Our phones are too useful to do without. Cures boredom, holds the answers to almost any question, our communication with friends and loved ones. It’s hard to just set that aside when we don’t see any harm
Last time I saw a phone booth/pay phone was in 2013 in some podunk town in Nevada. I hadn't seen one in years prior to that. Had to pull into the gas station to take a picture.
They've been getting converted into WiFi hotspots/defibrillators in the UK.
There's also information kiosks like [these](https://cdn-dhojg.nitrocdn.com/onetCTqwAHwBMczxjVKjPYdPrchGiSGt/assets/images/optimized/rev-e6fa424/www.lamasatech.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/lamasatech-smart-city-kiosks-gloucester-37-min-scaled.jpg) with built in phone chargers/phones to use for emergencies.
Look up something called a red box. Has a history to deep to get into at the moment, but it was basically a way to score free calls through a payphone.
Thank you for reminding me of the adventure, mystery and joy that used to come from trying to find house parties in college, having only been given a street name or area.I have fond memories of nights where we never did find the party, but went on some other adventure instead. The world has changed a lot.
I used to hold house parties and we never posted about them, just told people we knew and they told people, and it was always a couple dozen great people. Once my roommates posted on Facebook and 200+ people showed up and we couldn’t nearly fit them so outside turned into a “party” and lokes started spray painting and smashing bottles outside and loads of cops showed up and worst part was someone poured a bunch of shitty beer into a big bowl of wonderful sangria my best friend made for me.
So yeah I look forward to the parties during the 7 days of no phones, will need some good chill vibes to distract from the collapsing of society.
Page? In the 90's you had to call an info line off a flyer to get a location to go to. Then the person at that location would decide if you were right for the party and either give you a fake address on the other side of town, or the actual location a few blocks away.
It really wasn't that complex to be honest. I certainly don't look back to that time and think of complexity. Plus many people had dumb phones in the late 90s so reaching people wasn't a huge task then.
Minus the infrastructure that enabled the way of life from 20 years ago. Where I live I havent seen a public phone on the street in years and the majority of people here do not have a landline anymore.
I had my phone in service for 2 weeks so I bought a Nokia brick for 20€ and I'll tell you. Yes at times I felt like I wasn't up to date but the peace and quiet I had those 2 weeks was amazing.
Ask my kids in 5 days.
Edit: not a punishment, I made a bet with them, no cell phones or other electronics until Friday, only time they can have their phone is on the bus ride to and from school or when/if we are playing split screen in the evening after dinner.
and we are going out to eat at whatever they chose for dinner, be that Pizza, McDonald's or our local sushi ad libitum place, anywhere is an option really if they want to go.
I somewhat agree. But 30 minutes in the morning, on a crowded bus ride to school, with other kids that are often extremely loud and noisy, does drain the mind a lot. Now imagine if you had nothing to block that out. Your nogging wouldn't be able to function properly at work/schools, then same goes for the ride home, except now everyone is also drained after a long day, and then get stuck in with others.
And the potential splitscreen time we get in the evening is bonding time. It is roughly 30 minutes we play give or take on either end, and it is only after they have eaten, showered and is ready for bed, so we just need to brush our teeth.
The whole bet thing came about after I had voiced my grievances with their usage of their phones and their lacking help around the house. It was eternally locked in either hand, while the other hand did stuff. One hand phone, one handed putting clothes on, brushing teeth and everything else really. So this was my way to force it out of their hands, while still letting them enjoy their normal life.
Why make it harder for them, than it needs to be. This is to help them reach an easy win, gain some quick confidence in their own abilities, and also letting them have a win, where they feel they really earned it. Me helping them us only making the whole thing better.
Plz don’t take offense, I am genuinely curious… I really like this idea & may use it on my kids even. That being said, is there a reason you allow them to always be on their electronics? I guess I just don’t understand why parents don’t limit it more.
My kids are allowed 1hr/day either games or YouTube only after school work is done as well as chores. I only deviate from that if we’re going on a long car ride or a boring meeting/dr appt they have to go with. Otherwise their devices are all locked down.
Yes, they complain and tell me how mean & unfair I am, but at the same time they are spending more time outside or creating something than many of their friends.
Again, no judgement whatsoever, just trying to see another perspective.
But *they* will feel it was an earned win. That's the point.
In this scenario, nothing else really matters. I'm hopefully building kids that are willing to try new stuff, and have the confidence to go out of their own comfort zone from time to time.
I am an extremely heavy sleeper. No matter how loud it is, I’m shutting it off and going back to bed. The only alarm that works for me is amdroid, and that’s because I have to do some multiplication problems to turn the thing off. 4 problems shuts it off, then it sends me a text 5 minutes later to see if I’m really awake, two minutes after that it starts in on me again. I bought a $50 android with no cell service just to get the app again. I don’t know of any other clock or app that functions similarly for free.
You can get used to that too. I have been keeping it in another room for years now. Now I am perfectly capable of jumping out of bed the second it goes off, run in to turn it off, and jump back into bed without realizing. I still go back to sleep in 10 seconds.
I've had speakers hooked up to an iPod in another room and I still regularly crawled back into bed. Hell even now I'm pretty good at mindlessly doing multiplication, it's the quick succession of verification steps that get me up.
Is your room dark? I’m pretty sure sleep studies show that once your brain receives light it disrupts the sleep cycle and has a harder time restarting it. You could maybe try setting an alarm through a smart plug that controls a lamp. Then no matter if you shut the alarm off or not, the light is on
A lot of small businesses would have a hard time recovering. When AT&T went down for a day, it caused major havoc with customers reaching small businesses. Your Walmarts won't really be affected, the average person would just be annoyed and maybe bored for a bit, but some small business can't afford the disruption.
As much as I wish this were true I think I disagree, the existence of phones has established a communication timeline standard for most work that would be impossible to accomplish without a phone. Kind of like saying 'you can do all this clerical work without a computer' like maybe but they're just gonna hire someone who uses the computer.
Yeah - I need some sort of phone or VOIP for my job. I talk to people all over the state each day. I specifically can't use a landline for my job either. Besides that, the only time I use my phone is to listen to music when I go to sleep or text friends. If I wasn't to count the listening to music for bed on my screen time, my daily personal phone usage is less than 30 minutes a day.
So am I just supposed to manually do the math to work out my OTP from my 2FA tokens or something?
My work requires that we use 2FA apps from our phones to login to stuff on our laptops, big security no-no to have those installed on the same device we need to generate codes for
"Dont see any harm" .... ????? I feel like more and more people are reaching the conclusion every day that mobile phones have had a massive negative impact on human mental health and human relationship dynamics.
doesn't cure bordom.. Only answers questions correctly if you ask correctly or go to the correct source. Communication hub obviously. It's a time suck. Most people spend too much time on their screens and it has deleterious effects
Okay, let's remove cell phones.
You are now getting your news from the local newspaper and are spending your time watching TV and reading books as opposed to getting your news from a website and spending your time watching Netflix and reading a Kindle.
Nothing changes.
I mean sophisticated programs monitor your aggregated metadata and then use that info for targeted advertising to you and people you spend time with. They don't listen to your audio generally.
There was a very good post from an engineer I saw a while back that gave examples of how much information can be found about you from non-audio data. Especially when it's taken into account that also includes the data of *the people around you as well*.
So your friends searches, interests, locations etc are also influencing yours. When you start looking for something the algorithm starts considering if you could be looking for yourself, or a gift. Visit a friends house and share locations and it might take a guess at what the occasion was.
e: turns out I saved the post :
https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/q1u71q/my_phone_is_listening_to_my_conversations_not/hfhynid/
A colleague of mine had a project at university to use the location data and some others like speed, acceleration, height, angle of smartphones and they were able to pretty reliably map the walkable areas of your house using it and infer what the rooms are, when you are going to the toilet etc.
Yeap. You don't even need any kind of 'fancy spy software' or whatever for this. It's all just aggregated by default and as soon as you check the permission box, off it goes. Any time your phone is like "we need your location data uwu" you are telling them "go for it". Especially when you have it on all the time and not just specifically for a legit need (like sharing your location data with a friend to get them to meet you at the right spot). Our love for convenience heavily outweighs our fucks given for privacy.
This also means they know exactly what political issues you are talking about, or likely to, and can target ads from one party about the issue and also how other parties don't care about it.
Having an advantage like that ends democracy as most people vote based on a few core issues. The majority of the public aren't highly engaged with politics outside of a few issues.
Political stances are probably the easiest things to deduce from simple demographic data. Most people are really unoriginal when it comes to this. From someone's place of residence, age, marital status, profession, income bracket, and favorite pieces of media, you can deduce with pretty good accuracy what their stance is on immigration, abortion, work reform, the war in Ukraine, and so on
Don't bother arguing this. People on Reddit are too technologically illiterate to understand that it isn't worth the effort for phone companies to listen to us.
Edit: I was only talking to the person who I replied to. Just because you aren't able to infer that I meant phone APP companies, doesn't invalidate my claim, you conspiracy theorist dumbasses.
"But I got served ads for [extremely popular thing among my demographic] after I had only discussed it IRL with a friend! Google must be spying on me through the mic, it can't possibly be that my tastes are basic"
it's also just cognitive bias on top of that. think about the number of ads you get for stuff you dont care about. It's a lot, but you don't think about it because you just ignore them. when it was something that was on your mind, the ad stood out much more, and you noticed it quickly.
meh, it doesn't even have to be basic. people just make minor, subconscious changes in their habits when things are on their mind, and they can pick up on that
Or they didn't search it after the conversation, but their friend did. Or it came up in conversation *because* the friend had recently searched it or clicked on a related article/video.
This. I used to develop a product that has microphone inside it and is battery powered. If we continuously run the mic and stream the data to the internet, the battery would be dead in few hour. Yet some people still think our device is secretly spying them
The number of times I’ve tried to explain on Reddit that Alexa/Google Home/etc. literally do not send enough network traffic to be recording everything you say only to be downvoted by the conspiracy-minded hive is too damn high. People are determined to believe it’s happening no matter how much clear evidence there is to the contrary. I’m a very privacy-minded individual. I have Echos embedded in the wall of all my rooms for smart home controls. I watch their network traffic closely on pfSense and not once have they done anything untoward.
Yea. As usual people don't understand what's going on, don't bother to try and understand and just jump to the easiest explanation even though there's a perfectly plausible explanation. The algorithms are very smart, recommend stuff your friends have searched and they get it wrong all the time and recommend you stuff you're not interested in but no one seems to notice.
If phones were listening these underpaid and horribly treated employees from Google, Amazon would be coming out and saying it, there's no way this would be kept under wraps.
Could you imagine how valuable real time targeted ads would be to retailers who could bid to send you their shop when you start talking about a remote control car or something? None of this makes any sense.
The worst part about this discussion is the lack of awareness that people can, and do, monitor to see if this is happening; and if it were, it would be front page news immediately. It’s not some magical, unknowable thing.
Not only that, but any company that did it would be risking the literal end of their company if found out. The legal ramifications would be wild (in certain countries at least), and their reputation would be destroyed.
One thing I do fear is that companies are well on board with letting people assume that it happens, so that it's normalised by the time they try to introduce it as a "feature".
Fair. However, I just can’t get over this one experience. I’m not into martial arts, kung fu movies, or even anything remotely close to showing interest in Bruce Lee. However, me and my buddy were having a conversation and curious how Lee died. I pull up my phone and write in the Google search bar the word, “how”, and the first auto generated suggestion was, “how did Bruce Lee die”? Unless it was his birthday or some shit that I was unaware of, why the fuck would my phone suggest that?
Did the person you were sitting next to just Google something about martial arts or Bruce Lee on their phone? Cause that would be the biggest indicator. They don't need to listen to audio data to know that a few people are talking and link their searches together.
You're never going to get people to believe you though. The confirmation bias is too strong. If people get 100 ads thrown at them based on their location data, and one of them is for the brand of toothpaste their mom just bought and told you about, they remember the toothpaste because you talked about it and conclude they must have been listening. Nevermind that you also got 100 other ads based on being geolocated near your mom. But you have no reason to remember the laundry detergent ad (for the brand she just bought) because you didn't see that she bought it and didn't talk about it.
It's tough because it's very convincing the idea that phones are spying on you, because they are. But they don't need to listen to what you're saying and collect that as data. If they were actually doing that don't you think it would be easy to prove? There are so many people out there that would expose that sort of thing for privacy concerns or just for fun. But if you dig into the topic you'll find that very few instances of listening are occurring.
That being said, we need to differentiate between listening and actually storing and using/selling your data. Because it's well understood that phones are listening for things like voice commands, but that doesn't get stored generally get stored or analyzed like your data that's being sold
Sure they do…
Meanwhile, ads are supposedly so sophisticated that they know you’re pregnant before you do, but are so dumb that they’ll bombard you with product ads for an obvious one-time purchase that you just bought hours ago.
Dude same I get Mazda ads all the time now after buying a new one. I think they just want me to come back and buy a bigger one it seems because none of the ads are for my small car.
We need real politicians not the ones we have now. Boomer generation leaders are all fat stupid and bribed. They need to retire or our phones will soon have the god given right to listen to us.
> We need real politicians not the ones we have now. Boomer generation leaders are all fat stupid and bribed. They need to retire or our phones will soon have the god given right to listen to us.
You think another generation of politician will not be brided and stupid somehow?
Exactly right. The problem isn't age. The problem is that we don't have smart people getting into politics to change the world for the better, we have dumb, greedy people getting into politics for money & power.
This is interesting, like I would assume the TOS applies to you but what about others? Would there be a loophole that say in single party states you can go after google for listening to you through other phones you’re around without consent. Being a person that dosent read the TOS I wonder if their coverage of the subject is blanketed or not. Like if I’m good with my phone listening then anyone phone that uses their software can listen to me as well.
I remember walking by a computer shop last year. Had this really cool wooden PC case in the window. Didn't say anything, but admired it as I walked by as I'd never seen a wooden case before. Pulled out my phone.. guess what's the first ad I see is for?
I'm not even in a big city, I'm in a small countryside town. Freaking scary times.
It is, in fact, because you are in a small town and pinging their WiFi that it is so accurately able to identify things.
In ways that are way the fuck scarier than the (non existent).listening which everyone talks about being concerned over.
THIS. it’s way more computationally expensive to parse speech than to use big and aggregate data to profile the users.
They’re not actively acting on what they hear on the microphone; we are just way less special and unique than we think.
It's not just the wifi. It's literally just location services. Everything everyone types is tagged and sent to data brokers. Being near a thing of interest or near what someone else is typing or searching will make you a candidate to receive ads for that topic.
It's not voice parsing, it's geo location
you know how many people have walked past that window (and wi-fi network -- the magic part) and searched for a wooden pc case? of course it gets advertised to people walking past it.
That is not true. If you activate “Hey Siri” or similar commands, the listening is done by a chip that can *only* listen for that specific command. Anything else would drain your battery very quickly - and they don’t have any interest in doing that anyway. They can already get mountains of data from what you actively type into your phone.
I don't think most people appreciate how much information can be gathered from apparently useless data once it's aggregated.
My go to example for this is that advertisers can buy "anonymized" location data, but if a particular phone spends all night at your house, how anonymous is it? This has actually been used to out at least one priest who was using Grindr ( [https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/07/catholic-priest-quits-after-anonymized-data-revealed-alleged-use-of-grindr/](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/07/catholic-priest-quits-after-anonymized-data-revealed-alleged-use-of-grindr/) ).
We don't understand the value of the data we produce. That's why good information security means never giving anyone information unless they have a genuine need to know it, not because we don't see how it could hurt.
I think it's the fact that people and companies are preying on you. If you yawn you get sent an ad for coffee or energy drinks and they know which ad to send. It's invasive and not natural. Pretty much everyone isn't a threat to national security.
They don't. They listen for "Hey Google" or "Hey Siri", but there is no evidence whatsoever that shows that they store any other conversations. The reason why you see ads right after you talk about something could be because of two reasons: You have either searched for something related to it, or confirmation bias. Think about the billion irrelevant ads you see, if one of them just so happens to be related to something you talked about earlier it is probably a coincidence. But you notice that more than you notice the irrelevant ads, which leads to the impression that the ads are somehow related to your conversations.
Like a deja vu moment, and that existed before the age of computers. Sometime, complete coincidents happen and it isn't magic, glitch in the Matrix, or Google listening to your conversations 24/7.
I haven't.
Installed Calyx. No spy ware. Double the battery life. No Google apps.
Use tracker control app to block specific trackers if you absolutely need a hostile app.
Use fdroid apps where possible.
Self hosted wire guard VPN so you're always "home" from the phone's perspective.
Use organic maps
Use signal instead of MMS wherever possible.
Smartphones don't listen to you. Instead, sophisticated program injected in it to create anonymous metadata from your apps and browser you're using and "sell" them to advertisers and serves you personalized ads (e.g. Android's Ad Privacy, when turned on)
You think I care? My phone can listen to me talk to friends, it can hear me have sex, I don’t even care if it watches me masturbate when I watch porn. Anyone who intrudes on that is the villain, and I have nothing to be ashamed of.
Phones can't access your mic unless explicit consent is given.
Even if they could do that, it wouldn't be worth for any party to store and analyse everything that your mic would pick up in terms of costs and the infrastructure needed for it, but only IT people understand this, so the rest of the world just keeps leaning into the conspiracy hole
Our phones don't listen to us. We give them everything it needs. We google everything. We click on stuff and accept cookies. We willingly feed algorithms.
our phones do not listen to us, at least in the way you conspiracy theorists believe they do. you’ve heard the audio quality when someone accidentally rests their pinky on the microphone; if you can’t make anything out when someone has their pinky lightly on the microphone, why would their alleged trojan software hear any better?
It's not about listening to you. It's about tracking your location. Unfortunately phones have to track your location in order to function as phones, so there isn't a lot we can do about that.
Your phone records have been getting kept since the 1970's. Just a record of this number called this number. The contents of the conversation is mostly irrelevant. And anyway there's a record of every non encrypted DM you've ever sent on any app.
Recently me and my friend were talking about a credit card with some offers about dining. Guess what, half an hour later I received a WhatsApp message from that same company about the credit card. We spoke in WhatsApp and I have received that message in WhatsApp only. Both of us are using encryption provided by WhatsApp.
Encryption my ass.
I have never applied for that card in my life.
The iPhone user in my life has this problem, but I've got my settings configured. If it's listening, it's not using it for ads or Google assistant or anything.
No we have not. Our phones aren’t listening to us. There’s nothing indicating this.
There’s data tracking, but that’s it. Not a huge deal anyways. Don’t do anything wrong and I’m sure you’ll be ok.
Here’s my thought : if there’s no way to avoid being bombarded by advertisements 24/7, I’m at least somewhat happy they are ads for things I will/would use.
I still remember the freakiest instance of this for me. I was at a concert with my brother and he told me I should listen to the band The Hu ( I had never heard of them or listened to anything similar besides metal). Now I have listened to The Who in the past but when I got home my phone and specifically YouTube started suggesting their music. I did not look them up at the concert and neither did my brother. My phone was in my pocket the entire time. Really kinda creepy.
If you’re under 20 your phone, and your country, has been spying on you since the day you were born. Very hard to fight a system that you were born and raised into, you would need society to get cool with a lot of stuff real quick
And people are so lax saying who cares they've got nothing to hide. Once you accept these things it won't stop there. And before you know it we will be mass survalianced slaves
I didnt just accept it.. I weaponized it for my own purposes.. If i'm doing something that I will need more information in the future, Ill make sure to talk about it to myself with my phone close, when I go to my computer, there is youtube videos of course.. Or in my phone news about it... Its a good way to deviate my algorithm to things that I want..
I also use this method to fuck with some friends algorithms when they go to the bathroom, I just start talking very close to the microphone how I want to "buy X or Y" and as surely as the sun comes up every day, they now have ads about douches or videos about cock hygiene recommended to them. Its quite fun tbh
Some of us have, yes!
The rest fight tooth and nail to fool, block, and remove such spyware.
Complacency and acceptance is not a given!
Join a Union! Call your governor! Make your voice heard!
People who think phones are listening to everything we say are people who don't understand what that would actually entail for that to be a reality, and also that phones don't *need* to listen to us. You *tell* the phones everything already; you just don't realize it.
Our phones are too useful to do without. Cures boredom, holds the answers to almost any question, our communication with friends and loved ones. It’s hard to just set that aside when we don’t see any harm
What would happen if all the cell phones went dead for 7 days?
Party like it’s the 1990’s
Page me the number of the house when you get there in case I can’t find it
I’ll keep some coins to use the payphone around the block and make sure to page you in.
I haven’t seen a payphone in years
Last time I saw a phone booth/pay phone was in 2013 in some podunk town in Nevada. I hadn't seen one in years prior to that. Had to pull into the gas station to take a picture.
i hear tell they still have them in Kyoto, i think it costs a dollar a minute or some such.
Huh. Wevstill have them I'm Australia but they're all free now.
Smart
That’s correct. I was there. My band took the speed train and went to the arcade. Wanted to go but I didn’t.
There's one in Anchor Point, Alaska. I *think* it might be functional? Anchor Point is a wide spot in the road outside of Homer.
Most in the UK have defibrillators in them now.
They've been getting converted into WiFi hotspots/defibrillators in the UK. There's also information kiosks like [these](https://cdn-dhojg.nitrocdn.com/onetCTqwAHwBMczxjVKjPYdPrchGiSGt/assets/images/optimized/rev-e6fa424/www.lamasatech.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/lamasatech-smart-city-kiosks-gloucester-37-min-scaled.jpg) with built in phone chargers/phones to use for emergencies.
Look up something called a red box. Has a history to deep to get into at the moment, but it was basically a way to score free calls through a payphone.
Gonna have to pull Captain Crunch out of retirement
a real phreak
Collect call from "Bob Wehadababyitsaboy."
Thank you for reminding me of the adventure, mystery and joy that used to come from trying to find house parties in college, having only been given a street name or area.I have fond memories of nights where we never did find the party, but went on some other adventure instead. The world has changed a lot.
I used to hold house parties and we never posted about them, just told people we knew and they told people, and it was always a couple dozen great people. Once my roommates posted on Facebook and 200+ people showed up and we couldn’t nearly fit them so outside turned into a “party” and lokes started spray painting and smashing bottles outside and loads of cops showed up and worst part was someone poured a bunch of shitty beer into a big bowl of wonderful sangria my best friend made for me. So yeah I look forward to the parties during the 7 days of no phones, will need some good chill vibes to distract from the collapsing of society.
Page? In the 90's you had to call an info line off a flyer to get a location to go to. Then the person at that location would decide if you were right for the party and either give you a fake address on the other side of town, or the actual location a few blocks away.
Would you like it on A4 or A3? /s
I don’t have a pager, send up a smoke signal so I can find the house when you get there
i'll just print out 8 pages of turn by turn directions first
I'd rather party like it's 1999! 🎸
1976 The last year of the Bell Bottom jeans.
My work will kinda be fucked
You didn’t like that job anyways.
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Aka everything being far more complex in terms of being able to plan
It really wasn't that complex to be honest. I certainly don't look back to that time and think of complexity. Plus many people had dumb phones in the late 90s so reaching people wasn't a huge task then.
They said all phones aren’t allowed, I’m not thinking 90s, I’m thinking 1800s lmao
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The pots lines are all gone though, rip
Yea, you would just do less stuff. Might be nice.
Minus the infrastructure that enabled the way of life from 20 years ago. Where I live I havent seen a public phone on the street in years and the majority of people here do not have a landline anymore.
So everything being way less convenient. I could get behind that. But it'll take some getting used to. I just worry about my friends.
Nah just pop on MSN and see what they’re up to
I had my phone in service for 2 weeks so I bought a Nokia brick for 20€ and I'll tell you. Yes at times I felt like I wasn't up to date but the peace and quiet I had those 2 weeks was amazing.
First few days would be chaos. By day 7 humanity might return to society
Ask my kids in 5 days. Edit: not a punishment, I made a bet with them, no cell phones or other electronics until Friday, only time they can have their phone is on the bus ride to and from school or when/if we are playing split screen in the evening after dinner. and we are going out to eat at whatever they chose for dinner, be that Pizza, McDonald's or our local sushi ad libitum place, anywhere is an option really if they want to go.
I mean, letting them the phone during the bus and in the eventing when playing imo kinda defeats the purpose of the bet.
I somewhat agree. But 30 minutes in the morning, on a crowded bus ride to school, with other kids that are often extremely loud and noisy, does drain the mind a lot. Now imagine if you had nothing to block that out. Your nogging wouldn't be able to function properly at work/schools, then same goes for the ride home, except now everyone is also drained after a long day, and then get stuck in with others. And the potential splitscreen time we get in the evening is bonding time. It is roughly 30 minutes we play give or take on either end, and it is only after they have eaten, showered and is ready for bed, so we just need to brush our teeth. The whole bet thing came about after I had voiced my grievances with their usage of their phones and their lacking help around the house. It was eternally locked in either hand, while the other hand did stuff. One hand phone, one handed putting clothes on, brushing teeth and everything else really. So this was my way to force it out of their hands, while still letting them enjoy their normal life. Why make it harder for them, than it needs to be. This is to help them reach an easy win, gain some quick confidence in their own abilities, and also letting them have a win, where they feel they really earned it. Me helping them us only making the whole thing better.
Plz don’t take offense, I am genuinely curious… I really like this idea & may use it on my kids even. That being said, is there a reason you allow them to always be on their electronics? I guess I just don’t understand why parents don’t limit it more. My kids are allowed 1hr/day either games or YouTube only after school work is done as well as chores. I only deviate from that if we’re going on a long car ride or a boring meeting/dr appt they have to go with. Otherwise their devices are all locked down. Yes, they complain and tell me how mean & unfair I am, but at the same time they are spending more time outside or creating something than many of their friends. Again, no judgement whatsoever, just trying to see another perspective.
To me doesn't feel like an "earned" win if you help them. But you do you, you are the parent, and you are not hurting them, so it's fine nonetheless.
But *they* will feel it was an earned win. That's the point. In this scenario, nothing else really matters. I'm hopefully building kids that are willing to try new stuff, and have the confidence to go out of their own comfort zone from time to time.
Imo that's a solid reasoning and sounds like a great parenting technique.
And when they win, I win. I get to eat the food too. Personally I'm hoping for sushi.
I'd finally finish the 4 books I've started
Lotsa kdis born in 9 months
I use mine as an alarm clock ( 7 hour timer ) I'd be scrambling to get an alternative up and running.
Why not just an actual alarm clock
I am an extremely heavy sleeper. No matter how loud it is, I’m shutting it off and going back to bed. The only alarm that works for me is amdroid, and that’s because I have to do some multiplication problems to turn the thing off. 4 problems shuts it off, then it sends me a text 5 minutes later to see if I’m really awake, two minutes after that it starts in on me again. I bought a $50 android with no cell service just to get the app again. I don’t know of any other clock or app that functions similarly for free.
A wife is highly effective. But certainly not free.
The most expensive option here so far…
Just put the alarm thurther away from your bed so that would have to get up to turn it off.
You can get used to that too. I have been keeping it in another room for years now. Now I am perfectly capable of jumping out of bed the second it goes off, run in to turn it off, and jump back into bed without realizing. I still go back to sleep in 10 seconds.
I've had speakers hooked up to an iPod in another room and I still regularly crawled back into bed. Hell even now I'm pretty good at mindlessly doing multiplication, it's the quick succession of verification steps that get me up.
Is your room dark? I’m pretty sure sleep studies show that once your brain receives light it disrupts the sleep cycle and has a harder time restarting it. You could maybe try setting an alarm through a smart plug that controls a lamp. Then no matter if you shut the alarm off or not, the light is on
Clearly you never had an alarm clock that was made out of metal and had actual bells on it, those fuckers were loud as fuck.
Bucase phone
Probably a lot of dead people...
Some people are paying for this experience. Silent retreats, “digital detox”, etc
A lot of small businesses would have a hard time recovering. When AT&T went down for a day, it caused major havoc with customers reaching small businesses. Your Walmarts won't really be affected, the average person would just be annoyed and maybe bored for a bit, but some small business can't afford the disruption.
This is what phone companies want you to believe.
No it's literally just true. Both work and school absolutely require me to use my phone daily
Nah, that's FOMO. You are completely capable of not having your phone. No matter what you think.
As much as I wish this were true I think I disagree, the existence of phones has established a communication timeline standard for most work that would be impossible to accomplish without a phone. Kind of like saying 'you can do all this clerical work without a computer' like maybe but they're just gonna hire someone who uses the computer.
We don't all live/work the same as you. No phone isn't an option if I'm working. Day off? Sure, but that still depends.
Yeah - I need some sort of phone or VOIP for my job. I talk to people all over the state each day. I specifically can't use a landline for my job either. Besides that, the only time I use my phone is to listen to music when I go to sleep or text friends. If I wasn't to count the listening to music for bed on my screen time, my daily personal phone usage is less than 30 minutes a day.
Nonsense. My work requires biometric authentication to login to the VPN and providing a hard token to everyone is cost-prohibitive.
Hard tokens cost like fifteen bucks, where is your work getting smartphones that cost less than that?
My job does not provide my phone, they simply require that I have a smartphone as a condition of my employment.
So am I just supposed to manually do the math to work out my OTP from my 2FA tokens or something? My work requires that we use 2FA apps from our phones to login to stuff on our laptops, big security no-no to have those installed on the same device we need to generate codes for
I wish. My semester ticket and my student ID only exist in digital form since this semester.
"Dont see any harm" .... ????? I feel like more and more people are reaching the conclusion every day that mobile phones have had a massive negative impact on human mental health and human relationship dynamics.
doesn't cure bordom.. Only answers questions correctly if you ask correctly or go to the correct source. Communication hub obviously. It's a time suck. Most people spend too much time on their screens and it has deleterious effects
Okay, let's remove cell phones. You are now getting your news from the local newspaper and are spending your time watching TV and reading books as opposed to getting your news from a website and spending your time watching Netflix and reading a Kindle. Nothing changes.
My posture improves
I would have less carpel tunnel
A reminder to slap your dick on your phones mic every day
And what should the women do?
Strap-on and a fat suit
*Insert image of an awe-struck Stilgar*
In swedish we have the female equivalent, "Snigla" basically 'snailing' = making a slime trail like a snail.
New information acquired. Thank you.
Well... The bean is extendable and prehensile...
everything is possoble with the power of friendship
Aaannndd… That’s enough reddit for today
Me being the reason you turn off Reddit is quite the compliment
That's so tame compared to most peoples' reason for writing this exact comment
Check
I mean sophisticated programs monitor your aggregated metadata and then use that info for targeted advertising to you and people you spend time with. They don't listen to your audio generally.
There was a very good post from an engineer I saw a while back that gave examples of how much information can be found about you from non-audio data. Especially when it's taken into account that also includes the data of *the people around you as well*. So your friends searches, interests, locations etc are also influencing yours. When you start looking for something the algorithm starts considering if you could be looking for yourself, or a gift. Visit a friends house and share locations and it might take a guess at what the occasion was. e: turns out I saved the post : https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/q1u71q/my_phone_is_listening_to_my_conversations_not/hfhynid/
A colleague of mine had a project at university to use the location data and some others like speed, acceleration, height, angle of smartphones and they were able to pretty reliably map the walkable areas of your house using it and infer what the rooms are, when you are going to the toilet etc.
Yeap. You don't even need any kind of 'fancy spy software' or whatever for this. It's all just aggregated by default and as soon as you check the permission box, off it goes. Any time your phone is like "we need your location data uwu" you are telling them "go for it". Especially when you have it on all the time and not just specifically for a legit need (like sharing your location data with a friend to get them to meet you at the right spot). Our love for convenience heavily outweighs our fucks given for privacy.
This also means they know exactly what political issues you are talking about, or likely to, and can target ads from one party about the issue and also how other parties don't care about it. Having an advantage like that ends democracy as most people vote based on a few core issues. The majority of the public aren't highly engaged with politics outside of a few issues.
Political stances are probably the easiest things to deduce from simple demographic data. Most people are really unoriginal when it comes to this. From someone's place of residence, age, marital status, profession, income bracket, and favorite pieces of media, you can deduce with pretty good accuracy what their stance is on immigration, abortion, work reform, the war in Ukraine, and so on
Jesus Christ.
Yeah, your position on Jesus Christ is also easily deduced from basic data.
This is literally how the UK ended up with Brexit. Look up Cambridge Analytica.
Yeah, the scary thing isn't that they listen to you, it's that they don't even have to.
Don't bother arguing this. People on Reddit are too technologically illiterate to understand that it isn't worth the effort for phone companies to listen to us. Edit: I was only talking to the person who I replied to. Just because you aren't able to infer that I meant phone APP companies, doesn't invalidate my claim, you conspiracy theorist dumbasses.
"But I got served ads for [extremely popular thing among my demographic] after I had only discussed it IRL with a friend! Google must be spying on me through the mic, it can't possibly be that my tastes are basic"
it's also just cognitive bias on top of that. think about the number of ads you get for stuff you dont care about. It's a lot, but you don't think about it because you just ignore them. when it was something that was on your mind, the ad stood out much more, and you noticed it quickly.
meh, it doesn't even have to be basic. people just make minor, subconscious changes in their habits when things are on their mind, and they can pick up on that
Or they didn't search it after the conversation, but their friend did. Or it came up in conversation *because* the friend had recently searched it or clicked on a related article/video.
The irony of this is actually sad. I remember when this site used to be filled with mostly tech nerds Now we have this. Now we have you people
How is this ironic?
he's a tech nerd, not an english nerd. cut him some slack. 😂
It’s like rain on your wedding day.
This. I used to develop a product that has microphone inside it and is battery powered. If we continuously run the mic and stream the data to the internet, the battery would be dead in few hour. Yet some people still think our device is secretly spying them
The number of times I’ve tried to explain on Reddit that Alexa/Google Home/etc. literally do not send enough network traffic to be recording everything you say only to be downvoted by the conspiracy-minded hive is too damn high. People are determined to believe it’s happening no matter how much clear evidence there is to the contrary. I’m a very privacy-minded individual. I have Echos embedded in the wall of all my rooms for smart home controls. I watch their network traffic closely on pfSense and not once have they done anything untoward.
Yea. As usual people don't understand what's going on, don't bother to try and understand and just jump to the easiest explanation even though there's a perfectly plausible explanation. The algorithms are very smart, recommend stuff your friends have searched and they get it wrong all the time and recommend you stuff you're not interested in but no one seems to notice. If phones were listening these underpaid and horribly treated employees from Google, Amazon would be coming out and saying it, there's no way this would be kept under wraps. Could you imagine how valuable real time targeted ads would be to retailers who could bid to send you their shop when you start talking about a remote control car or something? None of this makes any sense.
The worst part about this discussion is the lack of awareness that people can, and do, monitor to see if this is happening; and if it were, it would be front page news immediately. It’s not some magical, unknowable thing.
Not only that, but any company that did it would be risking the literal end of their company if found out. The legal ramifications would be wild (in certain countries at least), and their reputation would be destroyed. One thing I do fear is that companies are well on board with letting people assume that it happens, so that it's normalised by the time they try to introduce it as a "feature".
Fair. However, I just can’t get over this one experience. I’m not into martial arts, kung fu movies, or even anything remotely close to showing interest in Bruce Lee. However, me and my buddy were having a conversation and curious how Lee died. I pull up my phone and write in the Google search bar the word, “how”, and the first auto generated suggestion was, “how did Bruce Lee die”? Unless it was his birthday or some shit that I was unaware of, why the fuck would my phone suggest that?
Did the person you were sitting next to just Google something about martial arts or Bruce Lee on their phone? Cause that would be the biggest indicator. They don't need to listen to audio data to know that a few people are talking and link their searches together.
They dont need to listen. Other data about you tells it enough about you to predict your spending habits
You're never going to get people to believe you though. The confirmation bias is too strong. If people get 100 ads thrown at them based on their location data, and one of them is for the brand of toothpaste their mom just bought and told you about, they remember the toothpaste because you talked about it and conclude they must have been listening. Nevermind that you also got 100 other ads based on being geolocated near your mom. But you have no reason to remember the laundry detergent ad (for the brand she just bought) because you didn't see that she bought it and didn't talk about it. It's tough because it's very convincing the idea that phones are spying on you, because they are. But they don't need to listen to what you're saying and collect that as data. If they were actually doing that don't you think it would be easy to prove? There are so many people out there that would expose that sort of thing for privacy concerns or just for fun. But if you dig into the topic you'll find that very few instances of listening are occurring. That being said, we need to differentiate between listening and actually storing and using/selling your data. Because it's well understood that phones are listening for things like voice commands, but that doesn't get stored generally get stored or analyzed like your data that's being sold
Being listened too is less scary of an idea than someone coming from a store and then I get served up ads for that store due to geolocation.
Sure they do… Meanwhile, ads are supposedly so sophisticated that they know you’re pregnant before you do, but are so dumb that they’ll bombard you with product ads for an obvious one-time purchase that you just bought hours ago.
Hours? I spent 5k on an e-bike last summer, and they have ever since tried to sell me another
I bought a car and got ads for cars for weeks after. How many cars do they think I need?
Dude same I get Mazda ads all the time now after buying a new one. I think they just want me to come back and buy a bigger one it seems because none of the ads are for my small car.
Allegedly, the one-time-purchase ads prevent buyer's remorse. I don't remember where I have heard this, or if it is true.
We need real politicians not the ones we have now. Boomer generation leaders are all fat stupid and bribed. They need to retire or our phones will soon have the god given right to listen to us.
> We need real politicians not the ones we have now. Boomer generation leaders are all fat stupid and bribed. They need to retire or our phones will soon have the god given right to listen to us. You think another generation of politician will not be brided and stupid somehow?
Exactly right. The problem isn't age. The problem is that we don't have smart people getting into politics to change the world for the better, we have dumb, greedy people getting into politics for money & power.
No sane smart person would get into politics, so we have dumb greedy people instead
The moment you accept the phone's or other devices' TOU, you agreed to whatever the company wants to do, including active listening!!
This is interesting, like I would assume the TOS applies to you but what about others? Would there be a loophole that say in single party states you can go after google for listening to you through other phones you’re around without consent. Being a person that dosent read the TOS I wonder if their coverage of the subject is blanketed or not. Like if I’m good with my phone listening then anyone phone that uses their software can listen to me as well.
[удалено]
I remember walking by a computer shop last year. Had this really cool wooden PC case in the window. Didn't say anything, but admired it as I walked by as I'd never seen a wooden case before. Pulled out my phone.. guess what's the first ad I see is for? I'm not even in a big city, I'm in a small countryside town. Freaking scary times.
It is, in fact, because you are in a small town and pinging their WiFi that it is so accurately able to identify things. In ways that are way the fuck scarier than the (non existent).listening which everyone talks about being concerned over.
THIS. it’s way more computationally expensive to parse speech than to use big and aggregate data to profile the users. They’re not actively acting on what they hear on the microphone; we are just way less special and unique than we think.
It's not just the wifi. It's literally just location services. Everything everyone types is tagged and sent to data brokers. Being near a thing of interest or near what someone else is typing or searching will make you a candidate to receive ads for that topic. It's not voice parsing, it's geo location
you know how many people have walked past that window (and wi-fi network -- the magic part) and searched for a wooden pc case? of course it gets advertised to people walking past it.
You’re a Redditor posting on Minecraft subreddits and you think the reason you got an ad for a PC case was due to phone telepathy?
That is not true. If you activate “Hey Siri” or similar commands, the listening is done by a chip that can *only* listen for that specific command. Anything else would drain your battery very quickly - and they don’t have any interest in doing that anyway. They can already get mountains of data from what you actively type into your phone.
Of course they do, otherwise how would the person on the other end of the call hear us?
I run a MOTOROLA RAZR. No issues but it is hampering my Words With Friends
I haven't accepted it because it still hasn't been sufficiently proven
It has been sufficiently disproven, in fact.
Aha yeah, I didn't want to be too contrary
There’s nothing that I say that anyone outside of my circle would remotely care about
I don't think most people appreciate how much information can be gathered from apparently useless data once it's aggregated. My go to example for this is that advertisers can buy "anonymized" location data, but if a particular phone spends all night at your house, how anonymous is it? This has actually been used to out at least one priest who was using Grindr ( [https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/07/catholic-priest-quits-after-anonymized-data-revealed-alleged-use-of-grindr/](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/07/catholic-priest-quits-after-anonymized-data-revealed-alleged-use-of-grindr/) ). We don't understand the value of the data we produce. That's why good information security means never giving anyone information unless they have a genuine need to know it, not because we don't see how it could hurt.
I think it's the fact that people and companies are preying on you. If you yawn you get sent an ad for coffee or energy drinks and they know which ad to send. It's invasive and not natural. Pretty much everyone isn't a threat to national security.
Just like we accepted that cars occasionally kill people
That’s not how it works.
No,lol 😆they don’t need to
They don't. They listen for "Hey Google" or "Hey Siri", but there is no evidence whatsoever that shows that they store any other conversations. The reason why you see ads right after you talk about something could be because of two reasons: You have either searched for something related to it, or confirmation bias. Think about the billion irrelevant ads you see, if one of them just so happens to be related to something you talked about earlier it is probably a coincidence. But you notice that more than you notice the irrelevant ads, which leads to the impression that the ads are somehow related to your conversations.
Yeah, a lot of stuff is based on IP address too. So in a group of 5 people on your WiFi if someone searches it you all can get ads for it
Like a deja vu moment, and that existed before the age of computers. Sometime, complete coincidents happen and it isn't magic, glitch in the Matrix, or Google listening to your conversations 24/7.
I haven't. Installed Calyx. No spy ware. Double the battery life. No Google apps. Use tracker control app to block specific trackers if you absolutely need a hostile app. Use fdroid apps where possible. Self hosted wire guard VPN so you're always "home" from the phone's perspective. Use organic maps Use signal instead of MMS wherever possible.
And TVs. And door bells. Even light bulbs.
We get outraged that our data is being used and sold without our consent while forgetting that we gave our data away freely to begin with
I just wish **I** was the one being paid for my data
Have you tried not using a cell phone? If we need one to engage in society, how free is our agreement to be spied on?
At least someone listens to me!
So my phone has been listening to me this whole time? Why hasn't there been a BBQ buffet yet. Or even all you can eat tacos. I have so many ideas.
Mine doesn't. The first thing I do when I get a new phone is erase it and install a custom Android OS with all the spyware removed.
Smartphones don't listen to you. Instead, sophisticated program injected in it to create anonymous metadata from your apps and browser you're using and "sell" them to advertisers and serves you personalized ads (e.g. Android's Ad Privacy, when turned on)
Might be because our phones do not listen to us
They don’t and only dumb people think that.
At least 1 thing that listens
You think I care? My phone can listen to me talk to friends, it can hear me have sex, I don’t even care if it watches me masturbate when I watch porn. Anyone who intrudes on that is the villain, and I have nothing to be ashamed of.
Phones can't access your mic unless explicit consent is given. Even if they could do that, it wouldn't be worth for any party to store and analyse everything that your mic would pick up in terms of costs and the infrastructure needed for it, but only IT people understand this, so the rest of the world just keeps leaning into the conspiracy hole
Our phones don't listen to us. We give them everything it needs. We google everything. We click on stuff and accept cookies. We willingly feed algorithms.
No tf we haven’t, we just can’t get the companies we buy em from to fuck off and stop
“Listen” in this case might not just mean “audio”… People just accept that their phones track everything they do…
our phones do not listen to us, at least in the way you conspiracy theorists believe they do. you’ve heard the audio quality when someone accidentally rests their pinky on the microphone; if you can’t make anything out when someone has their pinky lightly on the microphone, why would their alleged trojan software hear any better?
If they listen to everyone, then I am not worth listening to
It's not about listening to you. It's about tracking your location. Unfortunately phones have to track your location in order to function as phones, so there isn't a lot we can do about that. Your phone records have been getting kept since the 1970's. Just a record of this number called this number. The contents of the conversation is mostly irrelevant. And anyway there's a record of every non encrypted DM you've ever sent on any app.
Recently me and my friend were talking about a credit card with some offers about dining. Guess what, half an hour later I received a WhatsApp message from that same company about the credit card. We spoke in WhatsApp and I have received that message in WhatsApp only. Both of us are using encryption provided by WhatsApp. Encryption my ass. I have never applied for that card in my life.
I never cared in the first place.
But they don’t usually
well what the fuck am I supposed to do?
Because being listened to by an inanimate object is not embarrassing.
At least something does. :-(
Yep. We qwigh the pros and cons and decide that the benefits far outweigh the bads.
The iPhone user in my life has this problem, but I've got my settings configured. If it's listening, it's not using it for ads or Google assistant or anything.
Because I have far more important things to worry about in my life, I couldn't care less if Google hears about my life
humanity has accepted a lot of things that if we banded together we could easily change
No we have not. Our phones aren’t listening to us. There’s nothing indicating this. There’s data tracking, but that’s it. Not a huge deal anyways. Don’t do anything wrong and I’m sure you’ll be ok.
Here’s my thought : if there’s no way to avoid being bombarded by advertisements 24/7, I’m at least somewhat happy they are ads for things I will/would use.
I still remember the freakiest instance of this for me. I was at a concert with my brother and he told me I should listen to the band The Hu ( I had never heard of them or listened to anything similar besides metal). Now I have listened to The Who in the past but when I got home my phone and specifically YouTube started suggesting their music. I did not look them up at the concert and neither did my brother. My phone was in my pocket the entire time. Really kinda creepy.
If you’re under 20 your phone, and your country, has been spying on you since the day you were born. Very hard to fight a system that you were born and raised into, you would need society to get cool with a lot of stuff real quick
At least someone is listening to me
Mine reads my mind somehow.
Orwell and Huxley were both right.
And people are so lax saying who cares they've got nothing to hide. Once you accept these things it won't stop there. And before you know it we will be mass survalianced slaves
Don’t install Facebook or TikTok on your phone.
I didnt just accept it.. I weaponized it for my own purposes.. If i'm doing something that I will need more information in the future, Ill make sure to talk about it to myself with my phone close, when I go to my computer, there is youtube videos of course.. Or in my phone news about it... Its a good way to deviate my algorithm to things that I want.. I also use this method to fuck with some friends algorithms when they go to the bathroom, I just start talking very close to the microphone how I want to "buy X or Y" and as surely as the sun comes up every day, they now have ads about douches or videos about cock hygiene recommended to them. Its quite fun tbh
umm im like damn certain when the politicians found out the phones spied on us anyway they got erections not concerns
If anything it's reading my mind. Because I have things I'm thinking about pop up way more than anything I actually talk about.
Some of us have, yes! The rest fight tooth and nail to fool, block, and remove such spyware. Complacency and acceptance is not a given! Join a Union! Call your governor! Make your voice heard!
Joke's on my phone because I speak as rarely as possible, enjoy the silence!
People who think phones are listening to everything we say are people who don't understand what that would actually entail for that to be a reality, and also that phones don't *need* to listen to us. You *tell* the phones everything already; you just don't realize it.
those who would sacrifice freedom for security, deserve neither - benjamin franklin