from Hacker News

Hundreds of smartphone apps are monitoring users through their microphones

by macawfish on 4/27/25, 3:22 AM with 18 comments

• by neilv on 4/27/25, 5:48 AM

  > Advertisers can then use this information to learn more about consumers and target ads more effectively.

  Stop writing like that.

  For decades, this prompted the consumer to say, Why would I care about advertisers showing me ads that are more relevant to me?

  And so consumers didn't care about privacy.

  Not realizing that that's not the entirety of what the surveillance will eventually be used for.

  Hopefully everyone isn't about to learn, the hard way, one of the worst case scenarios.

• by AzN1337c0d3r on 4/27/25, 4:49 AM

  Duplicate HN submission from over 7! years ago:

  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16119981

• by Escapade5160 on 4/27/25, 4:27 AM

  Everything comes back to ads. I think the end goal is to monetize every single moment of our lives in some way.

• by gnabgib on 4/27/25, 4:40 AM

  (2017) Original source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/business/media/alphonso-a...

  > Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter.

  https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

• by klodolph on 4/27/25, 4:54 AM

  We know that microphone use on iPhone requires an entitlement and if an app is actively using audio in the background, an indicator appears on the screen. This has been true for ages.

  I assume Android has something similar to this but I’m not in touch with the Android ecosystem. This article is pretty old so I can believe that apps, far enough in the past, could do this. But it is otherwise some fearmongering you would see copy-pasted among tech illiterate.

• by TekMol on 4/27/25, 4:28 AM

  When an app gathers information on someone - for example via the microphone - how does it assign the data to a person?

  Say the person says "I will buy a new car next week". Now what? How will the ad agency bombard the person with car ads? I mean outside of the one app that has gathered the information?

• by jokoon on 4/27/25, 7:07 AM

  That's probably why I need to charge my phone so often.

• by macawfish on 4/27/25, 1:47 PM

  And here I thought we could get some substantive conversation going on this topic. What a huge disappointment. Why is this flagged?