Can anyone tell this meme is true or false? I don’t have Gspy so I cannot test this
The meme makes it sound like they turn off the server transmit feature. Though I also could believe this meme being false as well. “Ok Google” detection runs locally on the device as training a model to detect that and only that accurately without a server is easy to do and costs a lot less than having every device continuously transmitting the microphone. So it’s possible mute just disables transmission to the Internet rather than the mic.
i love all the hate google gets
Peace be with you 🌹. I could really feel that this sentence came straight from the heart 😂😂. Jokes aside, same here✋🏻😐. I hate them too.
Hey, wiretap
f-droid’s website https://f-droid.org/ has a link to https://keepandroidopen.org/ which says in Google will lock down Android in September,
If you were planning on reformatting your phone to GrapheneOS, LineageOS, PostmarketOS, or UbuntuTouch, now is the time to do it.
I know this won’t be a popular answer, but with my distaste for google, my switch to linux, the rumored google search revamp later this month turning it completely to AI and THIS? I’m going to go to iOS I believe
If you think google is problematic in terms of either control or spying I got serious news for you little buddy.
Just get a Pine Phone or similar linux-based device.
If you are implying iOS is anywhere near the control and spyware of google, you don’t know tech at all.
The control on iOS is much stricter, and it always has been, but I suppose at least they sold it as such from the start and didn’t slowly trickle it in while pretending to be supporting open source. The spyware is also the same. They probably share it with a few fewer people I guess, that’s about the best you could possibly say for it.
It is
Don’t get a pine phone.
Pain phone.
Can I still use apps from the app store if I use one of those alternative OS’s? I’m not very good with phones and don’t use mine much, but with so many things slowly going phone only I don’t want to cut myself off entirely.
Also, can I use those OS’s on my tablet? Which is best for somebody with decent Linux knowledge but almost no smart phone skills?
Phones are usually easier to find compatibility than tablets. If you check the websites for those operating systems, you will see what devices are compatible.
- https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Devices
- https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/
- https://grapheneos.org/faq#supported-devices
- https://devices.ubuntu-touch.io/
- https://docs.sailfishos.org/Support/Supported_Devices/
Concerning apps, you will be able to run 99% for your apps. There are odd rare cases where some may not work. For those, you may find success by installing them through https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.aurora.store/ instead of the through the Google Play Store.
One is particular feature that doesn’t work is using the NFC wallet feature on phones, but you shouldn’t use those anyways because you’re giving an extra cut away to Google, Samsung, or Apple, on top of credit card fees from Mastercard, Visa, or the like.
Some banks apps don’t work on Graphene. All of mine never have any problems. It might be worth saving a click link on your phone your banks website instead if the app doesn’t work. https://privsec.dev/posts/android/banking-applications-compatibility-with-grapheneos/ Or instead consider switching banks.
Thanks! I don’t trust my phone enough for banking anyway. I’ll try this out in the next few weeks.
Edit: Erg, looks like my phone isn’t supported by Graphene or Lineage… Oh well.
It might sound weird, but,
if you can sell your phone, and buy the one you want second hand,
you might be able to land a compatible device without any financial lose.
Fuck man I cannot buy a new phone right now. All apps I use are from fdroid. I’m kinda fucked ain’t I?
Looking at cad$300 for a pixel 8a to get graphine on it. So sad my galaxy 9 can’t run postmarket, lineage, or anything really.
I guess the pixel 3 (I think that’s the one) with Ubuntu touch could work. Only a hundred it looks like to get that
Welcome to the dependency economy where you can’t afford to not let them fuck you.
Even better, under community builds here it looks like PostmarketOS supports Galaxy 9
Not for my model. This ones got a locked bootloader and no way to unlock it. Tried everything I could think of to keep this boi out of the recycling center with no dice.
Edit: Thanks for the other suggestions though I’ll take a look when I’m getting a new phone
If you reformat your phone before September will one of my mentioned operating systems, f-Droid will continue working.
If you really need a new phone, but do try to avoid it, buy one second hand one. Or buy a new one of these https://scribe.disroot.org/post/8920564 including Fairphone as an option.
I don’t have Google Home installed on Graphene but also I can completely block microphone usage. 😏
Ubuntu Touch isn’t much better.
On a side note, if you have a Chromebook or other laptops/desktops, you can reformat the BIOS to give you better control, more security, and less backdoors.
I turned off “ok google” detection in my phone. Still it triggers incorrectly from the car radio sounding similar to “ok google”. In theory turning off the detection should mean that the assistant only starts when I tap the microphone icon, but that’s not my experience.
I can confirm, google is always listening, and it’s not even very good at pretending not to.
I never use any voice commands for my phone. So I disable it and uninstall all voice related apps and settings.
An unexpected benefit was this significantly improves the overall performance of the phone.
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.
It’s not true anymore, but Alexa’s used to only listen for specific keywords using a low-energy local-only chip.
It has since changed, as stated, and I have to assume other vendors followed suit.
As a specific example, the ESP32 chip does low power voice recognition for pre-trained trigger words. This lightweight recognition lacks the training to detect anything other than the list of trigger words that Espressif provides.
Basically only battery-operated devices work this way (for power consumption reasons). If you’re plugged in you’re probably always running the high quality listening loop.
This is also why a lot of the wake words are similar:
- Hey Siri
- Alexa / Echo
- OK Google / Hey Google
Those all have different vowel sounds, hard consonants etc. because without that there’s not enough difference to make a unique wake word/phrase. Google needed something like “Hey” or “OK” before it because “Google” itself doesn’t generate enough unique sounds to act as a keyword. They’re also between 3 and 5 syllables because they need to be short enough to monitor for them, and long enough that they can be distinguished reliably from background noise.
The sounds are converted into MFCCs, which is sort-of an extremely lossy form of compression. It was originally used to identify numbers, like when someone would call into an automated switchboard and they’d have to say “one” or “five”. It couldn’t identify complex words, just distinguish between a small set of very different sounding numbers.
The way these systems work is that they’re running on a very low-power loop converting ambient sounds into these patterns and seeing if there’s a match for a wake-word pattern. The sound is converted into basically a time vs. frequency matrix and matched against the keyword / phrase. If there’s a match it unlocks the much more computationally-expensive voice transcription programs, otherwise it just throws out the data.
You can tell that at least mobile devices aren’t always listening because if they were actually doing full-on voice transcription all the time, the battery would drain much faster. If they were doing off-device voice transcription, the antenna would have to stay on a lot more, which would also kill the battery, and it would be visible in your bandwidth bill.
People need some more basic computer literacy. I get that the FAANG companies are “evil”, and want to do unscrupulous things with your data, but there’s often a simpler explanation that doesn’t involve massive privacy violations that security researchers would have caught long ago.
Even in the first scenario, what stops there from being multiple wake words with different functionality? So like “ok google” wakes up the bot but “pepsi” wakes it silently and has it tick a box on the back end of a server that now sends me Coke adds because they paid about $3.50 for the privilege?
Pretty much nothing. Any company with the resources of Google or Amazon could easily have their top 100 wake words trained into that model.
Why are we ai upscaling so many things??? Like what does that playdoughy smoothness add to anything. Espescially 10 year old memes 😭
(i dont blame op, anybody still using google or unaltered ddg will get ai for their first like page or two of image results)
Last I muted mine it did this still. I believe the rationale is that wake word detection is local
I plan on moving away from the ecosystem but haven’t yet been able to invest time and money in a home assistant setup and start thinking about migrating
(I know many feel smart home tech is frivolous and just a security risk and privacy violation- I use automation to help manage a disability/medical condition)
I have been very happy with local stuff. I have home assistant running on a pi, independent of my main server (cause I wanna control the lights easily while changing server hardware).
All my smart devices (lamps, mostly) use Zigbee, and it’s just way easier and more flexible than classical dimmers. There’s local voice recognition support, but for that I’d probably run it on something with more horsepower than a raspi.
Yeah, I’ve been planning to set up a smart light switch in my kitchen and if/when I eventually get to that I’ll be setting up a home assistant install on a little thin client and using ZigBee instead of a WiFi device directly connected to google home. That way I can start to play with automation in haos and start connecting all of my existing wifi devices through haos on my own hardware.
I’d like to transition everything to offline protocols running locally, its just kind of a project and takes money. A while back I was doing my research for it and I think I decided on hardware, but haven’t gotten further than that, I just kinda have too many expenses and projects on my plate for the moment
I’m looking forward to all the tech stuff I depend on being actually my own in the future though :)
Yeah, totally understand that. Had an easy start cause I got a lot of Philips Hue stuff for free from a friend who got fed up with smart tech in general. He now has a Pixel with mostly blank Graphene and a Raspberry Pi as his only computing devices, lol.
I had a lot of fun programming click patterns for smart switches that are incomprehensible for anyone but me XD
Good luck with your transition~
You muted yourself from the conversation, but it still listens for commands.
Also, I love how every time “microphone” is mentioned on social media, the social media/spyware sockpuppets come out and say “well aktually…” and put this word vomit all over the place hoping you’ll just roll over and accept it. Must be a nice paycheck to cash…
My recommendations on Quora’s feed follow closely what I’ve said with an Android phone present, even someone else’s phone, as my presence is detected by Google from my voice and my /e/OS phone’s radio traffic.
I highly recommend GrapheneOS, /e/OS, Jolla Sailfish OS Linux phone, or anything that doesn’t work for Google or Apple. My battery life (idling) went from 2 days with Android to a whole week with /e/OS, because spying consumes energy.
I had this cheap android phone, it costed like €70/80, the battery life would die in a day or even less, in idle and then i decided to get rid of google play services, assistant ecc and now the damn battery can survive 7 fucking days in idle with termux in background hosting a discord bot this shit is just crazy
Accurate
