Secret eavesdropping, targeted promotion...are they all true?

I was just chatting with a friend about "Shanzhu" and immediately received an advertisement message about "Shanzhu"! Is my phone being monitored by an APP?

My electric kettle broke, and I was looking for my old kettle upstairs and downstairs. As a result, an advertisement for an electric kettle was pushed to me on the homepage of an APP. This APP must be spying on me!

Many of you may have heard similar "magical" stories, some of which are even so "magical" that they are beyond belief. This has also caused many netizens to worry about whether the APP has secret voice eavesdropping and secret video surveillance.

I can tell you for sure: although it is technically feasible for commercial apps to secretly monitor the voice or video on users’ phones, it does not exist in real life.

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01

Why eavesdropping on commercial apps is impossible

Why don’t commercial apps conduct large-scale user eavesdropping? There are three main reasons:

1. High legal risks

Secret wiretapping is already an act of hacking and a typical cyber crime. Any business that engages in such activities will basically be immediately shut down or sealed once verified. Despite rumors flying around, no domestic business company has been punished for similar situations so far. This is enough to prove that the online rumors are untrue.

2. High technical difficulty

It is technically very difficult to accurately and quickly retrieve the target words from a large amount of unclear speech (when the phone is far away from the mouth, the sound is often unclear), and to consider the user's accent, speaking habits, etc. Even professional speech recognition software generally has relatively high requirements for the sound reception environment and language environment.

In addition, even if user information is collected accurately, if you want to quickly match advertisements and deliver content in the background, this is a huge test for the merchant's cloud computing capabilities, and it is simply not something that ordinary small and medium-sized Internet companies can afford.

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3. The cost is not worth it

Monitoring all users’ voice or video 24/7 will not only consume users’ mobile phone power and data traffic quickly (making it easy to be discovered), but will also cause extremely high storage and computing costs for businesses. In the end, users may not buy the information they push. Investing such a high cost just to push an ad occasionally is obviously a loss-making business.

High cost and low return are the fundamental reasons why voice or video monitoring through APP is completely unfeasible in commercial practice. Merchants have many lower-cost and more efficient precision promotion methods, so there is no need to use such a "stupid" promotion method.

Of course, businesses still need to collect a lot of our private information for targeted promotion, and some of the collection methods are in a gray area. But in practice, collecting users' text information, location information, device information, application information, friend connections, Internet history information, etc. is much more cost-effective and effective than collecting voice and video.

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02

"Magical" stories from netizens

How did it happen?

So, are the "magical" stories reported by netizens all illusions or fabrications? No. Based on many years of experience in network security practice and online and offline surveys of a large number of users, the author summarizes the following main reasons:

1. The influence of advertising alliances

Many Internet companies form advertising alliances. The information you search on an app in the alliance will be shared with all other members of the alliance. Many advertising alliances may have hundreds or even thousands of member companies. Therefore, even if you have never used a certain app, it does not mean that the app does not know you or cannot conduct targeted marketing to you.

2. Big data related promotion

Careful friends will find such an interesting but terrifying phenomenon: some of the information you are interested in may be automatically recommended by the platform to your family, colleagues or friends, and vice versa. This is the relevance promotion based on big data. The platform can guess the relationship between you and the people around you through information such as geographic location and behavioral characteristics, and then conduct more efficient and precise promotion. In other words, just because you haven't searched, it doesn't mean that your family, colleagues, and friends haven't searched. The merchant's precise promotion to you is not "water without a source".

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3. Unconscious Internet Behavior

When people do not have a clear understanding or expectation of the possible consequences of an unintentional behavior, they often have a vague or even wrong memory of the behavior. For example, many victims of online fraud will say "very sure": "There is a link, and a little money is gone." But in fact, this is completely impossible in real life. Under the guidance of anti-fraud experts, victims will gradually recall the series of "unconscious operations" they performed after clicking the link.

This is often the case with precision promotion. You may have inadvertently allowed the network platform to record and "precisely profile" you through a series of unconscious behaviors. It is not surprising that push notifications that are too "precise" are occasionally produced.

4. Purely accidental

The last situation is the most "magical" and interesting. The "Shanzhu" incident mentioned at the beginning of this article is actually my own real experience. At that time, I happened to talk about "Shanzhu" with my friends. Before I finished talking, I received a discount advertisement for "Shanzhu" from an APP platform, and I have never used this APP. At that moment, I was really scared and even sent my phone to professionals for testing. The results finally confirmed that my phone was not infected with any Trojan virus, and there was no APP that eavesdropped on my phone microphone.

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Further investigation revealed the truth. It turned out that the APP platform involved was promoting a large number of Shanzhu discounts that day, and many of my colleagues and friends also received promotional text messages from this merchant. It was just that I was talking about Shanzhu with my colleagues when I received the text message. In other words, as long as the merchant sends enough text messages, there is a high probability that a customer will "just happen" to be caught in the crossfire. But for the person who "just happened" to be caught in the crossfire, this is an extremely incredible thing.

03

How to view the issue of privacy protection

Objectively speaking, in the Internet environment, many commercial promotion activities are inseparable from the collection and analysis of users' personal information and privacy information by businesses. Some of these are reasonable and legal, while others are on the edge of the law and in the gray area. There is still a long way to go to protect user privacy and security.

However, not every privacy risk rumor has a factual basis. Many "magical" things may happen for other reasons. The so-called commercial APP achieves precise promotion by eavesdropping on users' voice and video, which is unrealistic at present, and there are no real cases that can be confirmed.

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Author | Pei Zhiyong Member of the Popularization and Education Committee of the China Institute of Communications

Review | Sun Songlin Professor, School of Information and Communication Engineering, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications

This article is produced by the "Science Rumor Refutation Platform" (ID: Science_Facts). Please indicate the source when reprinting.

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