Study Shows Android and Apple Phones Not Eavesdropping
An Anonymous Coward writes:
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-49585682
A recent study has "proven" that Android and Apple phones do not eavesdrop on conversations.
A mobile security company has carried out a research investigation to address the popular conspiracy theory that tech giants are listening to conversations.
The internet is awash with posts and videos on social media where people claim to have proof that the likes of Facebook and Google are spying on users in order to serve hyper-targeted adverts. Videos have gone viral in recent months showing people talking about products and then ads for those exact items appear online.
Now, cyber security-specialists at Wandera have emulated the online experiments and found no evidence that phones or apps were secretly listening.
I think this is the classic can't prove a counterfactual thing, ("we've proved that no birds swim from this survey of life in a nearby park"). However, I thought this would be an interesting article, and possibly start some good conversation... if nothing else, due to poking potential holes in their experimental techniques and data analysis:
Researchers put two phones - one Samsung Android phone and one Apple iPhone - into a "audio room". For 30 minutes they played the sound of cat and dog food adverts on loop. They also put two identical phones in a silent room.
The security specialists kept apps open for Facebook, Instagram, Chrome, SnapChat, YouTube, and Amazon with full permissions granted to each platform.
They then looked for ads related to pet food on each platform and webpage they subsequently visited. They also analysed the battery usage and data consumption on the phones during the test phase.
They repeated the experiment at the same time for three days, and noted no relevant pet food adverts on the "audio room" phones and no significant spike in data or battery usage.
The activity seen on phones in the "audio room" and the silent rooms were similar. They did record data being transferred from the devices - but it was at low levels and nowhere near the quantity seen when virtual assistants like Siri or Hey Google are active.
James Mack, systems engineer at Wandera, said: "We observed that the data from our tests is much lower than the virtual assistant data over the 30-minute time period, which suggests that the constant recording of conversations and uploading to the cloud is not happening on any of these tested apps.
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