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Thread: is your phone listening and recording everything you say?

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    RIP Peterb ik9000's Avatar
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    is your phone listening and recording everything you say?

    the bbc suggest they might be used this way: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-35639549

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    Re: is your phone listening and recording everything you say?

    LOL

    Every text message is kept for at least a month by your mobile phone provider, I see no reason why they dont do it for voice calls too. Storage is cheap.

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    Senior Member Spreadie's Avatar
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    Re: is your phone listening and recording everything you say?

    Yeah... did her mum start the conversation with "OK, Google..."?
    Before you judge a man, walk a mile in his shoes; after that, who cares?! He's a mile away and you've got his shoes!

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    RIP Peterb ik9000's Avatar
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    Re: is your phone listening and recording everything you say?

    Quote Originally Posted by abaxas View Post
    LOL

    Every text message is kept for at least a month by your mobile phone provider, I see no reason why they dont do it for voice calls too. Storage is cheap.
    err, this isn't calls you make. This is using your phone as bug.

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    Re: is your phone listening and recording everything you say?

    Interesting article... That thought realy scares me!

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    Re: is your phone listening and recording everything you say?

    Your phone is definitely listening to you constantly. How do I know? Well if you go a voice search using "OK Google" to start the search, then go to:

    https://history.google.com/history/audio (sign in required with google account)

    Play any of the voice search requests (yes it saves all your audio searches). But the important bit to notice is how it starts recording BEFORE you even say "OK Google" ergo, it's constantly listening, then saving off the sections where you perform a search in your voice search history.

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    Not a good person scaryjim's Avatar
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    Re: is your phone listening and recording everything you say?

    I don't think google have ever denied that the phone is listening all the time, otherwise how else would it be able to recognise the phrase "OK Google"? They just say that any audio captured before saying "OK Google" is not processed and is discarded. Whether you choose to listen to that is another matter.

    As to saved/previous searches, if you're connected to lots of other people with Android phones and/or google accounts (and if they're in your google contacts, then google know you're connected), I wouldn't be at all surprised if search suggestions look at what other people you know have been searching for and base suggestions on that. So you talk to someone about an accident, they look it up, their friends look it up, google notes that lots of people in your "circles" have searched for the same thing, so when you next start typing a search that potentially matches it suggests that search. Seems like an utterly plausible explanation to me.

    On a side note, I recently added an email address to my linkedin account - an old one for me, but one that I'd previously chosen not to attach to my linkedin profile - and it suddenly started recommending I connect with a whole lot of friends that it never knew about before. It took me a couple of weeks of wondering why it would suddenly decide to suggest those people and where it had harvested the data from, then it occurred to me that maybe they'd given linkedin access to their address books when they signed up. It's something I'd never do, but if they had, and I was in that address book with that email address, linkedin would suddenly be aware of a whole new set of people that knew me.

    The moral being, I guess, be aware of what information you share, who you share it with, and what they might do with it...

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