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ลำดับตอนที่ #54 : Is your smartphone listening to you?
I was doing some ironing when my mum came in to tell me that a
family friend had been killed in a road accident in Thailand.
My phone was on the worktop behind me.
But the next time I used the search engine on it, up popped the
name of our friend, and the words, "Motorbike accident, Thailand" and
the year in the suggested text below the search box.
I
was startled, certain that I had not used my phone at the time I had had the
conversation - my hands had been full.
Had I started to look the details up later on and forgotten? Or
was my phone listening in?
Almost every time I mentioned it to people they had a similar
story, mainly based around advertising.
One
friend complained to her boyfriend about a migraine, her first ever, only to
find the next day she was being followed on Twitter by a migraine support
group.
Another had an in-depth chat with her sister about a tax issue,
and the next day was served up a Facebook advert from tax experts offering
advice on that exact issue.
Many
said they were discussing particular products or holiday destinations and
shortly afterwards noticed advertising on the same theme.
Community
website Reddit is full of similar stories.
One
reporter mentioned his male colleague seeing online adverts for sanitary pads
after discussing periods with his wife in the car.
But
surely if the microphone was activated and the handset was sending data,
battery life would be even worse than it is now and individual data usage would
be through the roof?
Tech challenge
I
challenged cybersecurity expert Ken Munro and his colleague David Lodge from
Pen Test Partners to see whether it was physically possible for an app to snoop
in this way.
Could
something "listen in" at will without it being obvious?
"I
wasn't convinced at first, it all seemed a bit anecdotal," admitted Mr
Munro.
However,
to our collective surprise, the answer was a resounding yes.
They
created a prototype app, we started chatting in the vicinity of the phone it
was on and watched our words appear on a laptop screen nearby.
"All
we did was use the existing functionality of Google Android - we chose it
because it was a little easier for us to develop in," said Mr Munro.
"We gave ourselves permission to use the microphone on the
phone, set up a listening server on the internet, and everything that
microphone heard on that phone, wherever it was in the world, came to us and we
could then have sent back customised ads."
The whole thing took a couple of days to build.
It wasn't perfect but it was practically in real time and
certainly able to identify most keywords.
The battery drain during our experiments was minimal and, using
wi-fi, there was no data plan spike.
"We re-used a lot of code that's already out there,"
said David Lodge.
"Certainly the user wouldn't realise what was happening. As
for Apple and Google - they could see it, they could find it and they could
stop it. But it is pretty easy to create."
"I'm not so cynical now," said Ken Munro.
"We have proved it can be done, it works, we've done it.
Does it happen? Probably."
Google responds
The major tech firms absolutely reject such an idea.
Google said it "categorically" does not use what it
calls "utterances" - the background sounds before a person says,
"OK Google" to activate the voice recognition - for advertising or
any other purpose. It also said it does not share audio acquired in that way
with third parties.
Its listening abilities only extend to activating its voice
services, a spokesperson said.
It
also states in its content policy for app developers that apps must not collect information
without the user's knowledge. Apps found to be breaking this are removed from
the Google Play store.
Facebook also told the BBC it does not allow brands to target
advertising based around microphone data and it never shares data with third
parties without consent.
It said Facebook ads are based only around information shared by
members on the social network and their net surfing habits elsewhere.
Other big tech companies have also denied using the technique.
Coincidence
There is of course also a more mathematical explanation - the
possibility that there is really no connection at all between what we say and
what we see.
Mathematics
professor David Hand from Imperial College London wrote a book called The
Improbability Principle, in which he argued that apparently extraordinary
events happen all the time.
"We are evolutionarily trained to seek explanations,"
he told the BBC.
"If you see a sign you know is associated with a predator
you run away and you survive.
"It's the same sort of thing here. This apparent
coincidence occurs and we think there must be explanation, it can't be chance.
But there are so many opportunities for that coincidence to occur.
"If you take something that has a tiny chance of occurring
and give it enough opportunities to occur, it inevitably will happen."
People are generally more alert to things that are currently
occupying them, such as recent conversations or big decisions like buying a car
or choosing a holiday, he added.
So suddenly those sorts of messages stand out more when they may
have been in the background all the time.
Beautiful
Prof Hand is not immune to the lure of coincidence himself.
When his book was published another author published a very
similar title at the same time. The author of The Coincidence Authority, John
Ironmonger, shared the same birthday as Prof Hand and was based at the same
university as his wife.
"These sorts of things happen," he said.
"Just because I understand why it happened doesn't make it
any less beautiful."
Startle (v.)
to do something unexpected that surprises and sometimes worries a person or animal
snoop (v.)
to look around a place secretly, in order to discover things or find out information about someone or something:
to try to find out about other people's private lives
anecdotal (adj.)
Anecdotal information is not based on facts or careful study
vicinity (n.)
the area around a place or where the speaker is :
drain
If you drain something, you remove the liquid from it, usually by pouring it away or allowing it to flow away, and if something drains, liquid flows away or out of it
to make someone very tired:
spike (v.)
to rise to a higher amount, price, or level, usually before
going down again:
cynical (adj.)
believing that people are only interested in themselves and are not sincere
used to say that someone's feelings or emotions are used to your own advantage
"categorically"
(adj.)
without any doubt or possibility of being changed:
"utterances"
(n.)
something that someone says:
to express your ideas or feelings in spoken words
consent (n.)
permission or agreement:
by common consent = most people agree:
inevitably (Adv.)
in a way that cannot be avoided:
immune (Adj.)
protected against a particular disease by particularsubstances in the blood:
not affected or upset by a particular type of behaviour or emotion
not able to be punished or damaged by something:
lure (n.)
the quality or power that something or someone has that makes it, him, or her attractive
an artificial insect or other small animal that is put on the end of a fishing line to attract fish
(v.)
to persuade someone to do something or go somewhere by offering them something exciting:
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