Are Phones and Smart Speakers Listening to You? Cox Media Group Claims They Can | Cord Cutters News - eviltoast
The idea of smartphones and smart speakers listening to everything you say and then sending you targeted advertisements has been around for years, and has largely been debunked by privacy experts. But the marketing unit of Cox Media Group, which owns newspapers and local radio and TV stations around the country, says it can do […]
  • Saik0@lemmy.saik0.comEnglish
    58·
    11 months ago

    Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20231214235444/https://www.cmglocalsolutions.com/blog/active-listening-an-overview

    Is Active Listening Legal?

    We know what you’re thinking. Is this even legal? The short answer is: yes. It is legal for phones and devices to listen to you. When a new app download or update prompts consumers with a multi-page terms of use agreement somewhere in the fine print, Active Listening is often included.

    So what were you saying?

    • jard@sopuli.xyz
      21·
      11 months ago

      The Ars article literally analyzes this exact claim and shows that it was over-exaggerated marketing to mislead advertisers, and when they were called out for their bullshit CMG pulled their crap from the Internet — you even link to an archive.org page, which corroborates what happened.

      Selectively ignoring contradictory evidence in favor of evidence that supports your argument is cherry-picking.

    • Cheradenine@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      67·
      11 months ago

      Did you read the article? No, you did not.

      According to the company this is all from regular 3rd party stuff. Being legal or not is beside the point when you are not actually doing something.

      You’re argument is based on what a marketing company put in their marketing.

      Read the article, with clarifications from the company

      ETA : if this were true I would either see it in my firewall logs, or it would blow through my data cap in a week. Surveillance capitalism is bullshit, this is just a grift.

      • library_napper@monyet.cc
        3·
        11 months ago

        Seems funny how you keep saying from the company as if somehow asking s murderer with red bloody hands if they did it is somehow a creditable source

      • Saik0@lemmy.saik0.comEnglish
        32·
        11 months ago

        You’re argument is based on what a marketing company put in their marketing.

        But your response is

        with clarifications from the company

        So what the company says isn’t good enough… Except when it’s in your favor? You realize that both statement are “from the company”.

        • Cheradenine@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          31·
          11 months ago

          Fight as long as you want, when they were called out on it they backed off. The technical aspects of this are not trivial, nor is the amount of data needed as anyone who has had an Alexa or similar spyware in their house will tell you.

          Like I said

          if this were true I would either see it in my firewall logs, or it would blow through my data cap in a week.

          • Saik0@lemmy.saik0.comEnglish
            1·
            11 months ago

            Like I said

            if this were true I would either see it in my firewall logs, or it would blow through my data cap in a week.

            Audio is literally trivial amounts of bandwidth. You wouldn’t notice it at all. Using something like Opus, you could stream audio 24/7 and reach about 300MBs uploaded. Now do some basic trimming/word processing… That number can easily be less than 10MB a day.