Find coverage of Northeastern University in the press.
CBS Sunday Morning
Is your phone listening to you?
David Choffnes, a professor of Computer Science at Northeastern University, wanted to test whether your smartphone is spying on you. “We did a study with thousands of apps on an Android device, and wanted to see, as you interact with these apps, are they recording your audio and sending it off?
Is your phone listening to you? Yeah, but probably not to target ads.
For years, Northeastern University professor David Choffnes has helped analyze how often our phone apps and voice assistants capture audio without our knowledge, and whether recordings from gadget microphones are used to tailor advertisements.
No, Your iPhone Isn’t Listening to You. Here’s What’s Really Happening
Independent researchers have gone looking for covert “listening” and found none, including a definitive 2018 Northeastern University study that has yet to be superseded. What they did catch in a handful of cases were screen recordings or image and video uploads to third parties. Creepy, sure, but not a hot mic.
New Atlas
Your phone isn’t secretly listening to you, but the truth is more disturbing
In early 2017 Jingjing Ren, a PhD student at Northeastern University, and Elleen Pan, an undergraduate student, designed a study to investigate the very issue of whether phones listen in on conversations without users knowing.
Terms of Service: Why It Feels Like Your Phone Is Listening to You
And is that how online advertisers are able to serve such specific ads? David Choffnes, associate professor at Northeastern University, says it’s not that simple.
Gizmodo
Your Phone Is Not Listening to You
However, researchers from Northeastern University tackled this myth in 2018 and found it’s a complete bust.
New York Post
How to stop your phone and other smart devices from listening to you
Smart speakers, like Google Home devices or Amazon Echos, can accidentally activate 19 times a day and record 43 seconds of audio with each activation, according to a new study released by Northeastern University.
Is Siri spying on me? Apps on my iPad began playing Spanish ads after conversations at home
“The simple answer is no, your (gadget) is not likely actively listening to your conversations,” Northeastern Associate Professor of Computer and Information Science David Choffnes told me over the phone. “But that doesn’t mean they aren’t (enabling the collection of) millions of data points to know who you are, where you live, what stores you shop at, […]
Refinery29
Is Your Phone Listening To You?
A year-long study conducted by Northeastern University monitored over 17,000 of the most popular apps to see if they were secretly using the phone’s microphone to capture conversations and found no evidence of these apps using the microphone or sending audio out under the radar. The scientists involved in the study did not claim that this proved […]
Getting Social Without the Networking: Enhancing Relatedness
Avatars. Avatars are images that represent either a person or some other sentient guide to a program. Avatars are used across a variety of settings, from IKEA’s Anna (who will helpfully guide you to their bedroom department if you complain about your saggy mattress) to the iPhone’s Siri. In healthcare, one intriguing use of avatars has […]