Big tech is watching you through your smartphone 24/7

If you’ve noticed in the past that you are being shown ads based on
something you may have mentioned to a friend or spouse and thought
that it was just a coincidence, you’re mistaken, according to a new,
but as yet unpublished, study from the University of Wisconsin
Madison.
According to a press release from the institution, researchers claim
that they investigated “many popular apps” in order to determine what
data they are capable of capturing even when a user has a muted
microphone on his or her device. The press release did not mention
which apps were studied, but what the researchers found is damning
enough that their study has been accepted by the 2022 Privacy
Enhancing Technologies Symposium, according to Reclaim The Net
(https://bit.ly/3kdXSUR).
“They used runtime binary analysis tools to trace raw audio in
popular video conferencing applications as the audio traveled from
the app to the computer audio driver and then to the network while
the app was muted,” the press release stated.
“They found that all of the apps they tested occasionally gather raw
audio data while mute is activated, with one popular app gathering
information and delivering data to its server at the same rate
regardless of whether the microphone is muted or not.”
With the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI), as well as machine
learning, Big Tech companies are able to use raw audio data in order
to make accurate inferences about users. Researchers for the study
used the technologies to see what kind of inferences Big Tech could
make and they found them to be fairly spot-on.
According to an abstract of the study obtained by the Next Web
(https://bit.ly/37L57B8): “Using network traffic that we intercept
en route to the telemetry server, we implement a proof-of-concept
background activity classifier and demonstrate the feasibility of
inferring the ongoing background activity during a meeting - cooking,
cleaning, typing, etc. We achieved 81.9 percent macro accuracy on
identifying six common background activities using intercepted
outgoing telemetry packets when a user is muted.”
In other words, the grad students at the university were able to
discover what a user of a video conferencing app was doing in the
background while the mic to their device was muted and were accurate
more than 80 percent of the time.
“With a camera, you can turn it off or even put your hand over it, and
no matter what you do, no one can see you. I don’t think that exists
for microphones,” said the lead author of the study, Kassem Fawaz.
In short, the Big Tech companies have decided that no matter what,
they don’t have to adhere to the alleged privacy guarantees contained
in the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution so they can
continually market goods and services to you, as well as obtain
deeply private information that can later be used to blackmail you
with – and they are doing it with the knowledge and at the behest
of the federal government.
Now you know why Congress refuses to take on Big Tech: It’s likely
Big Tech companies have all the goods on each and every member
and is threatening to expose anyone who opposes their power grabs.
One lawmaker, Florida Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz, has recently
spoken out about this, noting that his colleagues won’t rein in Big
Tech because they are “owned” by Big Tech (https://bit.ly/3OFVzb2).
“Congress is not going to rein in Big Tech, because Congress is
bought by Big Tech,” Gaetz said back in September 2020, when the
platforms were censoring damning information on Democratic
presidential.
“There are just simply too many members of the House and Senate who
are beholden to Big Tech either because of political donations or
because their family members are getting employed by Big Tech,”
he added.