After hearing about Cox Media Group, I am wondering why someone can’t simply look at the lines of code of an app or OS and see whether or not a connected device is spying on the user to sell them ads.
Like extract the .ipa Instagram app from an iphone and look at its code with xcode, search for audio recording features that could be running at times the iser isn’t running the app.
The multiple theories around this hypothesis always have something mystical about it as if coding wasn’t science.
In: Engineering
Because when you download an app you dont download the source code. Unless open source there is no way to just look at the real code to figure such things out. There are decompilers to get some code out of the files you download but they arent realy readable and its nearly impossible to be confident about what the code does/is supposed to do if you just have the decompiled code.
As a software developer the short answer is the code is proprietary and not accessible to the general public. So we can’t simply look at it and determine what it does.when code is released to the public it become very hard to take the compiled version and understand what it does, especially when the creators do everything they can to stop exactly that. It is technically possible and it’s called reverse engineering but there is a lot of guesswork and it’s extremely time consuming.
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I mean I have made several apps for iOS and there is no way to record audio without the user giving my app permission. Also no way to use the microphone without turning on the little indicator light.
All the stuff you see if maybe possibly when the camera is turned on for whatever purpose you are using it for. But never randomly without your permission.
The whole logistics of uploading audio recorded without knowledge and processing that data with no guarantee there was anything useful said would be pointless,
Literally it’s just cookies tracking your data and the people around you to know what’s going on in your life.
Literally the apps have access to my wifi network and my wife’s wifi network and knows we live together so when something affects her or she googles something I might be interested in that thing too, it goes way more in depth than that.
Google shadow profiles and look into it further, apps are not using your mic / camera on iOS without you knowing
It’s relatively easy to prove that a smartphone spies on your conversations – if it does. There are traffic logs, there are power consumption patterns, there is reverse engineering… But it’s totally impossible to prove that the smartphone *doesn’t* spy on you – because how do you prove an absence of something?
But think about it. There are a lot of talented hackers in the world. They find ways in to the most secured and exotic systems – look, for example, at GrayKey, a dongle that can breach the iPhone’s biometric protection (one of the most secure hardware designs in the world) in less than 24 hours. Reverse engineering the store apps like Facebook or tiktok would be a piece of cake for them. And yet the best piece of “evidence” we have is by weak inference – “I talked about the <thing> and now I’m presented with ads about <thing>”.
I can look at all the traffic leaving my phone over my wifi network. While that doesn’t necessarily tell me what the contents of the traffic is, I can see what sites it is sending data to. Haven’t found anything spying that I didn’t already know was spying (especially TVs) yet.
The code is compiled. So it’s transformed from human readable instructions into machine language.
The network traffic is encrypted so sniffing packets won’t work to reveal content.
A few things.
1.) Code is closed-source and it isn’t as easy to reverse-engineer as ‘popping open a book’. When compiled, things aren’t exactly 1:1 – think of it like how translating some things from English to a foreign language and then back, don’t always come out how they started. Many companies intentionally obfuscate code through various means, so that makes it even harder.
2.) The app may have code to record something, but once it’s recorded and sent, you can’t see what they’re doing with it on their end. Take it to a more simplistic analogy, let’s say you have a guy sitting outside your window. He writes down everything you say and gives it to me. You could catch him writing it down, but once he leaves with that paper you have no clue what I’m doing with it – I could be looking for you saying certain things to catch you doing something, or use it to see if maybe you mentioned that you really could use a new roof in the near future. The real issue is, in many/most apps, you agree to that guy sitting outside your window in the big ol’ terms and conditions.
I feel like it would be less obvious if they had a delay and fed you stuff later, but it seems overly obvious they’re spying when you just mention something in conversation, open your phone and hey, there’s an Ad for the thing I just talked about but have never searched for once before this.
I’ve always found it funny that people are so paranoid over their cell phones “listening” or “spying” on them when in reality they’ve literally unknowingly given permission to applications to share data and analytics with third parties in an effort to make the user experience better.
It’s all written in the terms and conditions of everything they use, but nobody ever reads them.
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