169
Your voice assistant is profiling you, just not in the way you expect, new research finds.
(news.northeastern.edu)
this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2025
169 points (97.7% liked)
Technology
67077 readers
5606 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
To hear you say "Hey Google" it has to listen to everything you say, all the time. While they pinky-promise they aren't doing anything with all the voice data they're getting while listening, do you trust them?
While this is true, it's not difficult to verify. You can inspect the network traffic through your router from that device and see whether it's communicating more often or with larger data packets while you're talking near but not to it.
That could be obfuscated with a powerful enough device that's able to maintain the user profile locally and by sending the full profile each time, or by trickling the information out bit by bit as part of a regular heartbeat traffic, but that would require more expensive hardware and would eat up a lot more bandwidth.
Not impossible, but not undetectable either. I'm willing to bet that studies have been done.
Skepticism is good but without thinking through it, experimenting, or doing research to back it up it's just paranoia. Conversely you could say my trust that others would have looked into it is naive.
studies were done and found similar to what you're saying.
also the secret listening does not comport with any of the business side of profile marketing, either. So it would have to be an incredibly well kept secret on top of all of that.
Good point, but given that I don't say anything in my bed room (I live alone, and I don't date), I wish it good luck hearing anything.