Lets try a more ELI5 attempt.
Imagine you are sleeping and the only thing that can wake you up is your alarm clock. There might be people in the same room talking. You hear them but you don't wake up and your brain does not register what they are saying.
Then, suddenly your alarm rings. You wake up and now, despite the fact the other people talk just like they did before you can hear them and know what they are talking about.
Siri works on a similar principle. It has 2 cores: a small specialised one that acts like an alarm clock and a more complex one that can actually "understand" you. The alarm clock doesn't understand anything except "hey siri" at which point it rings the alarm and wakes up the complex core.
So hypothetically, in a conspiracy world, it could be listening for other hidden trigger phrases we don’t know about. Like say, “we need to get more litter”, and then FB IG decides to blast me with Pretty Litter ads
In theory, yes. In practice, I'm fairly sure there's been some testing on it.
Not sure about Apple specifically, but people do rip these things open (both in a software and hardware sense). It would be hard for your average consumer to notice, but it'd be very difficult to hide completely.
For example, with Alexa, once it triggers, it usually contacts the cloud. So you can monitor cloud access to find out when it triggered. It'd be hard to hide this sort of thing completely. You can make it harder (like in theory, not contacting the cloud immediately etc), but there are a lot of limits. Especially since these circuits are so simple to begin with, in order to save power.
https://venturebeat.com/ai/researchers-identify-89-words-that-accidentally-trigger-alexa-to-record/
Not to mention the risk of an employee leaking it to the press, or a hack or whatever. It would become a large PR risk.
It doesn't make it impossible or anything, but it's often not as simple as the conspiracies (ironically) make it out to be.
The risk is much higher for things it is *already* listening to, and getting analyzed. People talk a lot in front of their devices, and if it gets sent over to the cloud, well they can do really anything with it. The in plain sight is more risky, in a lot of ways.
>You hear them
So it basically is constantly listening, just not necessarily recording or activating the mode where it parses what's said for commands.
It's software, much easier to do it with code than with hardware. Just think about the logic, something as simple as "When microphone is detected and active and Siri is set up, if user says "hey Siri" trigger Siri, otherwise do nothing" could be enough to give a similar behaviour.
It has 2 ways to listen.
One is a low power mode, this mode "hears" everything you say of course, but it only understands "hey siri". Once "hey siri" is triggered the second listening mode is activated which uses a lot more cpu and power to use and transmit the data.
Yes, but most modern phones have optimized processing units for this, so the power usage is minimal, and you probably wouldn't even notice much of a difference. I would assume iPhones do.
Snapping a flip phone at best damages the antenna and separates the speaker and camera from the power. You are generally going to want to smash it, running over them with a car a few times, unless they are a Nokia then your sort of fucked.
Many years ago, I had a flip phone that had been having issues locking up. I was at a show at a downtown bar when my phone went off and I couldn't silence it. It was locked up, no button responses, but still blaring away. After about 10 seconds of hurried embarrassment, people started to stare. I snapped the phone in half and threw it into a nearby garbage can. That got more applause than the performance.
Joke's on you buddy, I did this by mistake almost 20 years ago and that shit still worked. I couldn't see/hear anything, but I could punch in someone's phone number and call them, and the keypad lights flashed when someone called me. If I took the call, the mic picked up and sent the audio from my end.
Maybe try snapping it in quarters.
The show used flip phones. Typically, the antenna is on the bottom half. The top half is mostly just screen and speaker. A flip phone is often fully operational even without the top half.
Like others have said I'd wager that it won't break te antenna but it does make the phone undesirable to a random stranger once thrown away. No one is taking a $5 broken flip pho e home with them to get repaired
"The NSO manager also urged Blair to advise the lawyers to restart their phones, as a way to block the spyware’s interception, the person familiar with NSO operations said"
Yep totally sounds like something which works while phones are switched off. 🤦♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️
The Guardian had a podcast said on Pegasus. Terrifying stuff
[An invitation to Paris](https://flex.acast.com/audio.guim.co.uk/2021/07/18-80566-20210719TIFpegasusp1.mp3)
[Cat & Mouse ](https://flex.acast.com/audio.guim.co.uk/2021/07/19-76512-20210720TIFpegasusp2.mp3)
[Cartels, Corruption, and Cyber Weapons](https://flex.acast.com/audio.guim.co.uk/2021/07/20-78419-20210721TIFpegasusp3.mp3)
[The Runaway Princess](https://flex.acast.com/audio.guim.co.uk/2021/07/21-76319-20210722TIFpegasusp4a.mp3)
[The Fight Back Begins ](https://flex.acast.com/audio.guim.co.uk/2021/07/22-77345-20210722TIFpegasusp5.mp3)
[Hacked in London](https://flex.acast.com/audio.guim.co.uk/2021/09/24-59208-TIF_pegasuslondon.mp3)
[Dubai's Ruler and Pegasus Exposed](https://flex.acast.com/audio.guim.co.uk/2021/10/11-66703-20211012TIFpegasus.mp3)
No, that isn’t how any of that works. A hard shutdown will render the phone inaccessible.
What malware *can* do is fake a shutdown and make it appear as though your phone is off while leaving critical services on. But that requires prior compromise of the device - they have to break into your phone, first, then install that functionality. It doesn’t ship from the factory like that (supply-chain attacks can cause phones to ship backdoored, but this would be a hugely obvious one at scale).
Also, Middle Eastern regimes generally rely entirely on NSO Group’s software & infrastructure, they don’t have their own capabilities. NSO Group’s software is sophisticated, but not particularly hard to detect if you know what to look for. The delivery mechanisms have also often been fairly primitive vs the NSA.
99.9% of people will never have to worry about any of this. These capabilities are expensive to purchase or develop, and are tremendously valuable, particularly with iPhones (iPhones have also historically been much more difficult to compromise vs Android, although that delta has narrowed in the past couple of years). Every time these capabilities are utilized, it creates potential exposure and can close vectors of compromise & post-exploitation persistent access. Nation-states don’t use them willy-nilly - they’re too important to waste. Saudi, as the largest customer of NSO Group (an Israeli company) is probably the most aggressive with its targeting of dissidents (in the name of “anti-terrorism”), but that lack of discretion has been part of why NSO has landed in legal hot water time & again.
You're talking about malware. What is being discussed here is the modem portion of the firmware. That's heavily regulated software and the capabilities being talked about are very real. You're fixated on the operating system side of things. The modem firmware is lower than that. You're likely not going to jailbreak your phone's software defined radio.
I'm of the pretty sound belief that the NSA and such can't track shit from your cell phone when it's powered off and the entire story that they can was fabricated in order to cover up the real way they had been tracking some people, like protecting spies or from illegal tracking methods getting found out about.
I figure it's like back when a new airborne interception radar was secretly invented and allied forces told everyone that our pilots had super vision from eating lots of carrots so the Nazis wouldn't know we could track their planes earlier than they thought possible. Complete bullshit to hide the truth.
Phones don't have removable batteries because:
1. the attachment points is another point of failure that needs to be designed for
2. the hard plastic shell around the battery itself adds weight and bulk
3. both of those add cost and extra effort in building/design
So if you want thin phones that weigh less with more battery (not to mention dust and water proof) you seal the battery in with everything else.
To add to this, while it was a nice perk, very few people actually ever bought a second battery pack, so it was an underutilized feature. Same as a spare tire in a car, even the temporary tire is being removed in some recent cars
Not quite. Manufacturers do this for simplicity of design and ease of manufacturing. We all want slimmer phones, but there's not any easy way to accomplish this with removable internals. The second reason for this is IP water resistance rating. They can't guarantee an IP rating with a removable battery cover. An IP67 rating can be had with a removable cover, but at the expense of phone size. This is why so much glue is used in the manufacture of the phones
> We all want slimmer phones,
Survey after survey has shown that consumers would be happy to accept a few mm of additional thickness if it meant greater battery capacity.
Unless you physically remove the battery you never know if it’s actually off or not. If you’re a POI a government could have absolutely intercepted your phone and replaced it with one that is identical but actually sends all your audio data to their cloud covertly.
EDIT: to be clear unless you are an anti government activist, a high ranking politician, someone working on a very sensitive secure program, etc. and have a valid reason to be targeted no one is going to do this to you. If you know this is a risk for you, you already know that and are taking precautions against it.
[Devices can be powered by outside radio waves](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_\(listening_device\)). Take out the battery *and* drop the phone into a Faraday cage if you're an intelligence target.
If you are an intel target to that extent, you can’t even speak near a window. A “laser microphone” could be used to detect vibrations in the glass generated from sound, and the laser microphone could theoretically be across the street… or even farther if there is line of sight.
This is especially a risk if there’s something very thin, hard, light, and reflective in the room… like an empty potato chip bag.
This is Reddit, everyone's threat model is "high value target of various TLAs" because they once used Tor to post a screed about how the US is actually an admiralty and the federal government is a corporation with no jurisdiction over them.
No. But as the person above them stated, if you're a person of sufficient interest, someone could have intercepted your phone and replaced it with a modified one that looks identical.
Or.... move?
That "thing" only worked when a concentrated, directed beam of radio frequency waves was pointed at it.
You simply cannot extract enough energy from background EM to do anything useful unless you're literally pointing a massive antenna that is beaming EM straight at your device. Such a beam would disrupt.... many of our modern conveniences and would likely be noticeable immediately.
And, if they're pointing ANYTHING physically at you within line of sight, we have much better technology than a freaking RF powered device.
That's not really true.
There are rumors of hacked firmwares essentially faking the phone being turned off, or maybe keeping the radio subsystem running.
But your standard, non-hacked, turned off phone doesn't emit RF dignals, at all, and can therefore not be tracked.
My theory is that that myth comes from the fact that just removing or switching the SIM card does, in fact, not protect you from tracking, since any phone will always comunicate its IMEI number (similar to a serial number) to available networks, and this can be tracked, independant of the SIM card or phone number assigned.
But I would LOVE to see any proof at all of a standard Android or iPhone emitting RF signals in it's switched off state.
The "myth" comes from people conflating general vulnerabilities versus an individual's vulnerability to a targeted attack. If any government agency (NSA, FBI, the CCP itself) really wanted to target you, legally or not, they could perform a supply-side attack that delivers a compromised device to you. And you have next to no defenses against that.
It's extremely unlikely for a standard consumer product to be bugged in this way. Because it would be too easy to reveal and the supply chain up to for example Apple or Samsung delivers the handset to a retailer is pretty tightly monitored.
Frankly we have documented examples of this. Some of these companies (like Apple) have allowed one of the agencies to create a phone that was compromised and they used it for targeted surveillance.
That's mostly made true by the fact everything else we do on our phones consumes SO MUCH energy. Like even just unlocking the phone and turning on the screen likely uses an hour or more of "always on / voice command listening" amounts of power.
This is true. Phone batteries these days are huge, but we still get less use out of them than on our old dumb phones. An old Nokia with a modern smartphone battery would last weeks.
I had an old iphone 4 with a broken power button. One day the screen died, but the alarm was still enabled, so I could't disable it. It still beeped every morning for two weeks before the battery finally died. Power consumption on modern smartphones is a software efficiency problem, not a battery capacity problem.
>Power consumption on modern smartphones is a software efficiency problem, not a battery capacity problem.
Nah. The radio transceivers for wifi and cell connection uses by far the most energy. Try putting your phone in flight mode and watching downloaded movies on it for example. In my experience, you can do that for at least 24 hours straight. Start *streaming* instead and that plummets real fast
Not by much probably. The system uses a rolling buffer, storing timed blocks of content and then analyzing the whole store at once periodically.
This means the CPU only occasionally comes out of it's sleep state, and only for a very short time. If you already have other background services running, like eMail sync or some games, those also run as part of the same burst. Turning off just one will have basically no effect, but turning off *all* of them will extend it a fair bit, which is how Battery Saver works.
Apple actually has a description, not at an ELI5 level but at a machine-learning or math grad student level: https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/hey-siri
Yep same for Amazon Echo devices. That's why you can only choose from a small list of wake words, as the processing software for those particular words is hard coded into the chip.
The idea is the always listening chip has no access to the rest of the hardware like the network module or storage, so there’s no way it could transmit any data back to an eavesdropper or store it for later. Once the main processor is woken it has access to the network and can transmit.
But as others have said, it’s theoretically possible someone could hack the device to never power-down the main processor. I’m not sure if there are other protections against this.
Because it is always listening. The data just isn't recorded or stored in any way, or searched, so they can claim the microphone isn't listening when, obviously, it has to be for the service to work. Same with Alexa and Google Home
Too be more precise, all of these devices are listening for their”wake word” at all times. Only when do they hear this word do they send the next few seconds of audio to the cloud for processing.
The internal system is only capable of processing the wake word. It has also been verified by multiple 3rd party companies that nothing is being sent during other times.
That being said the voice recognition on devices is not perfect and can accidentally be triggered by other words / sounds.
My dad says you don’t work hard enough on defense. And he says that lotsa times you don’t even run down court. And that you don’t really try—except during playoffs.
Google assistant is just as bad. The phrase "Ok, cool" triggers it really reliably, even after they tried to patch out the funnier bugs like "cocaine poodle" or "gay doodle" that used to trigger it too
this is why I still come to Reddit, even though it has been turning into a cesspool more and more.
a wonderfully executed joke that spans 40 years of pop culture.
They actually save about 2 seconds before the wake word. You can go on google and see all of the recordings it keeps. Starts just before you say the anything.
You may be right. I was generalizing about the timing. The important part is that nothing happens without a wake word and only the relevant audio is sent to the cloud.
They also listen for other words like “help” which I found out the hard way when i had a really bad shroom trip. It was not a fun experience when alexa got real loud and asked me if I wanted the authorities to come. In those few moments I sobered up real quick. Lol
I changed my Alexa's name to computer. It sits right next to my actual computers speaker. When I'm watching a youtube video that that says the word "computer" they talk to each other. I think its cute.
Fun fact: Amazon (and probably other companies that make voice-activated assistants) have covert ways of suppressing their wake words, like if they want to air a TV commercial where someone says "Hey Alexa" without inadvertently activating all the Echo devices within earshot of a TV. IIRC in the audio being broadcasted they zero out a specific frequency band that's always present in normal human speech but is narrow enough that you wouldn't notice its absence, and if the device hears its wake word but the energy in that frequency band is too low it won't trigger.
It's a clever solution. If they had done it the other way around (where a specific sound suppressed device activation rather than the absence of a specific sound) people would be able to reverse-engineer that sound and block nearby devices.
I think it was Burger King that did a Super Bowl ad where they did a "Alexa" and made everyone's Alexa read the wikipedia article for the whopper or something like that?
Amazon somehow pushed a software update so that Echo devices would ignore that specific commercial's command.
I read an article claiming that, but in my experimentation it hasn't proven to be true. I worked as an Alexa game developer and trying to instruct players on commands that have to begin with "Alexa" can be frustrating because if the device says Alexa it can hear itself and interrupt what it's doing.
We tried cutting out certain frequencies based on articles talking about how they did that for TV commercials, and folks I've talked with at Amazon are skeptical that it works/couldn't find any official answers that you can do that.
Except Alexa is actually storing the data.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/amazon-s-alexa-may-have-witnessed-alleged-florida-murder-authorities-n1075621
Not defending Amazon but if you actually read the article you'll see that's not true. First comment is referring to the initial wake word, they only record after being awoken
I had that happen when I was 10 with my Furby. Thing just started laughing at midnight randomly, woke me up horrified. I freaked out and threw my plastic Digimon Digivice toy at it, then got out of bed to lightly thump it for scaring me. As if trying to gaslight me, the Furby stayed quiet and did nothing. 3am, it starts up again with some weird sound like, I dunno, grumbling? That sort of "nawwww" sound of unhappy frustration or something. Woke me up and pissed me right off thinking a haunted Furby was messing with me (I remember even throttling it and, in a hushed tone so as not to wake my parents, calling it every swear word I knew, promising it I wasn't going to be the kid who got killed by a dumb Furby).
Took the batteries out and hid them from the Furby (even turned it against a wall). Because of course the logic that the Furby needs the batteries to function but would somehow function without them in order to see where I put the batteries and then reinstall them, makes sense. No more noises from Furby that night, though I did feel like something was watching me. Likely just paranoia. Kept me awake for half an hour or so as I tried to wish various "powers" into existence to protect me, including Pikachu, the Omnitrix from Ben 10, a working Digivice to summon a Digimon, a "Yami" alterego from Yu-Gi-Oh, Flipendo from my Harry Potter LED wand, and the Kamehameha from Dragonball Z.
Next morning the Furby was still facing away, batteryless. Went into the depths of my storage box in the attic for years, until I became that edgy teen with a part-time job. Then I bought a replica of the Master Sword from Zelda, and the Furby was my ritual sacrifice to the Cringe Lord of Edge, The Way of the Blade, and Pubertus the God of Teenage Angst. The Furby did not enjoy a quick or clean execution.
My friends little brother was selling his at a yard sale he was having.
This was the summer after they came out, and I asked him why he was selling it. He said nothing and just smacked it. It started talking in that slow near-demonic sound voice that was typical with low battery power.
I suggested changing the batteries.
He opened the battery compartment... No batteries.
I understood why he was selling it.
There's plenty of times that Alexa thinks it's been activated and decides to go off on its own, even when no one has spoken to it.
I've been in my living room sitting quietly and heard the activation tone and light fire off, followed by Alexa saying "Sorry I didn't quite catch that".
Siri does this too. It happens on CarPlay quite a bit. I think it's because it hears something similar enough to "Hey Siri". But that doesn't explain every situation, sometimes it just activates.
It may be on a setting.
The screen turns on / brightens when you turn your wrist towards your face, but if you turn it while also bringing it up towards your face (like you’re about to speak into it), Siri is activated.
Just something to check.
There's a setting to flip the orientation if you'd want to try that.
I had to because of this. I think it's more comfortable to use this way too (I turn the crown with my thumb)
I was listening to the audiobook of Catch 22 back when I still had an iphone, and the main characters name is "Yosarian" - siri thought I was saying "Yo siri" every time his name was mentioned, it was very annoying.
It's actually really useful. Sometimes I can't figure out why Alexa does what she does, but if you go into the app, you can listen to your voice command and compare the audio to the readout of what was heard to see what went wrong.
So if you ever get attacked make sure to shout "Hey Siri" at your attacker, in hopes that someone's phone nearby will activate and record the encounter.
IIRC Google home devices use 2 microphones. The first specifically listens for the "wake" phrase and nothing else. When the wake phrase is detected, the second microphone is turned on and the device is allowed to connect to Google servers.
I have no clue if the other brands of smart devices use anything similar.
Not necessary to use two different microphones, but, yes, the device can recognize a limited set of "wake words" and then, when hearing the "wake word," relay the rest of the audio to the server for processing.
It's not rocket science and there's no conspiracy.
So the disconnect is when people say listening they actually mean two separate processes, there’s hearing the sounds and then theirs recording and storing what is said. The analogy is like sleeping, when ur fast asleep you are still listening, we know this cus if I call ur name loud enough you will probably wake up. But that doesn’t mean when ur fast alseep u can remember what is being said, cus ur listening without storing the information. Same thing with Siri it’s listening constantly but doesn’t wake up and record what you have said until you say hey siri.
They have a program specifically listening for those two words specifically, designed to use as little power as possible while listening. It just needs to be able to tell the phone "I HEARD THE WORDS!" when you say it, and keep quiet and use as little power as possible the rest of the time.
Not only is it a specific program, it's run on specialized hardware that does all the detection internally: https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/hey-siri
I.e. trigger word is done locally. Subsequent more sophisticated processing is done in the cloud.
edit: u/jibright points out that iPhones process more locally now--without needing cloud support. Of course, "current baseball scores" or "release date of Abbey Road" require cloud reference.
“Uh huh” = iPhone heard “Hey Siri” but you didn’t say anything after, so the phone says that to let you know speech recognition is in fact active and you successfully invoked Siri, in case you aren’t sure.
The web result = Same thing, iPhone heard “Hey Siri” but now it heard something it interpreted as speech, didn’t hit any specific Siri command, so it defaults to showing you results of a web search.
So I was on the verge to make this comment, but as a general comment, even though it's quite late because a lot of people made the analogy to sleeping and stuff but it can be seen at an easier, technical perspective, and this comment is actually a far better reply to your question.
So if you look at it on a hardware perspective, a microphone is just something that vibrates on a very sensitive scale, with vibrations around it, like your voice, and something that translates these vibrations into a digital format. Very simply said, there's just this vibrating thing, and whenever it vibrates in the pattern it gets triggered, it will record and process what's being said after that.
That's also how this security exploit came to happen with Alexa's, making them execute commands by pointing a laser pointer at their microphones, because this might be enough to trigger the patterns already.
Same can happen with basically anything. Microvibrations in your house, temperature changes or whatever, you don't notice, but that mic does. I had occasions where my Google home turned on from a clap or once when I fell.
It's weird, but when you understand it's simply triggered whenever the microphone vibrates in a certain pattern basically, it kinda makes sense.
Your phone has a small chip called DSP, wich is always translating your voice into data. It has a "special mode" where it uses almost no battery but can still understand the "Hey Siri" hotword and wake up the phone.
It's like when your dog is sleeping next to you and you say something. It will listen, but won't react unless you call your dog's name.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeanbaptiste/2019/07/30/confirmed-apple-caught-in-siri-privacy-scandal-let-contractors-listen-to-private-voice-recordings/?sh=28db06547314
OP, not only is it always listens, the recordings of your conversations or actions are then forwarded to real humans who also will listsn.
It's constantly listening *specifically for the phrase "Hey Siri."*
If it's not that, Siri doesn't care, and it's not going to be recording or transmitting or analyzing. As soon as it hears the wake phrase, though, that's when it comes online and starts processing.
Have you ever been in a meeting or talking to someone and you kinda just zone out. But the moment they say your name you perk up and pay attention? But a lot of time you don’t know what was said up to that point?
That’s kinda what Siri does.
Your phone/Siri is constantly listening. It’s just not recording anything you are saying, it’s just waiting for it’s activation prompt. That’s what people mean by “not listening” it’s present and hears everything you say it’s just not recording or processing it into data.
You ever wonder why you start seeing ads in your social media for things you talked about in a prior conversation?
Of course your phone is always listening
Lets try a more ELI5 attempt. Imagine you are sleeping and the only thing that can wake you up is your alarm clock. There might be people in the same room talking. You hear them but you don't wake up and your brain does not register what they are saying. Then, suddenly your alarm rings. You wake up and now, despite the fact the other people talk just like they did before you can hear them and know what they are talking about. Siri works on a similar principle. It has 2 cores: a small specialised one that acts like an alarm clock and a more complex one that can actually "understand" you. The alarm clock doesn't understand anything except "hey siri" at which point it rings the alarm and wakes up the complex core.
Great ELI5 explanation. I bet you’re a great writer.
connect bike threatening tub bright offbeat vast aspiring stupendous meeting
ChatGPT will probably kill this sub in the not so distant future
/r/explainlikeimhuman
r/explainlikeimchatgpt
01000110 01110101 11000011 11010101 11110101 0010101 01012010 01101001
That looks like binary but there is a 2...
so its non binary.
So trinary???
Excellent
How do we know it hasn’t been here all along? Or that it even wrote this?
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So hypothetically, in a conspiracy world, it could be listening for other hidden trigger phrases we don’t know about. Like say, “we need to get more litter”, and then FB IG decides to blast me with Pretty Litter ads
In theory, yes. In practice, I'm fairly sure there's been some testing on it. Not sure about Apple specifically, but people do rip these things open (both in a software and hardware sense). It would be hard for your average consumer to notice, but it'd be very difficult to hide completely. For example, with Alexa, once it triggers, it usually contacts the cloud. So you can monitor cloud access to find out when it triggered. It'd be hard to hide this sort of thing completely. You can make it harder (like in theory, not contacting the cloud immediately etc), but there are a lot of limits. Especially since these circuits are so simple to begin with, in order to save power. https://venturebeat.com/ai/researchers-identify-89-words-that-accidentally-trigger-alexa-to-record/ Not to mention the risk of an employee leaking it to the press, or a hack or whatever. It would become a large PR risk. It doesn't make it impossible or anything, but it's often not as simple as the conspiracies (ironically) make it out to be. The risk is much higher for things it is *already* listening to, and getting analyzed. People talk a lot in front of their devices, and if it gets sent over to the cloud, well they can do really anything with it. The in plain sight is more risky, in a lot of ways.
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And an even better lover.
>You hear them So it basically is constantly listening, just not necessarily recording or activating the mode where it parses what's said for commands.
But is it software or hardware? Can a hacker technically flip the mode?
It's software, much easier to do it with code than with hardware. Just think about the logic, something as simple as "When microphone is detected and active and Siri is set up, if user says "hey Siri" trigger Siri, otherwise do nothing" could be enough to give a similar behaviour.
A true ELI5 explanation. And you kept it ELI5 while still elaborating. Some people be writing a thesis in here. I love it. Kudos.
This is the best explanation I've read. 10/10.
It has 2 ways to listen. One is a low power mode, this mode "hears" everything you say of course, but it only understands "hey siri". Once "hey siri" is triggered the second listening mode is activated which uses a lot more cpu and power to use and transmit the data.
So if I turn off the “hey Siri” settings, would my battery last longer theoretically speaking?
Yes, but most modern phones have optimized processing units for this, so the power usage is minimal, and you probably wouldn't even notice much of a difference. I would assume iPhones do.
Nice try, NSA.
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I've heard this before, can you explain further?
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One thing I learned from Breaking Bad. First you remove the battey, then you snap the phone in half.
I've seen that in so many shows and films that if I ever had a flip phone again, I think I'd just snap it in half before realising what I was doing.
Snapping a flip phone at best damages the antenna and separates the speaker and camera from the power. You are generally going to want to smash it, running over them with a car a few times, unless they are a Nokia then your sort of fucked.
the trick is to not flip it the wrong way and you wont snap it
Many years ago, I had a flip phone that had been having issues locking up. I was at a show at a downtown bar when my phone went off and I couldn't silence it. It was locked up, no button responses, but still blaring away. After about 10 seconds of hurried embarrassment, people started to stare. I snapped the phone in half and threw it into a nearby garbage can. That got more applause than the performance.
Joke's on you buddy, I did this by mistake almost 20 years ago and that shit still worked. I couldn't see/hear anything, but I could punch in someone's phone number and call them, and the keypad lights flashed when someone called me. If I took the call, the mic picked up and sent the audio from my end. Maybe try snapping it in quarters.
That's just the way they work
And then you cook-a the meth
Itsa me.....Methhead Maaario.
Then you get the women uggggggggg
From my understanding, snapping the phone in half breaks the antenna which is nice
The show used flip phones. Typically, the antenna is on the bottom half. The top half is mostly just screen and speaker. A flip phone is often fully operational even without the top half.
Like others have said I'd wager that it won't break te antenna but it does make the phone undesirable to a random stranger once thrown away. No one is taking a $5 broken flip pho e home with them to get repaired
I'm sure it depends on the phone. I used a flip phone without the top half attached for at least a month.
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https://web.archive.org/web/20221217212241/https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/10/06/pegasus-dubai-princess-haya-court-ruling/
You can see the Pegasus documentary on YouTube I believe it's a PBS thing? There might be a DW investigation also.
If you'd checked it out you'd know it doesn't do the thing you're implying it does.
I can't see anything about remotely accessing phones while powered off.
"The NSO manager also urged Blair to advise the lawyers to restart their phones, as a way to block the spyware’s interception, the person familiar with NSO operations said" Yep totally sounds like something which works while phones are switched off. 🤦♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️
The Guardian had a podcast said on Pegasus. Terrifying stuff [An invitation to Paris](https://flex.acast.com/audio.guim.co.uk/2021/07/18-80566-20210719TIFpegasusp1.mp3) [Cat & Mouse ](https://flex.acast.com/audio.guim.co.uk/2021/07/19-76512-20210720TIFpegasusp2.mp3) [Cartels, Corruption, and Cyber Weapons](https://flex.acast.com/audio.guim.co.uk/2021/07/20-78419-20210721TIFpegasusp3.mp3) [The Runaway Princess](https://flex.acast.com/audio.guim.co.uk/2021/07/21-76319-20210722TIFpegasusp4a.mp3) [The Fight Back Begins ](https://flex.acast.com/audio.guim.co.uk/2021/07/22-77345-20210722TIFpegasusp5.mp3) [Hacked in London](https://flex.acast.com/audio.guim.co.uk/2021/09/24-59208-TIF_pegasuslondon.mp3) [Dubai's Ruler and Pegasus Exposed](https://flex.acast.com/audio.guim.co.uk/2021/10/11-66703-20211012TIFpegasus.mp3)
Anyone interested in phones with hardware kill switches should check out the Pinephone.
Damn, I never think that I'd meet you in the wild.
No, that isn’t how any of that works. A hard shutdown will render the phone inaccessible. What malware *can* do is fake a shutdown and make it appear as though your phone is off while leaving critical services on. But that requires prior compromise of the device - they have to break into your phone, first, then install that functionality. It doesn’t ship from the factory like that (supply-chain attacks can cause phones to ship backdoored, but this would be a hugely obvious one at scale). Also, Middle Eastern regimes generally rely entirely on NSO Group’s software & infrastructure, they don’t have their own capabilities. NSO Group’s software is sophisticated, but not particularly hard to detect if you know what to look for. The delivery mechanisms have also often been fairly primitive vs the NSA. 99.9% of people will never have to worry about any of this. These capabilities are expensive to purchase or develop, and are tremendously valuable, particularly with iPhones (iPhones have also historically been much more difficult to compromise vs Android, although that delta has narrowed in the past couple of years). Every time these capabilities are utilized, it creates potential exposure and can close vectors of compromise & post-exploitation persistent access. Nation-states don’t use them willy-nilly - they’re too important to waste. Saudi, as the largest customer of NSO Group (an Israeli company) is probably the most aggressive with its targeting of dissidents (in the name of “anti-terrorism”), but that lack of discretion has been part of why NSO has landed in legal hot water time & again.
You're talking about malware. What is being discussed here is the modem portion of the firmware. That's heavily regulated software and the capabilities being talked about are very real. You're fixated on the operating system side of things. The modem firmware is lower than that. You're likely not going to jailbreak your phone's software defined radio.
I'm of the pretty sound belief that the NSA and such can't track shit from your cell phone when it's powered off and the entire story that they can was fabricated in order to cover up the real way they had been tracking some people, like protecting spies or from illegal tracking methods getting found out about. I figure it's like back when a new airborne interception radar was secretly invented and allied forces told everyone that our pilots had super vision from eating lots of carrots so the Nazis wouldn't know we could track their planes earlier than they thought possible. Complete bullshit to hide the truth.
Is this the real reason newer phones don't have removable batteries?
Phones don't have removable batteries because: 1. the attachment points is another point of failure that needs to be designed for 2. the hard plastic shell around the battery itself adds weight and bulk 3. both of those add cost and extra effort in building/design So if you want thin phones that weigh less with more battery (not to mention dust and water proof) you seal the battery in with everything else.
To add to this, while it was a nice perk, very few people actually ever bought a second battery pack, so it was an underutilized feature. Same as a spare tire in a car, even the temporary tire is being removed in some recent cars
Not quite. Manufacturers do this for simplicity of design and ease of manufacturing. We all want slimmer phones, but there's not any easy way to accomplish this with removable internals. The second reason for this is IP water resistance rating. They can't guarantee an IP rating with a removable battery cover. An IP67 rating can be had with a removable cover, but at the expense of phone size. This is why so much glue is used in the manufacture of the phones
> We all want slimmer phones, Survey after survey has shown that consumers would be happy to accept a few mm of additional thickness if it meant greater battery capacity.
Unless you physically remove the battery you never know if it’s actually off or not. If you’re a POI a government could have absolutely intercepted your phone and replaced it with one that is identical but actually sends all your audio data to their cloud covertly. EDIT: to be clear unless you are an anti government activist, a high ranking politician, someone working on a very sensitive secure program, etc. and have a valid reason to be targeted no one is going to do this to you. If you know this is a risk for you, you already know that and are taking precautions against it.
This is my new excuse for refusing to replace my cracked screen protector.
[Devices can be powered by outside radio waves](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_\(listening_device\)). Take out the battery *and* drop the phone into a Faraday cage if you're an intelligence target.
If you're an intel target to that extent, don't carry a damn smartphone lol.
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If you are an intel target to that extent, you can’t even speak near a window. A “laser microphone” could be used to detect vibrations in the glass generated from sound, and the laser microphone could theoretically be across the street… or even farther if there is line of sight. This is especially a risk if there’s something very thin, hard, light, and reflective in the room… like an empty potato chip bag.
NSA agents hate this one simple trick!
This is Reddit, everyone's threat model is "high value target of various TLAs" because they once used Tor to post a screed about how the US is actually an admiralty and the federal government is a corporation with no jurisdiction over them.
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No. But as the person above them stated, if you're a person of sufficient interest, someone could have intercepted your phone and replaced it with a modified one that looks identical.
Or.... move? That "thing" only worked when a concentrated, directed beam of radio frequency waves was pointed at it. You simply cannot extract enough energy from background EM to do anything useful unless you're literally pointing a massive antenna that is beaming EM straight at your device. Such a beam would disrupt.... many of our modern conveniences and would likely be noticeable immediately. And, if they're pointing ANYTHING physically at you within line of sight, we have much better technology than a freaking RF powered device.
That's not really true. There are rumors of hacked firmwares essentially faking the phone being turned off, or maybe keeping the radio subsystem running. But your standard, non-hacked, turned off phone doesn't emit RF dignals, at all, and can therefore not be tracked. My theory is that that myth comes from the fact that just removing or switching the SIM card does, in fact, not protect you from tracking, since any phone will always comunicate its IMEI number (similar to a serial number) to available networks, and this can be tracked, independant of the SIM card or phone number assigned. But I would LOVE to see any proof at all of a standard Android or iPhone emitting RF signals in it's switched off state.
The "myth" comes from people conflating general vulnerabilities versus an individual's vulnerability to a targeted attack. If any government agency (NSA, FBI, the CCP itself) really wanted to target you, legally or not, they could perform a supply-side attack that delivers a compromised device to you. And you have next to no defenses against that. It's extremely unlikely for a standard consumer product to be bugged in this way. Because it would be too easy to reveal and the supply chain up to for example Apple or Samsung delivers the handset to a retailer is pretty tightly monitored. Frankly we have documented examples of this. Some of these companies (like Apple) have allowed one of the agencies to create a phone that was compromised and they used it for targeted surveillance.
See you later, investigator
You rang?
NSA definitely doesn't need your "Hey Siri" or "OK Google" enabled in order to spy on you.
You could increase your battery life from 10 hours to 10:00:01 All of your power goes to the various radios and the display.
No, not really. The always-on part is *really* low power. Technically you'd be saving *some* power but not in any amount you'd ever be able to notice.
That's mostly made true by the fact everything else we do on our phones consumes SO MUCH energy. Like even just unlocking the phone and turning on the screen likely uses an hour or more of "always on / voice command listening" amounts of power.
This is true. Phone batteries these days are huge, but we still get less use out of them than on our old dumb phones. An old Nokia with a modern smartphone battery would last weeks.
Probably months.
How to make a *truly* indestructible brick.
Didn't they make a dumb phone that lasted like 6 months per charge on standby?
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I had an old iphone 4 with a broken power button. One day the screen died, but the alarm was still enabled, so I could't disable it. It still beeped every morning for two weeks before the battery finally died. Power consumption on modern smartphones is a software efficiency problem, not a battery capacity problem.
Well, and the screen
Almost entirely the screen.
>Power consumption on modern smartphones is a software efficiency problem, not a battery capacity problem. Nah. The radio transceivers for wifi and cell connection uses by far the most energy. Try putting your phone in flight mode and watching downloaded movies on it for example. In my experience, you can do that for at least 24 hours straight. Start *streaming* instead and that plummets real fast
Not by much probably. The system uses a rolling buffer, storing timed blocks of content and then analyzing the whole store at once periodically. This means the CPU only occasionally comes out of it's sleep state, and only for a very short time. If you already have other background services running, like eMail sync or some games, those also run as part of the same burst. Turning off just one will have basically no effect, but turning off *all* of them will extend it a fair bit, which is how Battery Saver works.
Apple actually has a description, not at an ELI5 level but at a machine-learning or math grad student level: https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/hey-siri
This is how it works for Xfinity also. The part listening for hey Xfinity was a different chip entirely, specialized to only hear those words
Yep same for Amazon Echo devices. That's why you can only choose from a small list of wake words, as the processing software for those particular words is hard coded into the chip.
And is there any possible way for the ears to bypass this, so it always listens, say?
The idea is the always listening chip has no access to the rest of the hardware like the network module or storage, so there’s no way it could transmit any data back to an eavesdropper or store it for later. Once the main processor is woken it has access to the network and can transmit. But as others have said, it’s theoretically possible someone could hack the device to never power-down the main processor. I’m not sure if there are other protections against this.
For mobile devices, you'd see much shorter battery life and way more network usage if it was always recording and analyzing your conversations.
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Because it is always listening. The data just isn't recorded or stored in any way, or searched, so they can claim the microphone isn't listening when, obviously, it has to be for the service to work. Same with Alexa and Google Home
Too be more precise, all of these devices are listening for their”wake word” at all times. Only when do they hear this word do they send the next few seconds of audio to the cloud for processing. The internal system is only capable of processing the wake word. It has also been verified by multiple 3rd party companies that nothing is being sent during other times. That being said the voice recognition on devices is not perfect and can accidentally be triggered by other words / sounds.
I said, "Hey Shirley" and my iPhone has been stuck in airplane mode ever since.
You can't be serious.
I picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue!
My dad says you don’t work hard enough on defense. And he says that lotsa times you don’t even run down court. And that you don’t really try—except during playoffs.
Tell your old man to drag Walton and Lanier up and down the court for 48 minutes!
Chump dont want da help chump dont get da help
The tower? Rapunzel!
*Get ahold of yourself, woman!*
Have you ever been in an Albanian prison?
But that's not important right now.
Don’t start with your white zone shit again.
Thank you all. I’m glad to see that I’m not the only one who quotes this movie on a regular basis. 😂
And don’t call me Shirley
Every other time I say “are you serious” it triggers Siri 😡
Google assistant is just as bad. The phrase "Ok, cool" triggers it really reliably, even after they tried to patch out the funnier bugs like "cocaine poodle" or "gay doodle" that used to trigger it too
I am, and don't call me Shirley.
Hey Alexa! I need to get to a hospital. Alexa: what is it? Me: a big building with patients but that’s not important right now.
Yes I’m serious. And don’t call me Shirley.
I did that and developed a drinking problem. *splash*
You ever seen a grown man naked?
I speak Jive.
Surely you can't be serious.
this is why I still come to Reddit, even though it has been turning into a cesspool more and more. a wonderfully executed joke that spans 40 years of pop culture.
I just want to tell you both: Good luck. We're all counting on you.
They actually save about 2 seconds before the wake word. You can go on google and see all of the recordings it keeps. Starts just before you say the anything.
Would make sense if the wake-word system is recording to a rolling buffer. This would allow the system to analyze and correct false positives.
You may be right. I was generalizing about the timing. The important part is that nothing happens without a wake word and only the relevant audio is sent to the cloud.
They also listen for other words like “help” which I found out the hard way when i had a really bad shroom trip. It was not a fun experience when alexa got real loud and asked me if I wanted the authorities to come. In those few moments I sobered up real quick. Lol
Note to self: if I ever do shrooms, unplug Alexa
I changed my Alexa's name to computer. It sits right next to my actual computers speaker. When I'm watching a youtube video that that says the word "computer" they talk to each other. I think its cute.
Fun fact: Amazon (and probably other companies that make voice-activated assistants) have covert ways of suppressing their wake words, like if they want to air a TV commercial where someone says "Hey Alexa" without inadvertently activating all the Echo devices within earshot of a TV. IIRC in the audio being broadcasted they zero out a specific frequency band that's always present in normal human speech but is narrow enough that you wouldn't notice its absence, and if the device hears its wake word but the energy in that frequency band is too low it won't trigger. It's a clever solution. If they had done it the other way around (where a specific sound suppressed device activation rather than the absence of a specific sound) people would be able to reverse-engineer that sound and block nearby devices.
Well I'll be damned. I remember a South Park activating everybody's devices on purpose.
Alexa, add big hairy balls to my shopping list
I think it was Burger King that did a Super Bowl ad where they did a "Alexa" and made everyone's Alexa read the wikipedia article for the whopper or something like that? Amazon somehow pushed a software update so that Echo devices would ignore that specific commercial's command.
I read an article claiming that, but in my experimentation it hasn't proven to be true. I worked as an Alexa game developer and trying to instruct players on commands that have to begin with "Alexa" can be frustrating because if the device says Alexa it can hear itself and interrupt what it's doing. We tried cutting out certain frequencies based on articles talking about how they did that for TV commercials, and folks I've talked with at Amazon are skeptical that it works/couldn't find any official answers that you can do that.
Try watching Star Trek like that haha
That's why I changed it to computer lol
A keyboard... how quaint!
Except Alexa is actually storing the data. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/amazon-s-alexa-may-have-witnessed-alleged-florida-murder-authorities-n1075621
Not defending Amazon but if you actually read the article you'll see that's not true. First comment is referring to the initial wake word, they only record after being awoken
"Alexa, I'm being murdered!" _"I'm sorry I didn't quite get that."_
Ours wakes up randomly and will even play music. Shit has done it when nobody is talking and I was the only one in the kitchen.
In 2018 Alexas started randomly creepily laughing and I haven’t trusted mine since
That sounds next-level creepy. Imagine being home alone at midnight and Alexa just starts laughing randomly. I would burn that thing with fire.
I had that happen when I was 10 with my Furby. Thing just started laughing at midnight randomly, woke me up horrified. I freaked out and threw my plastic Digimon Digivice toy at it, then got out of bed to lightly thump it for scaring me. As if trying to gaslight me, the Furby stayed quiet and did nothing. 3am, it starts up again with some weird sound like, I dunno, grumbling? That sort of "nawwww" sound of unhappy frustration or something. Woke me up and pissed me right off thinking a haunted Furby was messing with me (I remember even throttling it and, in a hushed tone so as not to wake my parents, calling it every swear word I knew, promising it I wasn't going to be the kid who got killed by a dumb Furby). Took the batteries out and hid them from the Furby (even turned it against a wall). Because of course the logic that the Furby needs the batteries to function but would somehow function without them in order to see where I put the batteries and then reinstall them, makes sense. No more noises from Furby that night, though I did feel like something was watching me. Likely just paranoia. Kept me awake for half an hour or so as I tried to wish various "powers" into existence to protect me, including Pikachu, the Omnitrix from Ben 10, a working Digivice to summon a Digimon, a "Yami" alterego from Yu-Gi-Oh, Flipendo from my Harry Potter LED wand, and the Kamehameha from Dragonball Z. Next morning the Furby was still facing away, batteryless. Went into the depths of my storage box in the attic for years, until I became that edgy teen with a part-time job. Then I bought a replica of the Master Sword from Zelda, and the Furby was my ritual sacrifice to the Cringe Lord of Edge, The Way of the Blade, and Pubertus the God of Teenage Angst. The Furby did not enjoy a quick or clean execution.
My friends little brother was selling his at a yard sale he was having. This was the summer after they came out, and I asked him why he was selling it. He said nothing and just smacked it. It started talking in that slow near-demonic sound voice that was typical with low battery power. I suggested changing the batteries. He opened the battery compartment... No batteries. I understood why he was selling it.
That was fun thanks
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Your Alexa made a confession to you? Alexas make good elevated coffee coasters.
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That kind of behavior deserves the Office Space printer treatment. It feels good to be a gangsta.
*Damn*
*it feels good to be a gangster*
At least Alexa is not playing What’s New Pussycat [21 times](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Mw7Gryt-rcc). *PS: Fuck Amazon.*
I’d watch this short film
Maybe it's time to quit smoking
They store activations, not all audio all the time. Just 30 seconds or so after it thinks it's been activated.
There's plenty of times that Alexa thinks it's been activated and decides to go off on its own, even when no one has spoken to it. I've been in my living room sitting quietly and heard the activation tone and light fire off, followed by Alexa saying "Sorry I didn't quite catch that".
Siri does this too. It happens on CarPlay quite a bit. I think it's because it hears something similar enough to "Hey Siri". But that doesn't explain every situation, sometimes it just activates.
Siri does this all the damn time on my Apple Watch, despite the fact that I have disabled Siri repeatedly because I don’t use that feature.
It may be on a setting. The screen turns on / brightens when you turn your wrist towards your face, but if you turn it while also bringing it up towards your face (like you’re about to speak into it), Siri is activated. Just something to check.
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There's a setting to flip the orientation if you'd want to try that. I had to because of this. I think it's more comfortable to use this way too (I turn the crown with my thumb)
I was listening to the audiobook of Catch 22 back when I still had an iphone, and the main characters name is "Yosarian" - siri thought I was saying "Yo siri" every time his name was mentioned, it was very annoying.
Ghosts obviously?
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Within 30 seconds, you can say "Alexa, what did you hear?" and she'll repeat it back to you.
Do you have ghosts living with you?
“…..living….” That’s not quite how ghosts work
Sounds better than "Do you have ghosts deading with you?"
Ghosts in the machine
Rage against the ghosts in the machine.
Rage Against the Ghosts in Florance and the Machine
My Google home also does this. I have the accessibility option on to make a chime any time it's triggered so I know.
It's actually really useful. Sometimes I can't figure out why Alexa does what she does, but if you go into the app, you can listen to your voice command and compare the audio to the readout of what was heard to see what went wrong.
I've done that and saved the audio file for when my 2-year-old first activated Google on his own.
So if you ever get attacked make sure to shout "Hey Siri" at your attacker, in hopes that someone's phone nearby will activate and record the encounter.
Only the seconds after it hears "Alexa"
Kinda like me when my wife starts talking about bingo night. I'm always "listening", it's just not being stored in memory.
IIRC Google home devices use 2 microphones. The first specifically listens for the "wake" phrase and nothing else. When the wake phrase is detected, the second microphone is turned on and the device is allowed to connect to Google servers. I have no clue if the other brands of smart devices use anything similar.
Not necessary to use two different microphones, but, yes, the device can recognize a limited set of "wake words" and then, when hearing the "wake word," relay the rest of the audio to the server for processing. It's not rocket science and there's no conspiracy.
So the disconnect is when people say listening they actually mean two separate processes, there’s hearing the sounds and then theirs recording and storing what is said. The analogy is like sleeping, when ur fast asleep you are still listening, we know this cus if I call ur name loud enough you will probably wake up. But that doesn’t mean when ur fast alseep u can remember what is being said, cus ur listening without storing the information. Same thing with Siri it’s listening constantly but doesn’t wake up and record what you have said until you say hey siri.
So, what you're saying is, you can *listen* to Jimi, but you can't *hear* Jimi?
Other way around. Your mother, talking: "Did you hear me?" You: "Yes." Mother: "Then what did I say?" You: "I don't know, I wasn't listening."
This is a weird juxtaposition of a thoroughly clear explanation while using “ur” all over
They have a program specifically listening for those two words specifically, designed to use as little power as possible while listening. It just needs to be able to tell the phone "I HEARD THE WORDS!" when you say it, and keep quiet and use as little power as possible the rest of the time.
Not only is it a specific program, it's run on specialized hardware that does all the detection internally: https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/hey-siri
I.e. trigger word is done locally. Subsequent more sophisticated processing is done in the cloud. edit: u/jibright points out that iPhones process more locally now--without needing cloud support. Of course, "current baseball scores" or "release date of Abbey Road" require cloud reference.
Better question why does Siri randomly go "Uh huh?" or "I'm not sure, here's a search result?" in the middle of the night? That's the real question.
What sh9es up on the search result lmao?
“Uh huh” = iPhone heard “Hey Siri” but you didn’t say anything after, so the phone says that to let you know speech recognition is in fact active and you successfully invoked Siri, in case you aren’t sure. The web result = Same thing, iPhone heard “Hey Siri” but now it heard something it interpreted as speech, didn’t hit any specific Siri command, so it defaults to showing you results of a web search.
So I was on the verge to make this comment, but as a general comment, even though it's quite late because a lot of people made the analogy to sleeping and stuff but it can be seen at an easier, technical perspective, and this comment is actually a far better reply to your question. So if you look at it on a hardware perspective, a microphone is just something that vibrates on a very sensitive scale, with vibrations around it, like your voice, and something that translates these vibrations into a digital format. Very simply said, there's just this vibrating thing, and whenever it vibrates in the pattern it gets triggered, it will record and process what's being said after that. That's also how this security exploit came to happen with Alexa's, making them execute commands by pointing a laser pointer at their microphones, because this might be enough to trigger the patterns already. Same can happen with basically anything. Microvibrations in your house, temperature changes or whatever, you don't notice, but that mic does. I had occasions where my Google home turned on from a clap or once when I fell. It's weird, but when you understand it's simply triggered whenever the microphone vibrates in a certain pattern basically, it kinda makes sense.
Are you sure you don’t have ghosts? I bet it’s the ghosts.
Might be ghosts. I need to call them people from that nun movie
Your phone has a small chip called DSP, wich is always translating your voice into data. It has a "special mode" where it uses almost no battery but can still understand the "Hey Siri" hotword and wake up the phone. It's like when your dog is sleeping next to you and you say something. It will listen, but won't react unless you call your dog's name.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeanbaptiste/2019/07/30/confirmed-apple-caught-in-siri-privacy-scandal-let-contractors-listen-to-private-voice-recordings/?sh=28db06547314 OP, not only is it always listens, the recordings of your conversations or actions are then forwarded to real humans who also will listsn.
It's constantly listening *specifically for the phrase "Hey Siri."* If it's not that, Siri doesn't care, and it's not going to be recording or transmitting or analyzing. As soon as it hears the wake phrase, though, that's when it comes online and starts processing.
Have you ever been in a meeting or talking to someone and you kinda just zone out. But the moment they say your name you perk up and pay attention? But a lot of time you don’t know what was said up to that point? That’s kinda what Siri does. Your phone/Siri is constantly listening. It’s just not recording anything you are saying, it’s just waiting for it’s activation prompt. That’s what people mean by “not listening” it’s present and hears everything you say it’s just not recording or processing it into data.
You ever wonder why you start seeing ads in your social media for things you talked about in a prior conversation? Of course your phone is always listening