Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
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Notes -
The FB pixel localhost sidechannel exfiltration got caught within a year or so, but the researchers that found it realized that Yandex had been using a similar technique for 7 years without getting caught.
That was a clever use of Internet permissions, which were requested by the apps, rather than a covert usage of permissions that the apps weren't supposed to have. There's a difference between using a permission creatively and using a permission that you're not supposed to have.
Does this difference actually matter? 99.99% of users will click "allow" on any permission a "trusted" app (like facebook or browser) would ask them for, and would never realize any of those deep technical aspects.
If you've got a green microphone chip in your notifications bar because Facebook is listening to you, then it's not really a mystery if Facebook is listening to you or not and this conversation would be over.
However, this doesn't happen and nobody has produced an explanation of how it could happen without the OS notifying the user that the microphone is enabled.
Nobody checks any notifications bars when your phone is in your pocket or sitting on your table. A tiny green dot is hard to miss. Also, I am not entirely convinced there's no way to turn on the microphone (hardware) without showing the green dot (software). It's be very easy to lay all these doubt to rest - make a hardware microphone mute switch, that physically (electrically) disconnects the microphone hardware. I'd trust that. Nobody does it though.
On Android, apps can't turn on the microphone at all while running in the background. Accessing it while running in the foreground requires a permanent notification while the foreground process is running. To start a background process, the app must be open, so it can't start a background process while the phone is at rest.
In any case, Android maintains an audit log of all microphone accesses. It would, again, be trivial for people to demonstrate that the Facebook app is accessing the mic while the phone is locked or at rest. Somehow, nobody has produced such evidence.
I agree it's hard to miss, especially because (at least on Android) everything in the notification bar is monochrome (except I guess a low battery indicator).
This is the second time this week that someone has responded to my comment with an objection that I already covered in a grandparent.
I expect not reading from plebbit but I feel the bare minimum of engagement on this forum should be reading the conversation you are joining.
It's especially perplexing since you thought I was talking about granting microphone permissions at first, but somehow that's not a load bearing part of your argument and your confidence that I'm wrong seems unaffected.
Hmm, so you don't trust the microphone notification because you're not able to look at your notification bar, but you do trust a switch which may not do anything (when's the last time you disassembled your phone?) and that might get switched while your phone is in your pocket. Let's say, that's not a typical perspective among consumers.
No, I don't trust the notification because I don't see any mechanism that prevents microphone from working while not displaying the notification, those are completely different systems, and the only thing linking them is software. Which is extremely fallible. If I break the electric circuit, I'd trust the laws of physics to prevent the microphone from working.
Doesn't have to be Facebook, could be google feeding some data into one of a myriad of data aggregators, and ad platforms just using the end result of that.
That's become known pretty quickly I imagine, it's not hard to open it and verify, I opened my phones several times despite being complete ignoramus in electronics. And it's easy to prove too, so for a phone manufacturer going through all the expense of making a fake switch would be pointless, especially given as phone manufacturers aren't those who profit from ads. OTOH, phone manufacturers do not control the software, and making fallible software is cheaper than making secure one.
That you think the mechanism is fallible doesn't mean there isn't one.
This is not how Google's business model works. Selling user data to other companies defeats the purpose. If you're seeing Facebook ads for stuff you talked about IRL, I guarantee that information doesn't come from Google.
Facebook isn't a phone manufacturer.
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Why would you trust the Phone OS to set the electronic switch off (a physical switch isn't possible) if you don't trust the same OS to not route audio to the app without your permission?
Why a physical switch isn't possible? Looks like very basic thing, just interrupt the circuit.
There isn't "the circuit" to interrupt. A phone has something like half a dozen digital MEMS microphones, so you'd have to interrupt a whole bunch of circuits with a single switch. That'd require an expensive and more failure prone multi-pole switch and would be hell to route. You can't just cut power to the mics either because you need to turn off the clock signal before cutting power to prevent overdriving the protection diodes and also short circuiting the clock driver (and you can't sequence the clocks because the switch directly cuts power before the cpu has a chance to react). Plus of course there would again be the routing issue.
Then there are the legal ramifications. You have to be able to call the emergency number while paniccing and phones go to quite some lengths to bypass blocks to enable that. This would of course be impossible with a physical switch.
Finally, the whole thing is completely and utterly pointless for anything other than state level actors who have to worry about zero day exploits in the OS itself (where "turn off the phone" / "leave the phone in a sealed box" is more secure and much easier to do). Anyone with half a clue of how operating systems work knows that an app can't "just access" the microphone and the OS has to do a whole lot of work to stream audio to an application via a dedicated API that is used solely for that (which is a fundamental difference from all the typical file permission bypass exploits).
This is a very convincing argument about physical microphone switch being completely impossible. As somebody who never designed a phone, I have to completely defer to your expertise. Except for one small thing: phones with physical microphone switches actually exist. Example: https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/ Must be using some kind of unholy black magic, because is also costs less than many of those phones where there's absolutely no way to do it, both physically and legally. As people should not associate with unholy black magic, I guess we'd have to agree this is just not possible.
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