89
Hundreds of smartphone apps are monitoring users through their microphones
(www.the-independent.com)
this post was submitted on 27 Apr 2025
89 points (85.6% liked)
Hacker News
1267 readers
344 users here now
Posts from the RSS Feed of HackerNews.
The feed sometimes contains ads and posts that have been removed by the mod team at HN.
founded 7 months ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
All of the discourse around "we can't prove they are listening" feels like gaslighting, to me.
I don't need proof. We have all have had this experience, and "it's just tracking absolutely everything else so well that it guesses really accurately" isn't in any way better, anyway.
It isn’t better, it’s even worse IMO. But it’s just the truth. It is verifiable enough that apps cannot just spy via your microphone in any reasonably modern OS, not even the old versions. What has never been verified though is that there are non-zero-day-exploit-ways to spy through your microphone.
It can be proven, very easily. All it takes is a little bit of IT skills and a basic understanding of networking. There are also immense amounts of incentive to prove it. Your information would be spread across every news network, and you'd be able to use it to sue any business that does it.
So, the only reason it can't be proven is because it's not happening.
Oh, I wish that were so.
Any data breaches in the news, today? Of course there is..
The odds are good that whenever you (or anyone) read this comment, there's a verified data breach that hit the news this week and isn't getting any serious national coverage, or any television coverage at all. Even odds are that it's actually from today, regardless of when someone reads this.
I don't know what your pocketbooks look like, but I don't have the finances to hold any of these companies accountable.
I do have a half-dozen different legal settlements worth of (3 years each of) identity fraud protection service offers.
Edit: Oh, you maybe mean specifically if a voice recording was leaked. If so, you're right, that would be huge news.
My legal recourse would remain exactly what it currently is, though. Three more years of low quality identify theft insurance.
Data breaches are already commonplace, though. People don't really care about that, so news outlets don't care to cover it.
This is vastly different and would be a new thing that everyone would be interested in hearing about. So many people think that this is happening, but have no proof. They would love to be able to say "See! There's finally proof! I told everyone!"