The idea of smartphones and smart speakers listening to everything you say and then sending you targeted advertisements has been around for years, and has largely been debunked by privacy experts. But the marketing unit of Cox Media Group, which owns newspapers and local radio and TV stations around the country, says it can do […]
Services that “listen” for commands like Siri and Alexa have to be, by default, always listening, because otherwise they would not be able to hear the activate command. They are supposed to dump the excess data like anything that came before the activation command, but that’s just a promise. There are very few laws protecting you if that promise turns out to be a lie. The best you can get is likely small restitution through a class action lawsuit (if you didn’t waiver right to that by agreeing to the Terms of Service, which is more often than not, now).
Of fucking course they’re listening.
They’re not. Not yet. People are on edge and looking for this exact thing, which hadn’t happened yet. Meanwhile, they’ve already built a pretty damn good profile of you based on your search queries and mistyped urls.
Where are they hiding that data locally, and how are they making it invisible in transit?