Don’t know about Google home, but google meet is definitely like this. You mute your mic from the UI, you speak, and a small popup tells you something like, “are you trying to speak, your mic is off”.
Something like this also happened on Short Circuit (a channel of Linus Tech Tips) when testing Meta Glasses. Riley, the host was talking to it, and after the convo ended, he asked, “are you still listening?” And meta replied, “No”.
So, yes, it is safe to assume that the microphones are always listening and probably recording. These things are spywares and do not belong in private places like homes.
Muting microphone in a meeting is very different, the point is you don’t want other attendees to hear you, not the meeting software.
Otherwise agreed, the only way this can be 100% trusted is using a hw switch, which we won’t find on any phones and only a handful of laptops.
From my experience (Linux), switching off the microphone from the OS settings also works. You can’t be 100% sure, of course, but why would Linux / Firefox lie for Google?
Only marginally, IMHO - software is vulnerable to remote hacks, but physically breaking the electrical connection is pretty effing hard to overcome remotely.
Guys, ten or hundred of thousands security researchers have been going at this for years. Google isn’t secretly listening to you.
These things work with 2 mics, and 2 different circuits. The recording mic is one, while the detection mic is another. The second mic is only capable of pattern matching.
So yeah it’s on but only capable of hashing a 5 second recording and matching it to your voice (this shit works a lot like rsa keys if that’s helpful) to serve as a wake word. Maybe flag a simple response.
All that’s happening is the device heard a loud sound and knows it wasn’t a match or what’s expected.
No, it only applies to what they understood about the software and hardware, not any potential updates or firmware bugs being deliberately put out as backdoors. You know, the stuff that has been whistleblown on repeatedly. Oh well, why bother to remember all that stuff. It’s much easier to get angry at those nerds for spreading conspiracy theories about the Zionist glory of Google.
The truth is, none of you would believe this stuft was secure if your life depended on it. Your threat model is to be so entertained it would be foolish to kill you. Keep clapping big boy
Why are you talking about me as if you thought you knew who I was.
I don’t believe a quarter of the shit you put on me. I don’t believe in Google having ethics, but that doesn’t mean we can’t make predictions.
Yes, firmware updates exist. But since Google designed the things that way, there’s also a reasonable assumption that they’ll continue to work as they do for the foreseeable future. Doesn’t mean anyone should buy it or rely on it, but we weren’t talking about that.
That’s not a reasonable assumption to make about a company that brags about how closely it works with NATO, which has very clear “counterintelligence” goals which are more like zero tolerance for anything left if you read abt Gladio and shit. I think it reflects serious inconsistencies to read articles about Palestinians being stalked and tortured by American tech companies & their gulf state benefactors, then go, oh yippee, I found security researches born and bred in the exact same creche as all the other tech psychopaths, who act befuddled like “b-buh there’s no reason google would ever do that?! It would be against their business model!! 8D” like genuinely who givrs a fuck im sorry maybe it’s just you saying this about people who brag about hauling people in for torture, that is bothering me about the remark lmao. If I missed some subtleties
That’s the neat part. You don’t. There is an entire industry of devs trying to be the guy who conclusively proved all the companies are actually recording you.
Every time someone comes out and says that the phones aren’t secretly listening to us, I gotta tell this story.
I was at one time practicing therapy in a University. We did charity work, and I was providing therapy to a homeless man. This homeless man did not have a phone, or any electronic devices of any kind. We kept in contact via email, and he would use library computers in order to connect with us.
While providing therapy for him, the only electronic devices in the room are a batter operated digital clock, a battery operated voice recording device, and my own cell phone, locked and inactive. Nothing but my cell phone is connected to wifi or internet of any kind.
During session one day, he started talking about wanting to move to another country. We hold our usual session, with plenty of talk about moving to that country specifically. Once the session is over, we say goodbye and he goes on his way. I go back to my desk, and within an hour or so, scrolling on my phone, I’m getting advertisements for flights and vacations to that exact country. I had never gotten advertisements to that country before, or even for much travel in general.
So how do we explain it? The most common answer is “Oh, well he used his phone to look up flights and stuff, and google detected that your phones were near each other, and must have assumed that you would talk about it.”
Except the other man did not have a phone, nor did he have any way for Google to tell that he was near me after having looked it up at a local library. There was no way for Google to be able to tell that he was coming to our office at all unless it was reading his emails, and even then, it couldn’t know that he was talking to me specifically, such that I would get the targeted ads and none of my colleagues would.
Nobody can give me an explanation for what happened other than my phone was actively listening to the conversation. I’m definitely open to alternatives, I promise. Nobody has been able to explain it.
I get ads in Spanish if my phone hears me use a rotary saw a lot. I used to think it was from working near Spanish-speaking work crews, or purchasing lumber, but it’s happened from isolated backyard projects using materials that had been bought with cash weeks prior. The adbots are listening, and they think power tool noises are a dialect of Spanish.
It’s far too easy to change the software that drives that. For example, in order to minimize blatant power drain the trigger mic could easily become a switch that activates the main mic only when human voices are detected (or even specific voices). With authoritarian governments on the rise — along with the more than willing corporations backing them — I don’t think a bit of paranoia regarding the possibility is unwarranted.
ETA: Also there’s nothing saying the hardware can’t be updated for newer capabilities without anyone on the outside knowing. It’d be pretty easy to get away with once everyone gets lulled into a false sense of security regarding how they work.
If I was running a fascist government, I wouldn’t enable my spyware on every phone–that would make it too easy to detect and it would mean the people I’m spying on would take measures to protect themselves.
Instead, I would leave a backdoor open so that I could activate the specific phone of a specific person, a phone unlikely to be monitored in a lab by a security geek.
Which is why shit is continuously tested. Guys, billions of dollars goes into this. It’s not hard to find extra data pushed into packets. Far more complex shit is the norm.
Discord does this too. Occasionally instead of putting my voice through it just says “we’re not detecting any input from your microphone” but only while I’m speaking
Discord? Never had that. And it is super annoying that there is no mute indication. So many people “oh I was muted”, teamspeak had that solved decades ago. They also had actually distinct sounds for (in)muting…
There’s 2 mute indicators on discord? One on your name in the channel and one in the bottom left corner, where the digital mute button is. In any case, this issue has to do with the microphone detection and not the mute button itself
Don’t know about Google home, but google meet is definitely like this. You mute your mic from the UI, you speak, and a small popup tells you something like, “are you trying to speak, your mic is off”.
Something like this also happened on Short Circuit (a channel of Linus Tech Tips) when testing Meta Glasses. Riley, the host was talking to it, and after the convo ended, he asked, “are you still listening?” And meta replied, “No”.
So, yes, it is safe to assume that the microphones are always listening and probably recording. These things are spywares and do not belong in private places like homes.
Same with Teams, but the point it to mute yourself in a meeting, not from Microsoft
Muting microphone in a meeting is very different, the point is you don’t want other attendees to hear you, not the meeting software.
Otherwise agreed, the only way this can be 100% trusted is using a hw switch, which we won’t find on any phones and only a handful of laptops.
From my experience (Linux), switching off the microphone from the OS settings also works. You can’t be 100% sure, of course, but why would Linux / Firefox lie for Google?
Didn’t Fairphone or some other Linux phone maker include switches in some relatively recent model?
EDIT: According to (embarrassed for having to mention source) Google’s AI summary, yes:
Murena 2: Features a dedicated physical privacy switch that physically cuts the circuit for the microphone and camera.
Purism Librem 5: Offers physical toggle switches on the side of the phone to mechanically sever power to the microphone, camera, and baseband.
Pine64 PinePhone: Includes built-in hardware DIP switches under the back cover that allow you to completely disconnect the mic, cameras, and modems.
Is that true?
Man at least use some open source or European AI, like Qwen, Deepseek, Mistral.
I have /e/OS on my Fairphone 6 and the switch turns off camera and microphone. Of course this is software, but better than nothing.
Only marginally, IMHO - software is vulnerable to remote hacks, but physically breaking the electrical connection is pretty effing hard to overcome remotely.
Furi Lab’s FLX1 phones (Linux phones) have hardware switches.
Which are no longer for sale.
The FLX1s is, which also has hardware switches I’m pretty sure.
Guys, ten or hundred of thousands security researchers have been going at this for years. Google isn’t secretly listening to you.
These things work with 2 mics, and 2 different circuits. The recording mic is one, while the detection mic is another. The second mic is only capable of pattern matching.
So yeah it’s on but only capable of hashing a 5 second recording and matching it to your voice (this shit works a lot like rsa keys if that’s helpful) to serve as a wake word. Maybe flag a simple response.
All that’s happening is the device heard a loud sound and knows it wasn’t a match or what’s expected.
You’ll have to forgive me if I don’t believe that those fuckers are being honest and open with our data.
That’s the neat thing, you don’t have to believe: the researchers proved that it works like that.
Of course that only applies to the models they tested, and not future ones, but still.
No, it only applies to what they understood about the software and hardware, not any potential updates or firmware bugs being deliberately put out as backdoors. You know, the stuff that has been whistleblown on repeatedly. Oh well, why bother to remember all that stuff. It’s much easier to get angry at those nerds for spreading conspiracy theories about the Zionist glory of Google.
The truth is, none of you would believe this stuft was secure if your life depended on it. Your threat model is to be so entertained it would be foolish to kill you. Keep clapping big boy
Why are you talking about me as if you thought you knew who I was.
I don’t believe a quarter of the shit you put on me. I don’t believe in Google having ethics, but that doesn’t mean we can’t make predictions.
Yes, firmware updates exist. But since Google designed the things that way, there’s also a reasonable assumption that they’ll continue to work as they do for the foreseeable future. Doesn’t mean anyone should buy it or rely on it, but we weren’t talking about that.
That’s not a reasonable assumption to make about a company that brags about how closely it works with NATO, which has very clear “counterintelligence” goals which are more like zero tolerance for anything left if you read abt Gladio and shit. I think it reflects serious inconsistencies to read articles about Palestinians being stalked and tortured by American tech companies & their gulf state benefactors, then go, oh yippee, I found security researches born and bred in the exact same creche as all the other tech psychopaths, who act befuddled like “b-buh there’s no reason google would ever do that?! It would be against their business model!! 8D” like genuinely who givrs a fuck im sorry maybe it’s just you saying this about people who brag about hauling people in for torture, that is bothering me about the remark lmao. If I missed some subtleties
That’s the neat part. You don’t. There is an entire industry of devs trying to be the guy who conclusively proved all the companies are actually recording you.
Every time someone comes out and says that the phones aren’t secretly listening to us, I gotta tell this story.
I was at one time practicing therapy in a University. We did charity work, and I was providing therapy to a homeless man. This homeless man did not have a phone, or any electronic devices of any kind. We kept in contact via email, and he would use library computers in order to connect with us.
While providing therapy for him, the only electronic devices in the room are a batter operated digital clock, a battery operated voice recording device, and my own cell phone, locked and inactive. Nothing but my cell phone is connected to wifi or internet of any kind.
During session one day, he started talking about wanting to move to another country. We hold our usual session, with plenty of talk about moving to that country specifically. Once the session is over, we say goodbye and he goes on his way. I go back to my desk, and within an hour or so, scrolling on my phone, I’m getting advertisements for flights and vacations to that exact country. I had never gotten advertisements to that country before, or even for much travel in general.
So how do we explain it? The most common answer is “Oh, well he used his phone to look up flights and stuff, and google detected that your phones were near each other, and must have assumed that you would talk about it.”
Except the other man did not have a phone, nor did he have any way for Google to tell that he was near me after having looked it up at a local library. There was no way for Google to be able to tell that he was coming to our office at all unless it was reading his emails, and even then, it couldn’t know that he was talking to me specifically, such that I would get the targeted ads and none of my colleagues would.
Nobody can give me an explanation for what happened other than my phone was actively listening to the conversation. I’m definitely open to alternatives, I promise. Nobody has been able to explain it.
You have gotten ads for vacations and for that country and they never passed cognition
I get ads in Spanish if my phone hears me use a rotary saw a lot. I used to think it was from working near Spanish-speaking work crews, or purchasing lumber, but it’s happened from isolated backyard projects using materials that had been bought with cash weeks prior. The adbots are listening, and they think power tool noises are a dialect of Spanish.
If he or you have a gmail account, Google reads your emails.
Irrelevant considering the travel conversation didn’t happen over gmail
Shut up, dweeb.
Takes one to know one dork!
😁
It’s far too easy to change the software that drives that. For example, in order to minimize blatant power drain the trigger mic could easily become a switch that activates the main mic only when human voices are detected (or even specific voices). With authoritarian governments on the rise — along with the more than willing corporations backing them — I don’t think a bit of paranoia regarding the possibility is unwarranted.
ETA: Also there’s nothing saying the hardware can’t be updated for newer capabilities without anyone on the outside knowing. It’d be pretty easy to get away with once everyone gets lulled into a false sense of security regarding how they work.
If I was running a fascist government, I wouldn’t enable my spyware on every phone–that would make it too easy to detect and it would mean the people I’m spying on would take measures to protect themselves.
Instead, I would leave a backdoor open so that I could activate the specific phone of a specific person, a phone unlikely to be monitored in a lab by a security geek.
Which is why shit is continuously tested. Guys, billions of dollars goes into this. It’s not hard to find extra data pushed into packets. Far more complex shit is the norm.
Where did the money for all that come from? Where will it come from in the future as the wealth transfer to the few continues apace?
Yeah, no - I’m not inclined to rest easy. Just because more complex methods are available for use doesn’t mean the old standbys are forgotten.
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Yes
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Discord does this too. Occasionally instead of putting my voice through it just says “we’re not detecting any input from your microphone” but only while I’m speaking
Discord? Never had that. And it is super annoying that there is no mute indication. So many people “oh I was muted”, teamspeak had that solved decades ago. They also had actually distinct sounds for (in)muting…
There’s 2 mute indicators on discord? One on your name in the channel and one in the bottom left corner, where the digital mute button is. In any case, this issue has to do with the microphone detection and not the mute button itself
Edit: or did you mean like an audible indicator?
There’s the old-school method. You ask “can you hear me?” And after someone says “no”, you know your microphone is working
While a response of “yes” means you need to find more entertaining friends.