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[Lifehacker] - Your Phone Isn’t Spying on You to Show You Ads (It’s Worse Than That)
(lifehacker.com)
this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2023
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Technology
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This is not only an ad written by a hack, it contributes to widespread gaslighting on what our phones do.
It's well documented that our phones are always listening and sending keywords to advertisers.
Battery life is the single biggest indicator of how invasive our phone are.
If you're old enough to remember flip phones, you know they'd last easily days, to a week, or even longer between charges.
Even as Blackberrys came about with GPS navigation, WiFi, Bluetooth, etc, the battery life stayed about the same. Over time we've expanded the ability of those features, but we've also made them all significantly more power-efficient.
Some argue all the "always-on" features for optimizing signal and spontaneous device pairing is responsible, but these can all be turned off.
Even with all the Android Dev settings optimized for minimum background activity and all apps restricted, an S22 Ultra with 5000 mah battery will burn through most of its capacity in your pocket in a day.
Worth mentioning how tiny flip-phone batteries were too. A 500-900mah battery would take a flip-phone through a week where a modern smartphone with a 5000mah battery barely lasts a day.
It is not well documented that our phones are sending keywords to advertisers from audio. Are phones always listening? Yes. How else would they be activated. And anything you tell it after activating it is going to be stored. But outside that, there is no reason for phones to save what you say. Most of that audio is entirely useless to them. If you have the documentation of them sending audio recordings to advertisers, I'd love to see it.
Is that why my phone isn't always dying now that I'm not on reddit? It used to get mad hot after about 15 minutes. Now being on lemmy my phone is actually pretty cool to the touch...