> The phone is listening. Services like Shazam and Alphonso are constantly fingerprinting audio from the mics and sending these fingerprints up for "matching".
Could you please provide a source for this?
Just on the outset this sounds pretty wild if true. In the settings I do not see any permissions associated with Shazam, and only when I open it do I see the usual microphone indicator light up.
I will say though, it is weird that it doesn't have associated permissions listed, because clearly it can access the mic at least when it's open.
Edit: nevermind, found it, was just super hidden. But yeah, says it can only access it when the app is "in use". Now can it auto launch? Apparently also yes, after boot. Otherwise idk. It's further interesting I cannot tweak any of these permissions.
Edit #2: now it says that notifications are enabled for it, but then i check, and they aren't. i exercise the toggle, now it doesn't say that anymore, and the mic permissions are no longer hidden? Samsung please...
No amount of years in tech will rid me of tech pains it seems.
Pixel phones have a built in background audio fingerprinting service called "Now Playing" which can operate constantly.
Shazam has an "auto shazam" feature you can enable for constant background listening, since 2016 at least!
But look into Alphonso. That's like Shazam but explicitly for covert "content recognition" listening in microphone enabled apps. And it's old.
People who say it's too expensive or impractical to do bulk listening for ad-tech just aren't paying attention.
> Pixel phones have a built in background audio fingerprinting service called "Now Playing" which can operate constantly.
That's interesting. Although can and does are very different things - appears to be a feature you turn on yourself. Upon a surface level research, I also found it to rely on an offline music fingerprint database, suggesting it doesn't retain and send off the audio it records, or metadata it extracted from them.
> Shazam has an "auto shazam" feature you can enable for constant background listening, since 2016 at least!
This is again a can vs. does difference.