Cox deletes ‘Active Listening’ ad pitch after boasting that it eavesdrops though our phones::undefined
I’m confident this is built in to many smart TVs these days.
Well. Wireshark would confirm that if it were true.
I’m sure it will show HTTPS traffic outbound from your TV.
I’m sure it will show no traffic whatsoever if you don’t connect your TV to your network
TV’s have been spotted connecting to open networks on their own. They could easily look for alternative routes.
Source?
Either way, open networks are very uncommon in residential areas (and honestly in general)
Source that… a computer with wifi hardware can scan for wifi networks?
Source that it happens obviously.
You claimed that they connected to open networks.
There’s a dozen ways they could jump the air gap.
Ultrasonic to a phone or Alexa/Siri/etc, connect to an unsecured network, send data to a neighbor’s smart TV which is connected to Internet, Bluetooth or other to a phone
But this would be proven then?
Something that can be done easily and may be done in the future, if it hasn’t been discovered yet
Clandestine methods have been known since the 2000s. We know they’re scummy and want our data. Why does this seem too crazy?
Because it would result in a scandal and it seems easily discoverable (by professional investigators/engineers). I don’t know. It’s likely done on a small, targeted, scale, but can’t imagine this rolled out on a large scale. Too little gain for the potential lashback, quite some factors need to be right, too.
The economics aren’t there. A cellular chip and a subscription will not pay for the private conversations of a random house.
That would add a ludicrous amount of cost to the device in both material cost and R&D. It’s so incredibly unlikely that any company would make that investment just to spy on the conversations of ordinary citizens when there are far cheaper and easier ways for them to build and sell advertising profiles.
Ludicrous R&D?
Ultrasound is used by Microsoft teams, some apps use it to transmit data between phones. Back in the day there was a chrome app to transfer links.
Amazon sidewalk already connects devices together. Samsung Smart things already bridges Samsung devices. Apple Air tags already use “primary” Internet connected devices to transmit data about “secondary” devices.
None of this is new tech, it’s all feasible.
its not unlikely, devices were already shown doing shit like this
Low-bandwidth cellular chip…
At that point the customer acquisition cost is t worth it.
It would show the encrypted out bound traffic right? You wouldn’t be able to identify it by reading the bits, but you could by the volume and not doing anything else.
Maybe. They might do some processing locally and just upload as text so it might be easy to batch the data, making the upload volume and pattern less obvious.
It also saves them network bandwidth so I’m sure that would motivate them too. Uploading raw mic data from all TVs would be expensive.
You’re getting down voted, but this seems the most likely. TTS is trivial anymore.
And with DNS requests and timing you should be able to figure whats in those packets.
Sorry if this is a noob question, but…how?
DNS will tell you the server name and address, which would just be some server owned by the company. Nothing weird there unless they have the chutzpah to name it something telling. They could even bypass DNS entirely with hardcoded IP addresses.
Timing wouldn’t be a great indicator either if they aggregate requests.
They could slide anything nefarious in with daily software update checks or whatever other phone-homing they normally do, and without deep packet inspection or reverse engineering the software, it would be very difficult to tell.
I don’t think Wireshark can do deep packet inspection, can it? Assuming the client is using SSL and verifying certs, maybe even using cert pinning?
Size would be a big indicator if they’re sending full voice recordings, but not if they’re doing voice recognition locally and only sending transcripts, metadata, or keywords.
I’ve never actually done this kind of work in earnest, and my experience with Wireshark is at least a decade out of date. I’m just approaching this from the perspective of “if I were a corporate shitbag, how would I implement my shitbaggery?”
The answer is: it wouldn’t. You’re right on the money, you couldn’t do anything other than speculation.
Just spitballing here but you might be able to try and correlate the amount of data sent with how much real life activity there was. Say, have silence for a week around the TV then play recorded speech near it for a week and see if that changes the frequency or size of the data being sent back home. Then do this for random 1/2/3 day periods. If offline text to speech is as crap as I’ve heard then the increased data transfer should stick out pretty clearly.
That’s a completely unhinged level effort for what would still ultimately boil down to speculation lmao. Smart TVs phone home frequently, semi randomly, with varying data amounts, both when used regularly and when off for months at a time, both when you’re walking and talking around it, and if you’re on vacation for two weeks. If despite all that you tried to control the environment around it you’d somehow need to… ensure absolute silence in the room that it’s in for DAYS at a time? Unless you live in the middle of the woods that’s not very likely, and even then, all it would be is guessing lmao
First, someone would be able to prove that communication is happening. Second, if the keys are stored locally, and the original packets saved, the encryption can be reverse engineered.
Encryption prevents man in the middle attacks. If you have one of the ends, you can usually get the data. If you have the device that’s doing the encryption of the data, and you have the encrypted data, you can decode the data. It’s just a matter of getting through obfuscation at that point.
The reason this hasn’t been done yet is that it’s not happening yet. CMG was lying in their advertising.
Try it out. Setup dnsmasq and connect your phone to the network. You’ll see a ton of requests initially, that gives you some idea of what apps/services/accounts are on the phone. Let the phone go to sleep, and watch what is sending requests in the background. Many services use very specific host names which indicate what is being processed.
On the TV, it would be similar. You walk into the room and it starts sending packets? You say something unrelated to its trigger word yet Wireshark shows activity? Suspicious. If you can get a certificate onto the TV you can use mitmproxy to view the HTTPS traffic, but that’s probably kinda difficult.
I do not use smart TVs but I have been doing stuff like the above for a while. If they are recording and storing stuff some engineer eventually figures out, it’s not an NSA backdoor.
I’m not saying they are/aren’t, I do not know, it just seems very unlikely and improbable especially given smart phone ubiquity. What is known to be actually occuring is a complete violation of consumer privacy for marketing purposes, but OPs form of spying is so far unsubstantiated.
Now, can that TV be hacked and used by your neighbor to spy on you? Or can your government access your mic/camera? That’s an entirely different question and field of expertise.
That’s not how that works lol
I dont add it [edit: smart tv] to the wifi or drop a cat 5 cable to it and my smart phone will still see it in the house and ask if I want the two devices to connect. I miss when TVs were a bit thicker and easier to take apart so you could easily take out the wifi and Bluetooth cards.
Chance that it’s just marketing people talking out of their asses again, but then again, we have a lot of cheap smart devices with dubious firmwares so it might be possible on those sketchy devices.
Many companies already do this, but advertising it is unpalatable. Just be like Google and Facebook. For awhile the Facebook app was so bad about it that it caused significant battery drain and the only way to avoid it was to remove the app.
I don’t know why anyone would believe anyone would like that.
I’ve worked with marketers for years. many of them have a blind spot for what they create: they can realize something is irritating, or invasive, but not when it’s their marketing, which is obviously superior and what people want to see. it’s some sort of artist+marketer brainrot.
sorry to generalize, I’ve just seen it a lot over the years.
I imagine this is something like it: we’ll reach them with the perfect message, it’ll be exactly what they want! won’t that be delightful?
…completely ignoring how horrifying it is.
This was a pitch to their customers. They just forgot that we could hear them too.
this was such a weird claim, and I never really understood how it could be true specifically for phones, where they aren’t in control of system software. there’s like a gradient of possibility here:
- Android phones from major manufacturers, and Apple phones: doubt it. those things are too heavily scrutinized, someone would’ve found it, and the companies that make them don’t have the impetus.
- official “smart” voice devices from Amazon, Google, et al: doubt it, same reasoning as above
- Android phones from small players, heavily subsidized models, etc.: sure, could be
- smart TVs from major manufacturers: probably not? medium “maybe”? I bought one of these with a hardware mic switch so I guess that shows my paranoia
- other smart TVs: I dunno, feels highly likely
so: I’m careful about what I use so my risk felt pretty low, but I also feel like if this were true security researchers would’ve discovered it. let alone the fact that what they describe is bandwidth and battery intensive (off-device or on-device respectively, I don’t remember what they claimed as I read the 404 media report some weeks back) but it still makes me wonder: what led them to make these claims then? fascinating, pretty scary.
The spying that’s openly admitted in terms and conditions should be alarming enough — if anyone actually read and understood all the legalese. Consider this: https://time.com/5568815/amazon-workers-listen-to-alexa/
I’ve seen Android phones activate Google Assistant seemingly at random many many many times. They’re only supposed to activate when called by a specific phrase like “okay Google”, but there are plenty of false positives, and every time that happens, an audio recording gets sent to Google. Same deal with Alexa and Siri. This is, of course, allowed by the terms and conditions.
At least Android makes it visible to the user when this happens. I wouldn’t bet on smart TVs doing the same.
At this point there’s not much you can do about it. Even if I secure my own devices and my own home network, that all goes out the window the second anyone else walks in my door with their own smartphone.
That said, I agree that the claim is likely false with third-party apps on modern smartphones from major brands. It’s not easy for background activities to access the camera or microphone without the user’s knowledge on iOS or Android. First-party and second-party spying is hard to avoid, though.
Except Siri processing is actually done on your device, as of iOS 15. Which kind of blew my mind when it was announced.
Nothing is sent to Apple unless you request an online service (such as weather, maps, etc.) or unless you allow your recordings to be sent.
Try it: in airplane mode on an iOS 15 device: Siri still works at a basic level. Language processing happens locally.
Thanks for the correction. More details here: https://www.macrumors.com/guide/ios-15-siri/
They’re only supposed to activate when called by a specific phrase like “okay Google”, but there are plenty of false positives, and every time that happens, an audio recording gets sent to Google.
And you can even do Google takeout and see all the recordings they took of you. Many of which you’ll notice doesn’t have you asking or doing anything remotely related to a voice search.
It’s especially weird when the existing targeting can be so effective for much cheaper.
For tvs for example, they can see what you watch, when, what ads you mute and which you don’t, what you display over HDMI (content ID), the other devices on your network, your location, your accounts for every streaming service, what you search for. Then if you install their companion app they learn the other apps on your phone, your location habits, the media you play on your phone (looking at you Bose connect app…), bluetooth and network devices you are near (connecting you to other profiles they know), and probably a lot more.
content id is a wild one that I only discovered a year ago: I had always used my own Chromecast when traveling, and I plugged it into a Roku TV which kept saying “did you know you could watch [content that I was currently watching] on Roku” which really freaked me out, so I looked into it. honestly not sure why they tipped their hand like that: I found the setting and turned it off. otherwise I would’ve been none the wiser.
creepy af though. the amount of tracking you implicitly accept by using random devices out in the world is staggering. even if you read every privacy policy and opt out of everything (I do) you have no chance.
My take is two fold: 1- Marketing over selling their product (common practice) 2- The “always listening” devices are mainly their Smart Remotes that have a microphone built in.
#2 Seems the most likely as is a device fully in their control and can pull as much ad marketing / information gathering details from it as they want.
Wouldn’t be bandwidth intensive if the device had onboard TTS. Seems pretty doable to me.
that’s fair.
Tom Wamsgabs in shambles.
We here for you.
