Is your phone spying on you?

[OTRA15]

. . . also . . . keep in mind that Google stores every search request you make, even if you don't have a Google account, as well as the results, by using your IP address. This data is stored for about 10 years, I believe, but anything older than a certain date is moved to some kind of archive. Needless to say, this is an incredible amount of stored data for every user everywhere in the world, for 10 years!

[jcl]

Google doesn’t say they keep it ten years, they say they keep it as long as they can use it.

If you go to your Google account activity page, you can delete all or part of your search history. Your choice.

You can also turn off saving your activity monitoring completely, if you choose to. That includes all or some of location monitoring, search history, contact details, calendar details, etc. If you don’t want to see personalized ads, turn that feature off.

It is a little worrisome that some users don’t understand this, but it does explain why some people think their phone is spying on them if they have in fact turned on all these services and don’t know how to manage them.

[OTRA15]

. . . however you have to sign up for Google to use those options!

No thanks.




Sure -- I trust Google!

Originally Posted by jcl

Google doesn’t say they keep it ten years, they say they keep it as long as they can use it.
. . .

[jcl]

Originally Posted by OTRA15

. . . however you have to sign up for Google to use those options!

No thanks.

So just don't use any app or web site that talks to Google. Simple, if incredibly restrictive.

But if you are ever going to do a Google search, or access any web site that has an embedded Google feature, or you share any info with anyone else that is using any such Google services, you would be better off to sign up and manage your privacy.

I find Google a lot easier to deal with in this respect than Apple. Google helps you to manage your settings. Apple seems to make it such that you often can't figure out how to do so. And not having any Facebook or similar social media services at all helps as well.

[Lily&Me]

This in the news this morning...

https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/11/tech/...ing/index.html

Any privacy can and may/will be invaded, that’s what I believe to be true...not necessarily legally, nor necessarily (overtly, at least) used against one, but accessed and harvested and stored...and used at will.


I got an email FedEx notification the other day, of something being delivered to my home Friday, April 12. A gift from my daughter and SIL, meant to be a surprise.

FedEx had my name, address and email address in their system, and sent me a notification it was coming.

The world we live in.

Maggie

[UncleBad]

Someone provided that to them. One thing you can do is limit what you give to whom.

Other things you can do:
Create a generic junk email address for interacting with things like fedex and never use it for banking.
Use MFA (multi factor authentication) when available and never ever re-use passwords. I have about 842 passwords, all of them different. I could not do that without a secure password manager.
I use 1Password. You remember one password and it remembers the rest. Takes a little getting used to but it’s one of the best current approaches and works and synchronized across all my devices and is encrypted.

It’s the world we are in. Adapt or risk getting hacked.

[Lily&Me]

I provided it to them, for other orders delivered to me at this address.

I didn’t provide it to them for this order, meant to be a surprise gift from my daughter.

Maggie

[ROBERT CROSS]

Can they spy on your phone when it's off?

Bob
🇺🇸

[rmkrum]

If the phone is totally off it’s difficult but not impossible depending on the phone. The only way you are really safe is with a dead battery in the phone.

[waninae39]

use a VPN on all your devices. we use PIA (WIN, IOS, android support and covers 5 devices )

as well on an android phone , use GSM SPY finder.

This alerts you when a fake cell tower is acting as Man-in-the-middle
all governments use them.

[ROBERT CROSS]

Originally Posted by rmkrum

If the phone is totally off it’s difficult but not impossible depending on the phone. The only way you are really safe is with a dead battery in the phone.

The latest LGB470👍, it is off...until I need to make a call.
If I did remove the battery, I'd most likely lose it.😂

Bob
🇺🇸

[rmkrum]

Real Privacy is, unfortunately, a thing of the distant past. Too many gadgets tracking all of us. We won’t talk about all the scam phone calls either. I just let them go to voicemail, if no voicemail I ignore them. If it’s a bogus deal, the number goes to the “they’ll never be missed” list.

It will be interesting to see what Congress comes up with. The last FTC ‘do not call list’ is useless.

Apparently the phone companies like the profits from the scammers, and it will take more stiff laws to shut the robot callers down. The overseas ones are particularly hard to stop. Of course if you see a call from a Caribbean island, you can usually bet it’s a scam of some sort.

iPhone caller ID helps some. It checks my contact list to tell me who it might be. I usually get suspicious if the call is from my personal number, however. That has happened on spoofed calls occasionally.

[RedSHED]

Originally Posted by rmkrum

Real Privacy is, unfortunately, a thing of the distant past. Too many gadgets tracking all of us. We won’t talk about all the scam phone calls either. I just let them go to voicemail, if no voicemail I ignore them. If it’s a bogus deal, the number goes to the “they’ll never be missed” list.

It will be interesting to see what Congress comes up with. The last FTC ‘do not call list’ is useless.

Apparently the phone companies like the profits from the scammers, and it will take more stiff laws to shut the robot callers down. The overseas ones are particularly hard to stop. Of course if you see a call from a Caribbean island, you can usually bet it’s a scam of some sort.

iPhone caller ID helps some. It checks my contact list to tell me who it might be. I usually get suspicious if the call is from my personal number, however. That has happened on spoofed calls occasionally.

Or you can play it to mess with their data. I use different browsers for social stuff vs shopping. Sometimes different machines. Sometimes I'll search for specific things that go against my demographic using the same browser I use for social media just to verify the impact of ads. I NEVER log in to google and any other service with the same browser, and clean out cookies fairly regularly.
I have a Pi based tablet, and I'm ok with throwing a new image on it and taking it to a public wifi spot ... maybe running Kali.
Sometimes I leave the phone at home, and have thought about sending it on trips without me, pinging away with bogus data for hours on end.
And I beacon out APRS packets while travelling to debase the currency of information

Because the internet watches you means there are some ways you can exploit their assumptions. Primarily their assumption we're all lazy snd consistent.

[Lily&Me]

Mmm-hmmmm...what did I say?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/techn...=.bd59bedbb45e

Maggie

[UncleBad]

Originally Posted by Lily&Me

Mmm-hmmmm...what did I say?



https://www.washingtonpost.com/techn...=.bd59bedbb45e



Maggie

Yep. As one of the resident paranoids this does not surprise....

[UncleBad]

I have started using the Brave browser.

https://brave.com/

"Much more than a browser, Brave is a new way of thinking about how the web works. Brave is open source and built by a team of privacy focused, performance oriented pioneers of the web."

Watch the video on the site for more information...

[Lily&Me]

From the Washington Post today...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/techn...=.5887752c8443

Maggie

[InterBlog]

TL;DR - I reached a breaking point on the phone-listening possibility and I bought a faraday cage for mine (pictured below resting on my knees to show scale – I’ve got an iPhone 6+ so it’s large). The purpose of this device is to stop all transmissions going into and coming out of the phone on an elective basis. It works – you put your phone inside and it’s cut off from the world.

The only limitation I have discovered to date is that incoming phone calls do not log. Voice mails will get pushed to the phone after it has had a chance to sync upon re-emerging into the world. But the calls themselves never show up on the list of "Recent".

Silver lining on this cloud: My engineer husband, the world’s greatest skeptic, was witness to one of my most blatant apparent listening events, and is now a believer. There’s almost no possibility that what happened to us was the result of random chance. More likely is that I’ve got some rogue app on my phone, and rather than going through all my different apps trying to find which one has embedded malware, I chose to cut to the chase and just shut the phone up whenever I feel the need to ensure privacy.

Here’s the story that led me to conclude "enough is enough":

Husband and I went to lunch at a local restaurant in my car, which is old and which has no connectivity tech in it (so the car could not have been the offender).

During the return trip, we were on the road situated behind a car with a bumper sticker that said, "But did you die?" I turned to husband and said, "What the freak does that refer to - 'but did you die'? I have never seen that phrase in any context before." We proceeded to discuss it. Being 10 years younger and still interacting online with his college buddies, my husband often knows of pop culture references that I don't. But he did not understand the origins of it either.

Like clockwork, the next morning on Instagram, I received sales advertising for "But did you die?" products (image below). I did not do an internet search this phrase on any device and neither did my husband - nor did we continue to discuss it once we had exited my car.

There are three possibilities:

(1) My iPhone is listening in on me and parsing the words that come out of my mouth, or

(2) There's a sophisticated system of geolocation that associated me spatially with a previous buyer of a "Did you die?" product (this would also require the other driver’s phone to also be monitored). The idea being, if I saw it in front of me on someone else's car, maybe I might like to buy one, too, so the algorithm should offer me a link. Or,

(3) It was a coincidence.

I don’t believe (3) because it’s just too obscure of an example, especially given the exquisite timing. This was not a common or generic product we were discussing. There are approximately one hundred thousand consumer products that Instagram might have impressioned me with the next day, but it picked the only one we had discussed out loud. Odds are vanishingly low of that happening by chance.

I suspect (1) is the culprit. If (2) were the case, that kind of association should happen more than once. I pass a dozen bumper stickers a day, some pretty funny - funny enough to make me laugh out loud, like maybe I enjoyed it so much that I would like to buy one, too. But I don't get product sales impressions for those when that happens. I have to either speak the exact words that marketing software can pick up on, or someone has to transmit the words in association with me.

There’s also the issue that this is not the only such example – just the most blatant recent example for which I had a witness. I also had a case in the past month or so when I spoke the name of an obscure medication out loud, and received a product impression for that medication on Instagram the next day. There are 1,500 medications that have been approved by the FDA – am I supposed to believe it got lucky enough to pick the exact one out of 1,500? On top of all the other times when it gets lucky way outside of statistical expectations?

Enough is enough.

[matthewk]

Originally Posted by InterBlog

TL;DR - I reached a breaking point on the phone-listening possibility and I bought a faraday cage for mine (pictured below resting on my knees to show scale – I’ve got an iPhone 6+ so it’s large). The purpose of this device is to stop all transmissions going into and coming out of the phone on an elective basis. It works – you put your phone inside and it’s cut off from the world.

The only limitation I have discovered to date is that incoming phone calls do not log. Voice mails will get pushed to the phone after it has had a chance to sync upon re-emerging into the world. But the calls themselves never show up on the list of "Recent".

Silver lining on this cloud: My engineer husband, the world’s greatest skeptic, was witness to one of my most blatant apparent listening events, and is now a believer. There’s almost no possibility that what happened to us was the result of random chance. More likely is that I’ve got some rogue app on my phone, and rather than going through all my different apps trying to find which one has embedded malware, I chose to cut to the chase and just shut the phone up whenever I feel the need to ensure privacy.

Here’s the story that led me to conclude "enough is enough":

Husband and I went to lunch at a local restaurant in my car, which is old and which has no connectivity tech in it (so the car could not have been the offender).

During the return trip, we were on the road situated behind a car with a bumper sticker that said, "But did you die?" I turned to husband and said, "What the freak does that refer to - 'but did you die'? I have never seen that phrase in any context before." We proceeded to discuss it. Being 10 years younger and still interacting online with his college buddies, my husband often knows of pop culture references that I don't. But he did not understand the origins of it either.

Like clockwork, the next morning on Instagram, I received sales advertising for "But did you die?" products (image below). I did not do an internet search this phrase on any device and neither did my husband - nor did we continue to discuss it once we had exited my car.

There are three possibilities:

(1) My iPhone is listening in on me and parsing the words that come out of my mouth, or

(2) There's a sophisticated system of geolocation that associated me spatially with a previous buyer of a "Did you die?" product (this would also require the other driver’s phone to also be monitored). The idea being, if I saw it in front of me on someone else's car, maybe I might like to buy one, too, so the algorithm should offer me a link. Or,

(3) It was a coincidence.

I don’t believe (3) because it’s just too obscure of an example, especially given the exquisite timing. This was not a common or generic product we were discussing. There are approximately one hundred thousand consumer products that Instagram might have impressioned me with the next day, but it picked the only one we had discussed out loud. Odds are vanishingly low of that happening by chance.

I suspect (1) is the culprit. If (2) were the case, that kind of association should happen more than once. I pass a dozen bumper stickers a day, some pretty funny - funny enough to make me laugh out loud, like maybe I enjoyed it so much that I would like to buy one, too. But I don't get product sales impressions for those when that happens. I have to either speak the exact words that marketing software can pick up on, or someone has to transmit the words in association with me.

There’s also the issue that this is not the only such example – just the most blatant recent example for which I had a witness. I also had a case in the past month or so when I spoke the name of an obscure medication out loud, and received a product impression for that medication on Instagram the next day. There are 1,500 medications that have been approved by the FDA – am I supposed to believe it got lucky enough to pick the exact one out of 1,500? On top of all the other times when it gets lucky way outside of statistical expectations?

Enough is enough.

Did your husband search for it? It's not hard to triangulate internet usage patterns of people sharing the same household and linking them together.

That said, you have total control of what your phone does or does not "listen in on" go to the privacy setting, select microphone and turn off things you don't want to listen. Apple forces all apps to ask for permissions for access to your microphone, camera, contacts, calendar and location. The settings are there for you to lock this down and "if" it is listening somewhere along the way you've allowed it.

[ROBERT CROSS]

My smart phone is so smart....I turn on and it werks, I turn it off and it don't.
It's a hoot watching folks walking, talking and bumping into things.

Bob
🇺🇸