highly debatable),

regardless, that revenue is naturally for the sites not for the browser. maintaining a modern browser requires non-trivial resources, alot of us get hours/day from our browsers, advertisers are getting paid, and meanwhile ff has been missing out.

i could be wrong, but my gut feeling is mozilla is (mostly) a legit organisation with genuine good interests at heart. and if we’d all donated even a fraction of what its genuinely worth, they probably wouldn’t have to make these kinds of faustian deals.

giving advertisers enough to leave innocent people alone

I think this is very optimistic, the ad industry has virtually zero incentive to play fairly here. afaict they’ve currently got it far too good to have any genuine motivation to make concessions?

if i had to guess, one of the biggest actual threats on their horizon is somehow maintaining s̶u̶f̶f̶i̶c̶i̶e̶n̶t̶ infinite growth, which is further reason for them to NOT be satisfied with an equivalent or lesser scope than they already have right now.

imo its not a matter if but when it will be discovered meta’s behaved in bad faith here. i could be wrong, and hopefully i am because it would ofc philosophically be a step in the right direction.

To suggest that Mozilla PPA has no benefit to the average user is disingenuous at best or outright malicious malpractice with the intent of defamation

Thanks. Could you give some examples how the average user benefits from this collaboration between mozilla and meta, as implemented or due for implementation in firefox?

Dunning-Kruger effect

could you please explain further what you mean and what you’re referring to?