Your smartphone tracks your location, listens to your conversations, and sells your intimate moments to data brokers.
The law pretends to regulate this, but lobbyists write the rules and enforcement is a joke.
Encryption apps aren’t enough when the hardware itself is designed to betray you.
The phone is a spy device marketed as a lifestyle accessory.
We need radical technical solutions, not incremental privacy policies that change nothing.
The surveillance economy depends on your ignorance and inaction.
Break the chain: use open hardware, de-Googled Android, or build your own tools.
#privacy #surveillance #digitalrights #antitrust
How much of your life are you willing to sell for a slightly more convenient map app?
Is this poster an AI bot or am i tripping
Edit: it definitely is (the random hashtags should’ve been enough of a giveaway)
Thanks for pointing this out, I just used an LLM detector and it said it was likely 100% AI generated.
Is there any hard evidence that supports the claim that an Android/Apple phone listens in on conversations?
Snowden showed us ages ago that all phone conversations are recorded. This is fact.
Do phones record what we say outside of phone calls? If you have voice control enabled, yes.
Do phones listen even if that isn’t enabled? Probably sometimes, but I don’t know that for sure.
To add to what others are saying, there’s been hard evidence of apps doing this, notably Meta apps.
There’s hard evidence everything transmitted is logged and that any phone capable of connecting to the cell network can be listened in on at any time. I would be very surprised to learn monitoring/logging like that was not the default at this point given the infrastructure we’ve publicly built for that purpose and just how easy to implement it’s become. You think an on device assistant can help schedule and summarize your day but the NSA is going to opt out of those capabilities on principle and let that big ol Utah data center sit idle?
Would take a whistleblower to expose these things, and usually its done many years after.
Also its not that there’s some person currently listening. Its that they’re storing and probably transcribing all communications for all time, so that at any moment in the future, they can target a person and look up that history.
Also we know google and apple have been forwarding all these to the US goverment also, since at least ~2011, via the prism program, and thanks to Snowden and Manning’s leaks.
Would take a whistleblower to expose these things, and usually its done many years after.
So no, and also no, I disagree. If phones did this, especially to custom-tailor ads, like I’ve seen claimed countless times, then security researchers would be perfectly capable of uncovering this behavior without someone on the inside.
Its that they’re storing and probably transcribing all communications for all time, so that at any moment in the future, they can target a person and look up that history.
Is this just more speculation? EDIT: I’m bringing this up because it weakens the argument for privacy. This is a huge claim and if it can be dismissed like this then people might dismiss everything else with it.
If phones did this, especially to custom-tailor ads, like I’ve seen claimed countless times, then security researchers would be perfectly capable of uncovering this behavior without someone on the inside.
When you make calls via these services, the entirety of that data is being routed through their service. What you’re asking is if google/apple actually stores that data. You should always assume they do, for a threat analysis.
I suggest reading about the Crypto AG honeypot scandal, which was a secure service that ran for over 60 years before it was revealed to be an CIA honeypot. Leaks in the future will likely reveal the same for US surveillance capital services.
I think this can be misconstrued a little bit. “Listening to conversations” could mean listening to phone calls, texts, etc, but it could also mean listening to conversations with people in real life.
yup. That’s really it.
No, it is trivial to verify it by checking your data usage. We have these AI devices (one of them is called friend) that actually do listen to you the whole time and even they do a terrible job of transcription. That’s when people wear them like pendants.
Now imagine using a phone instead that’s sometimes in the pockets, in the bag or just on the table. Speech recognition errors would be terrible. Even worse when the speech isn’t english. Use recommendation engines on this crap data and it’ll be an advertising disaster!
Lolz. Close your mouth you’re gonna catch a fly
I use Graphene OS and mostly/exclusively only open source applications.
+1 for GrapheneOS. I wasn’t particularly privacy conscious when I installed it; I was just super bothered by the Google/Apple duopoly in mobile OSes and wanted literally anything else. Came across GrapheneOS and a few others, but Graphene looked the easiest to install (and it was!) so I went with that. Barely a year later, Google’s out here trying to lock Android down and harvest literally every piece of personal data they can find, and I feel like I dodged a bullet.
Some stuff that you can use are
- AdNauseam, visually blocks ads but under the hood clicks on them, nuking the usefulness of ad trackers
- TrackMeNot, spams queries on search engines, clicks some links here and there, all in the background. Works perfectly with AdNauseam, nuking both ad & search profiling
Then there is this experimental (HARPO: Learning to Subvert Online Behavioral Advertising) paper on using ML to obfuscate online tracking, it’s a research paper so my understanding is limited to the excerpt 😅 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2111.05792
visually blocks ads but under the hood clicks on them
I get where they’re coming from on the idea. But the problem I have… it would still run all the fingerprnting scripts and other shit. Sure it makes some bad data added to the good… but still plugs me into huge adware ecosystems. It leaves such a bad taste in my mouth, if any of their shit hits my comp.
I really mostly want to not be part of any of that shit. 🤮 Just leave me alone, surveilance companies, thank you.
TrackMeNot is dead
Not updated but it still works fine
Running outdated software can open security vulnerabilities however.
Snitch on me about what exactly?
If a specific guy was following you everywhere, that wouldn’t bother you? Having a stalker wouldn’t be a big deal?
I see no reason why it’s less disturbing if it’s done by my own phone.
Nothing, you’re the one guy who literally has nothing to hide. Just let it log when you sleep shit or fuck, every word you speak, and every place you go. Who cares, am I right?
Yea you’re right, I don’t really care.
You’re also being hyperbolic and inventing things. If the point that you’re making is a good one, why do you need to create strawman to knock down. We both know that your phones doesn’t “log when you sleep shit or fuck, every word you speak,”.
I wear a Garmin watch, that thing logs way more of my personal data. Im not ignorant of how much data is collected on me. I’m just literally not that special, who the fucks cares if my watch knows how girthy my shits are.
I mean… I genuinely believe your phone (and the watch I correctly assumed you wore) log all of those things, for a start. It’s essentially free for them to do and there’s value to be extracted from that data. My earnest answer to the mocking strawman question you pose would be that you, garmin, your healthcare provider/insurance company, various advertisers, and law enforcement for a start would love to know the frequency, consistency, and volume of your shits for various reasons and that same data on a population in aggregate is even more valuable.
Anyway if you want hyperbole, informing the corpos of your turd girth is a traitorous betrayal of our species and will be punishable by death when the revolution comes. Hope you’re having a nice day lol
Because every piece of data they have on you can (and will) be used to manipulate (and hence control) you. Make you buy products you don’t want, think things you wouldn’t have thought and do things you wouldn’t have done. Are you aware of how much they control what you see, hear and read? Do you not think they would leverage this power to their advantage?
Would the three hardware switches on the furi phone actually help here?
Not familiar with the furi phone but hardware switches generally are very helpful to prevent tracking.
We need bots, automations… I don’t know… we need a new category called “telemetry jammers.” If the tools existed, I’m almost certain people would not mind running them. Spam the hell out of telemetry sensors of all kinds, with random data… destroy the usefulness altogether. The more spam, the fewer people we actually need to participate. The more transparent to the actual user, the better.
At some pint the extra data being sent to the trackers might start to consume more battery power and heat from CPU usage.
Pokemon GO did something similar to this and those were the side effects
Could be done on another device though, a computer could pretend to be your phone and start sending tons of useless data maybe? I don’t know how feasible it is.
You’d have to automate the retrieval of IDs for each data harvesting platform (including web based cookies to be feature complete) and manage to send the properly formatted data on each platform.
Funnily enough though, the kind of fuzzy data generation that just looks plausible enough could be a great usecase for LLMs
So like what, just Faraday cage bags?
Faraday pants.
Nah, a reverse faraday cage, something that would make telemetry useless by flooding it with trash. We can try all we can not to be spied on, but it’s an uphill battle. If we start being so noisy that they’d have to sift through tons of crap to maybe perhaps get a tiny speck of useful data, it won’t economically make sense to continue harvesting the data.
It’s one of the things I do with a combo of trackmenot + adnauseam, spam web search & click websites and all their ads automatically while I use my computer. Good luck profiling me correctly
we are all moths and the internet is the flame
This is a legal/poltical issue more than a technology one. The good guys are the EFF, OpenRightsGroup, EDRi and others in the same side. Increasingly phone apps are forced on us to do things at all, and those apps are not only closed but only run on locked down OSs. It’s anti competitive, anti-freedom, authoritarian, etc etc.
We need to get better at convincing non-nerds. We need to stop fighting political fights by burying ourselves ever deeper in tech. Which I’m guilty of too!
Very well said. Everything you said I agree about 100%.
We need to get better at convincing non-nerds.
I’m doing my best. It’s hard tho. They just… don’t care. They don’t understand why it is important. Important for their future, and for all of our future. They don’t seem to grasp why it matters so much, and what price we have to pay when we get it wrong.
I try to find concrete examples for them. But when people are invested already in some big tech ecosytem, it’s easy to discount the examples. “That wouldn’t apply to me”.
I’m trying so hard, but it is an up hill fight :(.
Yeah, it’s hard. People don’t want to see the problems because they don’t want to change. Law makers are the ones we really can’t fail to convince.
💯 support EFF
I’ve donated monthly to OpenRightGroup well over a decade now. I make sure it is always more than my wife’s Netflix (DRM pusher) to maintain a net positive!
i dream about a phone with hw switch, which would be used to lock the screen and at the same moment it would physically disconnect microphone, camera, and gps module.
not saying it is complete solution to the privacy problem, but it would be good start.
Would need to disable the cell radios, wifi and bluetooth too since those are also used to track device location.
you can’t really disconnect yourself from the cell network, that would beat the purpose of having the mobile phone ;)
If you have a need for high levels of privacy it’s the only way to do it, or just leave your phone at home.
It doesn’t really defeat the purpose of having a mobile phone either IMO, most stuff I do on my phone is already offline (maps, notes, taking photos, etc).
well, the primary purpose of a PHONE is to be able to make and receive PHONE CALLS. anything else is just a matter of convenience.you can use maps, make photos and take notes without a phone, the same can’t be said for phone calls.
Would it?
yes.
but i can still watch netflix
that is cool, but primary purpose of a phone is to make and receive phone calls. there are better tools for watching netflix.
yeah but dropping a PC on my face while laying on my bed takes too much work
the pinephone does that, its not built into the lock screen button but, it has a switch for most the privacy central features.
did not know that. but from the image, that seems like something that is inside of the phone? not really something you casually flip on the street.
my idea is that anytime you would flip the switch and lock the screen to put the phone in the pocket, its spying capabilities would be physically disabled.
Yea you are right, the privacy switches are under the battery cover, so it requires taking the cover off flipping the switch and putting it back on again.
The cover is made similar to how the Acatels are if you have ever used them, so its a pry instead of a slide which is annoying, but at least its there, in my opinion its a design defect, I think the switch would have worked better if the cover was a slide like how the old Samsungs were prior to going to the non-removable battery layout
I actually have one I’m not using at the moment. The switches at within the back cover but that’s easily able to be reached within 5 seconds or so with no tools. It’s not exactly something you would be flipping on and off regularly though unless you had a very specific use case.
Anything that isn’t a hardware switch potentially leads itself to being bypassed, so the switches are your best bet for being sure it’s disabled.
Edit: there’s also this (I linked the case which shows the switches) phone which has switches on the outside for this purpose. I don’t know anyone who has used this one however.
Fairphone 6 with e/OS can use its physical switch to disable camera & microphone. Its only SW disabling but it forces app that want to use it request it. There’s also privacy setting that gives apps fake geo data.
Its not perfect but any improvement is good.
We all know the title is right. Graphene OS is the answer, from what I read.
Me reading this on Pixel 9a running GrapheneOS:
graphene is pretty good, but be careful with cell network triangulation. also careful with what apps you run on it.
I don’t like smartphones and im kinda paranoid so turned off and in an rfid blocking bag. Even with dumbphones because who knows what is hidden away active without me knowing. I would have laughed at such paranoia 15 years ago.
Is this a post just tilting the blame and impetus for escaping closed hardware on the user and nothing else? Because I’ll buy a Jolla or a Fairphone when my current phone dies, maybe, if I can afford it. All your post does is position true privacy as a hobbyists niche.
exactly right. positioning the solution as "buy different hardware and swap OSs’ is short term thinking that solves the problem for the individual and exactly nobody else.
privacy should not be niche, it should be standard. go to city council meetings and make your voice known during flock safety hearings. write your legislators to make your stance known on OS DOB registry. its not nearly as cool as a de-googled phone you can show your friends. its not technical. but we’re sliding backwards because we’re distracted from tried and true solutions.
Best friend is stuck on his iPhone. Does anybody have any quick and easy links that show how bad Apple is at privacy? I’ve been trying to get a few together to show him and hopefully break the cycle.
He needs to enable lockdown mode, then go into the privacy settings and turn off “allow apps to request to track”, disable the system services in location settings which aren’t needed, turn off personalised ads under Apple advertising, then he well be good.
Sweet! Love seeing actionable things I can send him.
I think Lockdown might be too much for the average person, since it imposes limitations to reduce the attack surface (breaks some websites, some apps dont work properly)
I would just recommend he enables Advance Data Protection on his iPhone, disables analytics, and switches to privacy-focused apps. Apple has decent privacy, even by default compared to Android
Lockdown mode for websites and apps isn’t terrible to manage/configure on the fly, bonus is it makes you (re)consider if you should.
Apple is pretty decent actually. If I couldn’t use GrapheneOS, I’d go for iOS.
This is a fair assessment but Apple is getting worse as well.
It’s not as bad as Google but still pretty terrible. I too would like to see a comprehensive list on Apple issues.
Apple devices aren’t the best but theyre definitely not the worst. If the leaked Cellebrite documentation is to be believed then the newest devices running the latest iOS builds are well protected against hacking tools, second only to GrapheneOS. The iOS permissions system is relatively robust, lockdown mode is a good bit of extra protection too. And iirc full-disk encryption is enabled by default on iOS these days. Advanced Data Protection lets you E2E encrypt (most) cloud storage too. These are all good things
For the most part, you can set up an Apple Account without using genuine information (though the age verification thing might change this, but Google is implementing that too). For both iOS and GrapheneOS you need to either trust Apple or Google with your phone number to set up an account.
I’d be interested to hear people’s criticisms so long as they’re not just random claims with no elaboration or evidence
GrapheneOS can be used just fine without any Google Services. This is one of the core features.
i mean this with sincerity, and not as a means to further the Android vs Apple bullshit. please stop drinking cyanide.
But where is the data? I’m genuinely curious since I want to get my friend off the platform but if there is nothing to show them then I don’t really know if I can (or even should tbh).
The site says user privacy is a concern on iPhone but doesn’t actually list any incidents. Is this correct?
friend is stuck on his iPhone
my honest opinion is that it’s a lost cause. people superficial enough to be on an iphone in the first place probably aren’t gonna think through the deeper ramifications of privacy and information security practices at all.
