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A conspiracy that no less than Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg tried to swat down himself when he was grilled by Congress earlier this year. The study looked at 17, Android apps and specifically paid attention to the media files being sent from them. But they did find that some apps were sending screen recordings and screenshots to third parties.
Gizmodo drills down and pulls out examples like that of junk food delivery app GoPuff, which the site describes as monitoring user interactions with the app and sending them to a mobile analytics company called Appsee. Money talks, and the other stuff walks. Are you going to download offline music from streaming apps? Or are you going to load it up with local files from your PC? Most of the popular streaming services, such as Spotify and Google Play Music, allow you to download for offline playback.
Apps like doubleTwist make it easy to sync files between your phone and PC. Regardless of how you get the music onto the phone, a good audio player is a must. Check out these audio players.
Samsung delivers a music player app to your Galaxy phone without the need to go find and download one. Samsung Music is compatible with Android and. Is your Android phone always listening to you? Apply a filter to only show voice recordings by clicking Filter by date & product at the top, under the search bar.
As more and more services have moved to the cloud, storage on phones has become less of an issue. Grab one of the SD cards below and load it up with tunes.
Now that we have everything set up, we can enjoy some music. Plug in some headphones, connect to your car stereo, link up with a set of portable speakers. The widespread use of smartphones makes them a particularly attractive hacking target [ 4 ]. Not only cyber criminals, but also law enforcement agencies and secret services invest heavily in their capabilities to exploit software flaws and other security vulnerabilities in consumer electronics [ 73 ].
With the help of specialized tools, smartphone microphones can even be tapped when the device is or seems switched off [ 73 ]. Such attacks can also be successful in high-security environments.
In a recent case, for example, more than Israeli servicemen had their phones infected with spyware that allowed unknown adversaries to control built-in cameras and microphones [ 57 ]. Besides the United States and some European nations, other developed countries, such as Russia, Israel and China, also have highly sophisticated spying technology at their disposal [ 75 ]. Less developed countries and other actors can buy digital eavesdropping tools from a flourishing industry of surveillance contractors at comparatively low prices [ 60 ].
Eavesdropping capabilities of criminal organizations should not be underestimated, either. So far, despite significant research efforts, no evidence has been found to confirm the widespread suspicion that firms are secretly eavesdropping on smartphone users to inform ads.
To the best of our knowledge, however, the opposite has not been proven either. While some threat scenarios e. In comparison with the researchers cited in this paper, it can be assumed that certain companies have significantly more financial resources, more training data, and more technical expertise in areas such as signal processing, data compression, covert channels, and automatic speech recognition. This is — besides unresolved contradictions between cited studies and large remaining research gaps — another reason why existing work should not be seen as final and conclusive, but rather as an initial exploration of the issue.
While this paper focuses on smartphones, it should be noted that microphones and motion sensors are also present in a variety of other Internet-connected devices, including not only VR headsets, wearable fitness trackers and smartwatches, but also baby monitors, toys, remote controls, cars, household appliances, laptops, and smart speakers.
Some of these devices may have weaker privacy safeguards than smartphones. For instance, they may not ask for user permission before turning on the microphone or may not impose a limit on sensor sampling frequencies. Numerous devices, including smart TVs [ 13 ], smart speakers [ 27 ], and connected toys [ 26 ], have already been suspected to spy on private conversations of their users. Certain smart home devices, such as home security alarms, may even contain a hidden microphone without disclosing it in the product specifications [ 44 ].
For these reasons, it is essential to also thoroughly examine non-smartphone devices when investigating suspicions of eavesdropping. It is quite possible, at the same time, that the fears of advertising companies eavesdropping on private conversations are unfounded. Besides the widespread attribution to chance, one alternative approach to explaining strangely accurate advertisements points to all the established tracking technologies commonly employed by advertisers that do not depend on any phone sensors or microphones [ 51 ].
Although their own search engines, social networks, email services, route planners, instant messengers, and media platforms already give them intimate insight into the lives of billions of people, advertising giants like Facebook and Google also intensively track user behavior on foreign websites and apps.
Of the Through their analytics services and like buttons, Google and Facebook can track clicks and scrolls of Internet users on a vast number of websites [ 17 ]. The deep and potentially unexpected insights that result from such ubiquitous surveillance can be used for micro-targeted advertising and might thereby create an illusion of being eavesdropped upon, especially if the data subject is ill-informed about the pervasiveness and impressive possibilities of data linkage.
Even without being used for audio snooping, smartphones in their current configuration allow a large variety of actors to track private citizen in a much more efficient and detailed way than would ever have been possible in even the most repressive regimes and police states of the 20th century.
At the bottom line, whether sensitive information is extracted from private conversations or collected from other sources does not make much difference to the possibilities of data exploitation and the entailing consequences for the data subject. Therefore, whether justified or not, the suspicions examined in this paper eventually lead to a very fundamental question: What degree of surveillance should be considered acceptable for commercial purposes like targeted advertising? Although this paper cannot offer an answer to this political question, it should not be forgotten that constant surveillance is by no means a technical necessity and that, by definition, democracies should design and regulate technology to primarily reflect the values of the public, not commercial interests.
Certainly, the fear of eavesdropping smartphones should never be portrayed as completely unfounded, as various criminal and governmental actors can gain unauthorized access to consumer electronics. Although such attacks are unlikely to result in targeted advertisement, they equally deprive the user of control over his or her privacy and might lead to other unpredictable harms and consequences.
For example, digital spying tools have been used to infiltrate the smartphones of journalists [ 49 ] and human rights activists [ 60 ] for repressive purposes. Finally, it should be recognized that — apart from the linguistic contents of speech — microphones and motion sensors may unexpectedly transmit a wealth of other sensitive information. After online advertisements seemingly adapted to topics raised in private face-to-face conversations, many people suspect companies to secretly listen in through their smartphones.
This paper reviewed and analyzed existing approaches to explaining the phenomenon and examined the general feasibility and detectability of mobile eavesdropping attacks. While it is possible, on the one hand, that the strangely accurate ads were just a product of chance or conventional profiling methods, the spying fears were not disproved so far, neither by device manufacturers and ecosystem providers nor by the research community.
In our threat model, we considered non-system mobile apps, third-party libraries, and ecosystem providers themselves as potential adversaries. Smartphone microphones and motion sensors were investigated as possible eavesdropping channels. Taking into account permission requirements, user notifications, sensor sampling frequencies, limited device resources, and existing security checks, we conclude that — under the current levels of data collection transparency in iOS and Android — sophisticated eavesdropping operations could potentially be run by either of the above-mentioned adversaries without being detected.
At this time, no estimate can be made as to the probability and economic viability of such attacks. Advertising networks are companies that match demand and supply of online ad space by connecting advertisers to ad publishers. They often hold extensive amounts of data on individual internet users to enable targeted advertising [ 17 ]. The role and significance of third-party apps will be further explained in Sect. For more information on cross-device tracking, refer to [ 65 ]. The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the work's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if such material is not included in the work's Creative Commons license and the respective action is not permitted by statutory regulation, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to duplicate, adapt or reproduce the material.
If you have Android 9 or below, get the Android Auto app on your phone. The same holds true for one in five Australians, according to a recent survey [ 38 ]. For more information on cross-device tracking, refer to [ 65 ]. Adversaries might be able to eavesdrop on conversations through cell phones without accessing the microphone. Safe to say, those days are now gone. Check out all the Apps for Android Auto.
Skip to main content Skip to sections. Advertisement Hide. Is My Phone Listening in? On the Feasibility and Detectability of Mobile Eavesdropping. Open Access. First Online: 11 June Download conference paper PDF. Organization A then uses the received information to identify the smartphone owner as a suitable target for specific ads and sends a corresponding broadcast request to an ad publisher organization A could also publish the ads itself if it has access to ad distribution channels.
Finally, the publisher displays the ads on websites or apps — either on the smartphone through which the speech was recorded or on other devices that can be linked 4 to the smartphone owner, for example through logins, browsing behavior, or IP address matching. Not even organization A necessarily understands how and by whom the received profiling information was initially collected. For illustration, Fig.
Open image in new window. A schematic and simplified overview of the threat model. Even where adversaries manage to get around security measures and evade detection, it remains questionable whether a continuous and large-scale eavesdropping operation for the purpose of ad targeting would be technically feasible and economically viable.