Cox deletes ‘Active Listening’ ad pitch after boasting that it eavesdrops though our phones::undefined
I’m confident this is built in to many smart TVs these days.
Well. Wireshark would confirm that if it were true.
I’m sure it will show HTTPS traffic outbound from your TV.
I’m sure it will show no traffic whatsoever if you don’t connect your TV to your network
There’s a dozen ways they could jump the air gap.
Ultrasonic to a phone or Alexa/Siri/etc, connect to an unsecured network, send data to a neighbor’s smart TV which is connected to Internet, Bluetooth or other to a phone
That would add a ludicrous amount of cost to the device in both material cost and R&D. It’s so incredibly unlikely that any company would make that investment just to spy on the conversations of ordinary citizens when there are far cheaper and easier ways for them to build and sell advertising profiles.
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If it were, it would be pretty common knowledge and there would be several news cycles about it. I don’t doubt that they could bury it in the terms of service, but we have wiretap laws in enough places that are two-party consent that it would have had to come out by now. Not to mention nerds like me running pi-hole and monitoring their traffic, repair people who could easily regonize a mic in the device, etc.
The privacy agreement in them covers it, just like Alexa.
Check yours, if you don’t agree to the privacy agreement, things like cable and broadcast channel recognition don’t work.
It also breaks Automatic Content Recognition, which enables the manufacturer to monitor what you’re watching.
Granted that’s not the same as listening, but it’s close enough. And we know Google employees have been caught listening/watching people. There was another article just the other day of another company caught doing the same.
Just because something’s illegal doesn’t stop people from doing it.
As for catching it with monitoring… We know Microsoft has hard coded domain names into certain DLL’s since XP, so you can’t block the domains with a hosts file. There’s some talk in the Pihole community about smart tv’s being able to bypass your DNS with hard-coded IP destinations - they only need one to be able to then deliver their own DNS.
Some smart TV’s will connect to others via wifi if they don’t have connectivity, yet another way to bypass our efforts to block their connections.
That manufacturers are so blatantly adversarial makes it pretty clear they’ll try to get away with anything they can. And anything I can think of, surely their dedicated teams of engineers thought of it long before me.
Edit: then there’s apps like Netflix, Prime, Peacock, Hulu, YouTube, etc, that make encrypted connections to home. It would be trivial to permit those apps to deliver alternative name resolution for the entire OS on TV’s since we don’t control the OS.
Many companies already do this, but advertising it is unpalatable. Just be like Google and Facebook. For awhile the Facebook app was so bad about it that it caused significant battery drain and the only way to avoid it was to remove the app.
Their claim was bullshit from the beginning:
Update: Cox Media Group responded by saying that it uses “third-party vendor products powered by data sets sourced from users by various social media and other applications then packaged and resold to data servicers. Advertising data based on voice and other data is collected by these platforms and devices under the terms and conditions provided by those apps and accepted by their users, and can then be sold to third-party companies and converted into anonymized information for advertisers. “CMG businesses do not listen to any conversations or have access to anything beyond a third-party aggregated, anonymized and fully encrypted data set that can be used for ad placement,” the company added. “We regret any confusion and we are committed to ensuring our marketing is clear and transparent.”
So typical advertising mechanisms, not “active listening”. Someone from marketing was too eager to sell their service.
Yeah but I already believe they are listening because one time I talked about something and it advertised it to me, and let’s ignore all of the hundreds of things I also said just that day alone that it didn’t advertise to me, so this was clearly “saying the quiet part out loud.” And now they are just trying to cover their asses.
