• 0 Posts
  • 259 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 4th, 2023

help-circle







  • How many times a day are you shown ads that are completely irrelevant?

    Me personally, I’ve never once experienced the “they’re listening to my mic for ads” phenomenon. I think someone would notice by now either by seeing increased upload usage or a hot device- at least with current technology. On device machine learning will make this much easier to analyze without having to upload audio.

    Not that I don’t think it’s entirely possible to listen right now, I just don’t think it’s occurring to unimportant people. I’m not particularly important or rich nor is anyone I know. It seems much more plausible to me that we’re just seeing conventional web tracking get a lot better + a healthy dose of confirmation bias.




  • I really doubt they’re listening to your microphone. Constantly uploading your audio would be noticeable in bandwidth and constantly analyzing audio on device would kill your battery - at least currently.

    What this demonstrates is how good tracking by other methods is getting. You don’t need to listen to someone’s microphone when you know what they and their friends/coworkers are looking up online and likely bringing up in conversation. It’s trivial to fingerprint someone and track near everything they’re looking up online, and even if you’re privacy conscious, many of those you associate with share their contact list with every app that asks for it. This makes suggesting things your friends are looking up pretty easy. Add a bit of confirmation bias to the mix and you’ve got this “listening to the microphone” theory, because you’re not counting the number of times an ad isn’t something you’ve been recently discussing.









  • These complaints sound legitimate.

    AT&T said SpaceX’s requested “ninefold increase” to the allowable power flux-density limits for out-of-band emissions “would cause unacceptable harmful interference to incumbent terrestrial mobile operations. Specifically, AT&T’s technical analysis shows that SpaceX’s proposal would cause an 18% average reduction in network downlink throughput in an operational and representative AT&T PCS C Block market deployment.”

    Assuming a handset antenna gain of -3 dBi, SpaceX’s proposal still results in an interference to noise (I/N) ratio of -3 dB—well above the ITU [International Telecommunication Union] threshold SpaceX claims would protect terrestrial devices. SpaceX’s proposed margin therefore fails to adequately protect terrestrial user equipment from potential interference from SCS satellite systems, including user equipment that may not fall within the flagship performance parameters, and should be rejected.”