The “security consultant” claims to know that there’s clips of audio being sent back to servers, but not knowing what that audio is since it’s encrypted. First off, if the content is encrypted, you don’t know that it’s audio. Secondly, if you had proof of a major app unexpectedly sending back recorded audio clips, it would be huge news, so I’d assume he doesn’t have that.
Apps do not have access to always on microphone access by default as insinuated by the article. On Android, until P comes out, apps can access the mic in the background if you give microphone access to the app. On iOS, app microphone access triggers the microphone symbol in the top left. These are the apps explicitly asking to take microphone access though, not some sort of listener pattern where apps can attach to the OS’s always on microphone behavior.
Experiment is clearly flawed for numerous reasons (no starting recorded state, didn’t record behavior on FB/other sites that could have impacted results during expt, etc.)
The only reason I'm not convinced yet, is that it would be somewhat easy to run a statistical significant experiment with 1,000 people to verify if it's definitely real or not.
Have been expecting some research to come out from either a security firm, university researchers, or other to verify. Don't think it would cost too much to run, hoping something comes out soon.
The “security consultant” claims to know that there’s clips of audio being sent back to servers, but not knowing what that audio is since it’s encrypted. First off, if the content is encrypted, you don’t know that it’s audio. Secondly, if you had proof of a major app unexpectedly sending back recorded audio clips, it would be huge news, so I’d assume he doesn’t have that.
Apps do not have access to always on microphone access by default as insinuated by the article. On Android, until P comes out, apps can access the mic in the background if you give microphone access to the app. On iOS, app microphone access triggers the microphone symbol in the top left. These are the apps explicitly asking to take microphone access though, not some sort of listener pattern where apps can attach to the OS’s always on microphone behavior.
Experiment is clearly flawed for numerous reasons (no starting recorded state, didn’t record behavior on FB/other sites that could have impacted results during expt, etc.)