Anybody got recommendations on cases or other solutions to mitigate this?
grapheneOS for pixel phones
It turn off the mics when not in use?
You can toggle mic off through quick tiles to be sure it’s off. Same as location, Bluetooth etc.
Tbh I don’t believe at all that phones record you, they leak enough info in every other way that they don’t need to spy on your conversions.
grapheneOS has a metric shittonne of features that allow much better seperation between apps, sandboxes all Google services so you can control it’s permissions (or not use/install them) and much more
You can leak a lot less data with it, not using/installing google services, using PWA/webpage shortcuts instead of apps, focusing on using FOSS software over proprietary, etc
How do you know for sure though. Couldn’t they override the code? I’d be interested in a hardware solution.
Your phone typically isn’t actually listening to you. Constantly recording and uploading that data would destroy your battery.
A lot of it is just the metadata from ads, apps, location, nearby devices etc. Your phone doesn’t need to know that you were watching CNN last night. CNN knows that this IP was watching them, google knows that your phone was at that IP at that time, so it can assume you watched CNN last night.
Your phone typically isn’t actually listening to you.
It is if you have any “voice assistant” on.
Emphasis on the active part. It’s listening, but passively for the keyword. The phone isn’t constantly sending all the data it hears 24/7 off to someone else. But once that keyword has been activated now it’s actively listening and that data is being recorded and sent.
Very convenient, that the keywords they are filtering are endless.
