this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2024
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This keeps getting brought up and it's simply not true. No, your phone isn't listening to you, plenty of tests have been done. It could easily be traceable with higher CPU usage, higher battery usage, network usage and so on, but there is zero difference between having a conversation next to your phone or the phone being in a literal sound proofed room.
Meta data, people you spend time with, what you look up online, your age, your hobbies, your interests, ads you have recently seen, location data, .. there's so much about you online that it's easy to predict.
And sometimes you talk about things because everyone else is talking about them. You're not that special.
It can be a bit scary how much you can predict about a person by just using a few simple facts (sex, age, location, income, ..).
Then how does Google figure out what music is playing in the background to display it on the lock screen?
I'm very happy to have GrapheneOS on my phone now.
I'm not 100% sure we both are talking about the same things but I'm going to assume you mean playing songs on Spotify and then having your phones lockscreen display that song.
The answer to that is UI APIs, your phone likely exposed APIs to developers who make apps for your phone. They can use these system APIs to tell your phone's music display UI thing what song you are playing and what the buttons (next, prev, stop/play should do)
These APIs are client side but I wouldn't be surprised if they phoned home in some way.
An example of this could be that the internal UI API may phone home to tell Google that a client is choosing Spotify as their music player.
That being said I don't know if this is practical or likely. It is possible and doable though.
That's not what they were referring to. I have a setting on my pixel 7 (and have had it on 2 older pixels) that automatically listens foe music playing anywhere around the phone and shows the title on the always on display and on the lockscreen. It samples audio once every several seconds and listens for music and if it hears some it activates, records some of the song, and finds the info. The battery usage is negligible in my experience and it's actually very useful, if you don't care about privacy.
IIRC, it uses a database of common and popular songs stored locally on your phone (possibly adapted to what Google knows about your taste in music, idk) and only goes online for matches when you do a manual song search.
Just... no. Fuck no. It's listening, and it's not just the audio, it's snooping on what you're accessing on your network connections. Shazam is definitely doing this, as what you search will appear instantly in most cases.
It occurred to me that I might be wrong about the locally stored database, so I conducted an experiment.
I put my phone in airplane mode, then went to my record player and played a song with my phone sitting nearby. Within a minute, my phone correctly displayed the currently playing song, despite having no connectivity whatsoever. This proves that there is a local database of songs against which the service can compare what it hears. Obviously the database does not include every song ever written, that would be ridiculous.
I never claimed that the phone was not listening, it has to listen in some way to recognize music. What I did claim, and have now proven, is that it can identify songs without sending the audio to Google.