Is there a true app that, preferably open source, that can disable the all microphones, confidently, for all apps, without having to physically disable my microphone as Edward Snowden suggested?
Depends on the permissions model of the OS, and if you trust the OS. Hence why Edward Snowden and Bunnie Huang developed the Introspection Engine [1].
It’s reasonable to assume that if you can’t audit and review the code of the app and the OS, you can trust neither and need safeguards at lower levels of the stack.
Yes, they're called amplifiers. Directional coupling circuits would apply in theory, but not in practice; they're good enough to do full-duplex audio over two wires, but not nearly good enough to deal with the sensitivity of analog inputs if you want to prevent a signal from being read.
Only a slightly related tangent, but most headphones and other loudspeakers can be very effective microphones when wired into the right circuit.
While speakers are often wired directly to a one-way DAC, that's not always the case. Sometimes the analog lines are all fed into a multiplexer and it can be routed to a ADC. Sometimes it's wired to a general purpose IO pin.
In such cases, reprogramming could turn that speaker into a microphone. I wonder if anyone has exploited this in the wild yet.
You can do the opposite of noise cancellation too: determine the back emf from the speaker compared to the audio input, that will give you the audio in the room. So you can use the same circuit both to drive the speaker and use it as a microphone. As good as undetectable until you trace the circuitry of what looks like an ordinary amplifier. The difference is on the order of a few mV but that's more than enough.
My personal favorite is the laser attack that turns any shiny surface into a microphone. When it's not on it literally isn't there.
If you are a hacker who removed microphones from your computer but is worrying about this exploit, fortunately, a simple mitigation is possible - just put an audio amplifier or unity-gain buffer between the speaker and the audio output port, so the audio signal cannot travel back to the audio chip. Any "Hi-Fi" headphone amplifier can be used, but a $0.5 opamp is enough - a daughterboard can be tiny enough to fit inside a laptop.
An article complaining about the collecting and sharing of users personal data from a blog site that connects to facebook, google analytics and other third-party services to collect and share their users data? Oh the irony...
I've seen this comment or a variation on it a thousand times now and it is getting boring. Just like all the other times: please comment on the message rather than on the means of delivery, finding pages without social media embeds is becoming more and more rare and besides that the party writing the article content may not have control over that particular aspect. But that doesn't mean they don't have a point.
They author may not be able to control the social media embeds of this particular site, but they certainly have control over where the choose to publish. I see nothing wrong with taking them to task for this sort of hypocrisy.
No, they don't always have that control. Maybe in this case they do, maybe they don't. But your typical author is in someone's pay. And they probably don't have the pick of where to publish besides the bulk of the places where you can work and write articles that reach a sizeable audience will have this kind of environment.
Anyway, seeing the same comment over and over again reduces its value. It was a cool observation the first time, boring the second, redundant after that.
There is no value in calling out hypocrisy. If a murderer outs another murderer now you know about two murderers. Saying "you're a murderer too, you hypocrite" has no epistemological value.
While I agree in principle, this kind of observation is getting awfully close to mister gotcha[1]. Whenever the topic of, for example, google analytics comes up on HN, many reasons are given for why the alternatives are inferior. And that's from people intimately familiar with the tech. I'm not sure how you can expect a site whose revenue probably comes exclusively from Google ads to be able to effectively resist the Google/Facebook duopoly.
Isn't this really only an issue if you use the companion app? I doubt the usb-c/lightning/bluetooth headphones can exfiltrate data if you don't have the companion app installed.
Because we cut a corner somewhere to make a budget device and realized it was a lot more popular and now we have to patch it like if it was a fucking nuclear reactor....
why do keyboards need firmware updates and companion apps? yet, that's exactly what my razer mech KB required for me to change the slow fade in/out to just "on". Pretty ridiculous and I too uninstalled it after, but who knows if I got it all?
Because they have complex software in for bluetooth connection, noise cancellation and other behaviours like automatically switching off when taken out for example. You don't have to update it of you prefer not to.
Sony has the worst app I’ve ever seen[1], to the point where I legitimately don’t know how it passed the app store vetting process. Paragraphs of text have wrapping disabled so that the text goes off screen (important text, like the TOS!). Text which does have wrapping enabled wraps on character boundaries instead of word boundaries. Bullet-point lists don’t line up. I have no idea how they made it so bad, it feels like it must’ve taken effort to disable things which just work by default?
It also has two buttons. I really don't see the need for an app. Besides that I don't have a phone capable of running an app so that saves me from getting irritated at Sony. Again.
I'm curious about the Sony App. What information does it get from the phone? The only kind of sensitive permission it asks for is location, and arguably there's a functionality related to that (change the adaptive sound reduction as a function of where you are). The other permission it asked for is Bluetooth, which I guess is expected since it uses that to talk to the headphones. It never asked for anything else.
I didn't allow it to get my location and I can still get firmware updates and can use it to confirm the codec in use (that's the main reason I have it installed).
Access to the Bluetooth service itself can cause some problems - both in user tracking (as your device notices and is noticed by other discoverable Bluetooth devices), fingerprinting, and through access to the bluetooth data channels (as mentioned in the article with the Bose Connect app)
Great headphones would never require an app or updating of the firmware. They should play music as engineered and intended from day one of the purchase of said heaphones, until they no longer work.
I agree they should just work but I also think their could be good cause for an update such as an improved noise cancelation software updates. I would expect that for music playback that just works always even if you decline the update.
So to each of you with the same response; You're totally ok being sold an unfinished product, paying too high of a price for it, and then having to opt into privacy violations to use a device which should have worked from day one out of the factory. Got it. Noise cancellation in headphones is a gimmick and a fad. High end studio monitors do not typically use it, and it distorts the experience. It makes sense if you're constantly packed in like a sardine on public transit or crowded spaces and you're simply trying to block out the surroundings, but may I suggest buying a real pair of headphones and carrying a pair of earplugs instead? To be very clear on my point. I see needing to update headphones and being conned into my headphones masquerading as a "smart device" equal to needing a smart toaster, or a connected can opener that some would justify should need firmware updates. It's senseless.
I suspect they liked the device in the state they bought it in, and were pleased when it later got even better at no extra charge (except for installing the app).
You can still buy dumb headphones without Bluetooth or noise cancellation of you don't like smart devices.
How's it different to any other software? Why should I be sold an 'unfinished' PC operating system that requires updates? Is that asinine?
You don't have to update any firmware if you don't want to. It doesn't mean the product is unfinished. In the past, improvements to firmware would have just been kept for the next revision of a hardware product, requiring you to pay for a whole new physical product just to get that new software.
EQ was not a feature sold to me, it's a free addon, a nice to have.
Noise cancellation is great for those of us that have to work in noisy environments, or for neurodivergent people that need a break from information overload, or for long haul flights... or any number of scenarios you have not considered, as if nothing outside your little bubble matters. And let me guess, your "sardine in public transport" remark is just rubbing in that you don't have to rely on such either, isn't it?
Besides the point that noise cancellation can be turned off at any time, I have a perfectly fine pair of ATH-M50x's for use at home.
This comments reeks of ugly elitism and a severe lack of capacity for empathy. Maybe sometimes you should just not write whatever comes to your mind.
To work around Bluetooth bugs in newer phones/OSes that come out.
Bluetooth stacks constantly get broken with new revisions, the burden is unfortunately placed on individual device makers to update to work with whatever has broken recently.
I only installed the Bose app when I was going to be on a plane, as the app allows you to pair multiple Bose headphones to one source. Then you can watch the same movie with someone else.
Edit: Bose also had a nice big opt-out button in the app, and asks during setup.
With the app you can also change the cancellation level, they’re pretty isolated even with the feature powered off entirely but it helps out in some situations.
My Boses allow you to set the cancellation level with a button press. It cycles through three options: high, low, and off. Does the app enable more fine-grained control or something? Perhaps per-ear cancellation settings?
Apparently so. I have the QC35 II, which has a button on the left ear can. Bose calls it the Action Button, and it's used to summon Alexa/Google Assistant; but if you don't configure it to use an assistant (through the Connect app?) it will cycle through the noise cancellation level settings.
There were two things that happened when Apple got rid of the headphone jack: (1) they added water resistance, (2) the phones got thinner. Plus, Apple had seen the trends heading toward wireless headphones.
They still included a dongle to give you a standard headphone jack.
While Apple could likely have gotten their water resistance even with the headphone jack, they couldn’t have made the phones as thin. People may disagree with the product choice, but I don’t see any reason to think that those weren’t the real reasons.
Does anybody other than PR/marketing people care about phones being thinner than they are? It's just an excuse to not give better battery life which costs money.
> While Apple could likely have gotten their water resistance even with the headphone jack, they couldn’t have made the phones as thin.
Except that's a pretty obvious lie. Not just that the phones did not get thinner (or lighter), they stayed around the same thickness (+- 0.5 mm), while getting larger, much heavier and much more expensive. But also the thinnest Android phone with a 3.5 mm jack is just 5.1 mm thick, for example. Sony even made a waterproof phone that's 6.5 mm thin and still has a 3.5 mm jack, which is thinner than any iPhone ever.
Everything about this argumentation is wrong or an outright lie. The only reason they did this is because they could moneygrab through accessoires better when they eliminate standardized I/O.
The only reason? Doesn’t shallow dismissive posting violate comment rules here?
It’s almost as if “every argument I make about frugalness and standards is maybe leading me to ignore other considerations.”
“Pros” continue to make use of their wired kit, and it changes the math of recurring waste problem; I’ve thrown away many fewer pairs of $30 earbuds since iPhone 7. Saved money and generated less consumer waste over the long run. Now scale that up to the iPhone user base.
You seem to believe human agency must be functionally fixed on how we used to do things. Or at least how you have been lead to believe we did. Turns out iterating away through new invention is how we do things. Or do you have your wax cylinders ready?
And for people that want a wire a 2” dongle is available. Given all else they get with a life that affords an iPhone, oofda what a stretch.
Let’s get to the back of the line with our first world sour grapes a bit. I can see how broader utility was enabled in a variety of ways.
Sorry you haven’t been able to cope with, really, such a trivial change in 5 years.
Despite being aware of this, you went on to create a posting that's largely assumptions, projections and some salty ad-hominem.
> Sorry you haven’t been able to cope with, really, such a trivial change in 5 years.
I haven't upgraded my phone in a number of years, so it actually still has a headphone jack, which I virtually never use since I don't listen to music on the go.
The explanation/excuse I recall seeing, was about space, not thickness. The headphone jack takes up space inside the phone that they’d rather put to other uses, like more battery for example. At least, that seems to make a bit more sense.
Yes it does. I think back then teardown pictures made the rounds where the innards of the two generations where virtually the same, except they added some component where the headphone jack used to be. And as far as smartphone components go, a 3.5 mm jack is pretty big; I'd guess about the volume of a camera module.
I don't know who started the thinness-jack meme, I suspect it was an explanation made up by people other than Apple, since Apple is usually more into omitting things instead of lying.
It would be very straightforward as well to simply come up with a new thinner analog headphone jack: maybe something balanced and with a magnetic connector since we’re at it?
They "had seen the trends heading toward wireless headphones" or they wanted to create the trend and sell their own headphones? The second explanation seems much better.
As usual, if there's no headphone jack, I won't buy that device. Privacy isn't even the deal breaker there. Latency and the ability to use my favourite set (Sennheiser HD600) are.
When at my desk, I plug in through a Mont Blanc FiiO for my Beyerdynamic headphones. Makes a big difference with some audio. Wireless buds are obviously already a step down from wired, and one step further from amplified cans. And yeah, I'm an outlier and want to be.
But there are combined DAC/amps that will use lightning connectors, so if you use an external amp, you might as well use an external dac/amp instead and get audio quality that is certainly no worse than a random android phone, and possibly better.
As one data point, the headphone jack-having iPhone would drive 26.39 mW into 33 ohms, which means that at max volume you'd be damaging your ears at a volume of around 100dB with the 300ohm impedance and 105dB/mW SPL.
So yes, the previous poster could conceivably be doing the thing that they said they were doing.
Their sensitivity is only 97dB/mW. But I think it's more complicated than that. The amplifier might be able to deliever 26mW into 33 ohms but can it deliver that into 300 ohms? It would have to be able to produce high enough voltages. Also the impedance goes up to almost 600 ohms at the resonant frequency of the headphones, requiring even more voltage [1]. You'd obviously get some sound and it would probably even be loud enough, but there would likely be a significant effect on the frequency response and possibly more distortion that you'd like.
It’s still kicking around, still works, but I switched to easy to drive IEMs for on the go listening so my biggest problem these days is getting the volume quiet enough.
When the volume is set quite high (near max setting of the phone, definitely unhealthy for long-term use), it doesn't hold a candle to the Topping DX3 Pro v1[0] I use on my desktop. Important: I don't recommend the v2[1] that's currently on sale, as the measurements aren't anywhere as good. They did destroy the product with the amp redesign they did to get around a high early failure rate hardware problem on the v1 that they were never able to debug. I would suggest the JDS Atom + Atom DAC set or the Topping DX7 Pro instead, cheap (yet powerful well measuring) and expensive (but balanced and ridiculously well measuring) respectively. Or a Schiit Hel for a very portable usb-powered solution for the laptop backpack that also has mic input.
But at lowish volumes (used most of the time, don't destroy your ears!) then yes, phones tend to have reasonable headphone amps in them. With decent power output and lowish output impedance. Unlike most computer motherboards, which have excessive output impedance and out power is so low I'd call anemic, when not flawed in other ways (noise due to poor isolation, or non-flat frequency reproduction due to shit implementations of aliasing filters).
I mostly connect the headphones to the phone to play rhythm games like Love Live sif, allstars or idolm@ster deresute, mirishita. My phone (chinese and a few years old) does very successfully drive the HD600 to a pleasant output while playing these games.
As an aside, I absolutely recommend Sennheiser HD600 to anyone who wants a durable (plus tool-free modular with good availability of parts, and compatibility with HD580/58x/650(aka 6xx),660S parts, thus effectively forever) all-rounder open back headphone with a focus on accuracy that's cost efficient and extremely comfortable. Plus they've been around for a good two decades, thus there's no shortage of reviews to base a purchase decision on.
I felt cheated after falling for the mass hysteria, which lead me to acquire my first set of SR-60. It didn't take very long to realise how uncomfortable they are for longer listening periods, or when the cable turns into a tangled mess, and the special hell, when you have to replace the earpads.
Lack of regulation and non-existent enforcement of existing regulation.
People are used to the government being there to prevent companies from doing bad/dangerous stuff. It’s why you can buy any food at any supermarket and be reasonably confident it won’t poison you or be full of cyanide.
People expect the same when it comes to technology companies, and I once did too - I expected that big companies would’ve already got in trouble if they did something bad so it must be safe. The problem is that is far from the truth.
Re: Personal fitness and menstruation history - Is that shocking? They're earbuds, but they're marketed as fitness buds that track personal data. It looks like Fitbit for your ears. Fitbit and Apple Health (or whatever it is called) does these kinds of things as well.
Re: Bose collecting all that stuff
I can see "why" they would want all that, in order to optimize their sound output of their buds to the kind of music and environments for which they are used. That should, of course, be opt-in, but I don't think it is evil.
Do I necessarily like the latter example? No. I believe, like the "cookie policies" that exist on many websites, there should be "Needed permissions" and "Please thank you" permissions, and they should incentivize the consumer to help them out. Amazon does this on their Kindles: $20 off if you let them run ads on the lock screen.
But if all the manufacturers do this, then what competition is there to push them to change?
> I can see "why" they would want all that, in order to optimize their sound output of their buds to the kind of music and environments for which they are used.
I can't see why they would need so many samples. Wouldn't using the data from (say) 100 Bose employees be sufficient to cover most noisy environments these buds are used in?
If you're trying for perfection, then not even remotely, no. The type of data provided by "one million users" will uncover issues that "one hundred users" simply never can.
I believe it was iOS 10 or 11 developer betas that would, on each beta update, run a trial APFS conversion process against the phone's internal filesystem, check the result for consistency, and then discard the replica and report success/failure w/ logs — so that Apple could find the issues that they couldn't find at 'one hundred users' scale.
There's a famous Bose bughunt article that proves this not to be the case. I can't find where they posted it on a blog or something but here's the forum link:
Ordinarily when you pay $350 for headphones it is assumed that the vendor has already invested money in doing R&D to make them work properly and isn't planning to do testing on you without telling you or compensating you for it, to enable the functionality you already paid for.
I bought headphones, I did not sign up for a research project.
We went from paying for software to getting it for free in return for our data and now we're apparently giving over our data even for physical devices that we pay top dollar for.
> ow we're apparently giving over our data even for physical devices that we pay top dollar for.
This is the thing that really bugs me. I don't like the user is the product aspect but I can at least understand it in a free setting. In a high case luxury setting where you aren't even getting a discount? That's just absurd. All they've done is increase their bottom end, give you no choice and no discount.
Ah yes, company speak for "collecting massive amounts of personal data for our profits and your detriment." It's clear now with the fitbit reference that this is mainly a spying device.
I see this as only another example of how markets with too little, or the wrong kind of regulation so easily creates anti consumer, or anti environment, etc behavior.
... Which makes total sense from a market efficiency point of view, at least as long consumers doesn't have perfect information and the time to stay informed about almost everything. Which isn't true, and people won't be, especially since the most basic decision theory that we can derive from our behavior would go almost entirely counter this.
... Which isn't strange at all as the number of new or changing facts that could affect our living situation probably didn't change as much from 150000 years ago, as changed last week alone.
Sometimes I think one of, or maybe the most damaging lie of our century is that we are generally capable of individual, rational thought for everyday decisions. We really are not, not to any significant fraction.
Almost all our decision are derived from observation of very few instances, judging based on survival instincts, and social cost/benefits.
In contrast much of rules regarding eg advertising and much of economic theory seems predicates that everyone has the time and energy to figure out which toothpaste company also are not totally exploiting some workers in some country five shell companies and thousands of miles away. But I digress.
They don't. The app may ask for it, and there may be some benefit to the user if they provide it, but it's not like the headphones magically acquire any of the data the author is complaining about.
If people want to give their personal information out, that's up to them. I personally limit what information I share, and I get annoyed when devices or apps try to sneakily get more information than I'm willing to intentionally provide, but this article is silly.
The younger generation has grown up without a sense of personal privacy, and they're largely ok with it. They will happily give away personal details in exchange for a "free" app or product, and they bend over backwards to expose their entire lives via images and videos on social media. There's always mock outrage when someone "discovers" that the reason the Internet is free is because someone is selling personal data to drive advertising, but everyone knows that. Most people just don't care.
They care. It exudes as a cynicism about the world and continual jokes about talking to the FBI agent assigned to watch them. They (as are we) are just powerless to prevent it as every single service and every single platform and apparently every single product is collecting data on us. And since the value of services and platforms and, sadly, even products goes up as more people are using them, the arguments of "don't use these products and vote with your dollars" that people constantly push are nonsensical: you can value your privacy but also value having a romantic partner, and most people these days use dating apps to date; you can value your privacy but also value getting invited to the birthday party, and most people these days invite everyone to their party on a social network; you can value your privacy but also value being able to travel, and so unless you want to be the one insane person in your friend group who doesn't use Lyft/Uber and never knows when the public transportation is running late and takes forever to book hotels (and always ends up spending a lot more when you do)... well, you are going to use a bunch of apps that do a bunch of data collection.
I dunno... when it comes to the tiny things this article is talking about I really don’t care. This all seems like outrage in the name of a few clicks. That annoys me way more than my headphones asking to know how long I use them each day.
That sounds like you do have a choice: spend more money. In a world where this wasn't allowed, presumably you'd be forced to spend more money. So you can inhabit that world right now if you want.
Sure, but they deserve to be able to make the choice too. So if you move to a world where selling your data for services isn't available, then you're forcing them to pay and since we've determined they can't pay, all you're doing is removing the choice from them and forcing them in to the no-service option.
And I know how it is because I was once affected by this. All these "but the poor people" folks disappear when the poor actually ask for help. It's like this:
Poor people: Hey, can we get the right to work for a living in a dignified way and use the same services as everyone else?
The Privileged Protectors: Okay, how about I make it so you can't work for more than 20 hrs and umm... I'll throw in some privacy
>So if you move to a world where selling your data for services isn't available, then you're forcing them to pay and since we've determined they can't pay, all you're doing is removing the choice from them and forcing them in to the no-service option.
Like this is the only option... We already see a lot of services that sell multiple tiers of their products, with power users or larger companies paying significantly more.
We're talking about a companion app for one of the most expensive consumer headphones you can get ( $350 ).
I don't think this is about money, this is about using dark patterns and morally questionable behavior to get user data.
Yes, if you're older and wiser you can work around these, disable the app location data, etc. But a lot of people are oblivious to this, not because they don't care but because they are being purposefully deceived.
I’ve lived in a world similar to that. It was called the 1990s. It wasn’t particularly expensive, it wasn’t that hard to book hotels and, amazingly, people also got invited to parties and events. Also, your headphones didn’t spy on you.
This is how you know you were wealthy. Everything was so much more expensive then. I remember even trying to get maps or a digital marker for where you were required so much money. Noise canceling headphones? Forget about it.
And if you weren't in America with money, you could barely do anything online.
Hotels, air travel? So expensive. Way cheaper now. TVs? So cheap now. And where I lived you couldn't even book your own flights at the time. You needed a travel agent. Up costs. Nightmare.
I can assure you I'm not wealthy and never have been, other than in the sense of me living in the west (though not the US). My point is that life can be pretty damn decent without digital markers for where you are, constant air travel and a new TV every other year.
Yes, certain things have gotten more affordable. But is affordable noise cancelling headphones and cheap air travel really the result of apps and websites crawling up our backsides with a microscope and shuffling that data to some unknown other?
Air travel in the 1990s was much cheaper than, say, in the 1950s, much like computers, TV:s and headphones. In fact, the price of air travel dropped by roughly 1/3 between 1980 and 1995[0].
Evidence suggests that happened completely without constant digital surveillance.
Yeah, that's the funny thing. Since you're in the West, you're automatically so wealthy that you're practically the "How much could a banana cost, Michael? Ten dollars?" character. It so permeates your worldview that you do not think about the wealth. It's not uncommon or worthy of reproof. Class self-identification tends downward a little bit from reality. At worst, it just means you're a normal person.
Today, you can buy a $200 55" TV. That is truly amazing. That took data selling as one part of the metrics. I'm not saying it's the sole cause, because I don't believe that. But it drives down the price, just as it does for everything else in a competitive market.
Just like with air travel, TV:s have gotten larger and cheaper for a long, long time before data harvesting even existed as a factor. Yes, the price of TV:s are continuing to drop. Mostly because of cheaper panels. Of course manufacturers claim that TV:s would be unsellably expensive without telemetry, but then again, they make lots of money off it and "cheap" is a neat way to justify that.
Current prices might've taken a bit longer to reach without telemetry - although the latest most significant price drops occurred a decade ago or more, well before spy TV:s were baseline models.
Today, you can buy a 32" monitor for $200, and they've not yet begun spying on us. For pure screen real estate, yes, it costs more than a 55" model. But is it "expensive"? Heck, would it be "expensive" if it was a 28" CRT, like the one my current LCD TV replaced a decade ago?
Sacrificing privacy for constant upgrades to something bigger and ostensibly better is, to reply in kind, if anything a kind of wealth blindness: What could possibly go wrong to anyone who owns a 55 inch TV?
Bose and Sony, 2 of the most expensive tech product companies, are the example here. The option is buy your sub $10 wired skull candy earbuds and ignore anything that's more expensive because it isn't an option. It's the same reason recent generations grew p on fast food, it's cheaper and easier and all some people have resources for.
Bullshit. People don't care. You don't even have to go so far as not to use certain applications. In this particular case, if people didn't buy iPhones en masse, we probably wouldn't be dealing with wireless headphones because neither Google nor Android phone manufacturers have cared to be innovators on the hardware end.
Has anyone had any experience with new Bose headphones? If you use the Bose Connect app, I believe what the author wrote is accurate. But that app doesn’t work on the newer headphones (at least, not the ones I have). Instead I need to download the “Bose Music” app which doesn’t seem to give you the same options for privacy. And if you don’t use that app, the headphones are much less useful (eg, no hardware controls to switch which device you are connected to).
Why do you think they made a new app to begin with? the piracy policy is the same, its just after the media hype died down they saw no reason to add the opt out
Everyone, including headphone manufacturers, are trying to get in on the gold rush that is turning their customers into fonts of personal data that can be sold to the highest bidder.
I see this sentiment mentioned a lot, but who actually pays for this data? Is there a company I can call that will buy my amorphous "user data"? What are their names?
The obvious reason is money and a lack of ethics, but the dogwhistle reason is that these headphones are supposed to be used with a health and fitness app.
Say I have a database full of metrics, user agents, IPs, GPS, names, addresses, photos, etc. on a million users, who would I call to sell it? Genuinely curious.
Here's a list of approximately a hundred companies that acquire and sell data in various ways, some of whom would plausibly be interested in your hypothetical trove of data:
One part of CCPA is that data brokers have to register themselves with the Attorney General if they trade in the data of California residents. The registry is public. You could start there.
I don't know if this counts and I haven't seen it outside of research projects, but 3D spatialization (that's worth a damn) basically requires it be tuned for the user's particular head geometry.
The top end Sony headphones actually ask for a photo of your ears to do exactly this. It's only for use with the fancy spatially aware apps - pretty much only Deezer does this at the moment?
I signed up for a free trial (and I did send a photo of my ears), but I couldn't tell the difference and the HD library was so small it didn't seem worth paying monthly for it.
I've come to believe that this can only be fixed with legislation and regulation. There are no technical fixes that could practically be deployed as there is far too much "attack surface" and anyway there is zero incentive to deploy them.
In the meantime: install as few apps as possible on phones, be careful about IoT and personal assistance devices, and use Apple or Linux (not Android) based systems as they seem to have the best record for security and privacy.
iOS exploits are cheaper than Android exploits because they are so plentiful. Plenty of apps on iOS have been caught activating the camera or snooping on the clipboard on iPhones.
iOS seems to be more privacy oriented (for the western market, where the government does not yet have the power to force them to comply) by default, while android needs more work put in. If you did as much as you could to secure both I'd agree with you that android is more secure.
Exactly, it will be a cold day in hell before I buy a pair of headphones that I have to charge on order to make them work or have any "smart" features.
I broke down when I finally found good noise cancelling headphones that will continue working without battery. The annoying part now is that layering pass through audio of the outside world on top of what I'm listening to has become pretty nice.
The only thing that annoys me about this setup is noise of the wire brushing against clothing etc. Or if you eat with them on.
With music playing the removal of external noise is enough for me. They do well enough blocking distracting noise used as simple ear plugs too. At least the ~£20 Sennheiser ones I use do.
The sad thing is that many people will think it is Ok to give them this kind of private information, just in exchange for some crappy, useless app. 20 years ago, if somebody said they cared about how many steps they walked, or how many minutes they slept more than last month, or how many minutes they looked at the computer, you would classify them as mentally sick. Except for specialists that do research in these areas, there is no reason to keep tabs on minutiae like this. This whole industry is training people to behave as the mentally retarded, and give away all their private information for nothing.
Pedometers have been a thing for quite some time. It was about 20 years ago when one of my parents bought a pedometer, it didn’t have an app, but it had an lcd display that told you how many steps you took.
Just value adds, you can listen just fine without them. You might lose (in the case of the headphones that lead to the article) some fitness tracking features, ANC or EQ fine-tuning, or other additional functionality but they'll work just fine for audio.
Bose has a computer-based firmware updater over USB, I used it with their relatively new noise cancelling 700 headphones since I don't use the Bose Music app. Website launches a Windows desktop application for the update. Worked great in a Windows virtual machine with USB passthrough.
For older QC35 headphones there's a 'based-connect' repo on github that lets you configure the headphones; unfortunately the newer models such as the NC700 have encrypted firmware update files so I couldn't easily reverse engineer the protocol to get all the BT commands to configure all the options you can change in the app. Actually the app didn't even work on my Android phone without GApps, so I couldn't sniff the connection either...
I tend to use passive headphones with 3.5mm jack, they have no electronics in them except the small speakers. They do not collect data. They are also used by musicians when doing audio mixing so its should sounds neutral and good.
That the headphones does not have electronics and batteries means they will last longer and thus be be better for the environment.
> they will last longer and thus be be better for the environment
This isn’t necessarily true.
My wireless headphones have been with me for years. My wired earbuds are cheap enough that I can lose or damage them without care. The former are far better for the environment.
Of course it's not a universal rule. But apples-to-apples, with a wired vs. wireless set of similar construction, cost, and intended use, the wired will outlast the wireless, solely due to the battery (not to mention the other complexities inherent to a wireless set).
> apples-to-apples, with a wired vs. wireless set of similar construction, cost, and intended use
These aren’t independent variables. Most consumers I know will pay more for wireless headphones. They’re more convenient, and they’re anchored at a higher price point.
As such, I’ve watched lots of friends go from buying cheap earbuds monthly to having a pair of AirPods for years.
There is a lot of moralising around wired versus wireless. I’m pushing back against that fad.
My Sennheiser HD25 have been with me for 10 years and I stepped on them, dropped them used them outside in the rain, in sub zero degrees and three times a week while jogging.
10 years of that is a heavy thing to survive. In fact I know hardly any object that would have survived this long.
I bought $100 wired 'gaming' headphones 8 years ago and they still sound amazing and are as comfortable as when I bought them. I didn't give a shit about handling them well, since they were only $100 and seemed to have a very durable construction. The earpads are starting to get torn up from use, but those cost $10 to replace. The headband cushion is nonreplaceable but is only just starting to show any wear now.
Well-built wireless headphones have a lifespan of a few years; well-built wired headphones have a lifespan of ∞, as long as they are designed so that the wear parts can be replaced (earcups, headband cushion, cable).
My Sennheiser RS180 died a few month ago after about 8 years or so. They had normal rechargeable batteries, but it seems it was something else that broke down (the batteries got replaced a few times).
For my Sennheiser MB 660 I just replaced the ear cushions after about 3 years, but I am still 'worried' that some day the built-in battery will give up. Not because I can't afford new ones, but because I hate if a product dies due to an old battery.
I own a few wired headphones/headsets, but there is none I used as much as my RS180 and when I think about it, I doubt that the cable would have survived the usage. Actually, I had to repair one of the wired headset once. The MB 660 can be used with a (removable) cable, but I use it only on airplanes or when the device I want to use has neither USB (dongle) nor Bluetooth.
While I am privacy savvy person, my bigger concern is about health. Having an active unit all day in such proximity to my brain, makes me wonder if they are actually that safe to use.
I wonder if wireless ones can be hijacked and requested to produce and ultra loud pulse to damage hearing. I suppose that's possible with wired ones buy I guess you'd need to broadcast plenty of energy for them to pick up, which makes it impractical, whereas with wireless ones you just need to get control of the signal. I'm guessing though.
Depends on the type of wireless headphone. I can envision that as possible if you can break Bluetooth encryption and crank up the volume, but there are RF wireless headphones where the digital signal doesn't contain volume level, which is entirely on-device and only controllable with physical buttons.
Yes I had some 555’s for almost 18 years of DAILY use and abuse and the band up top eventually broke. I could replace it if parts weren’t more than a new pair.
The problem is that your wired headphones might break if you're not careful, but if you don't then they will work essentially forever. Your wireless headphones on the other hand will break at some point because the tiny lithium battery inside them will eventually stop holding charge. It's not a question of if but when.
I am aware that most wireless headphones use built-in batteries nowadays, but strictly speaking, your argument doesn't relate to wireless headphones, but to products with non-replaceable batteries.
The Sennheiser RS180, for example, had rechargeable and replaceable batteries inside. Ironically, mine died a few months ago, but I am still not sure what the cause was.
As an addition to you post: my wired headphones do break, but I can solder things at maybe a .1 mm scale. With wireless headphones repairability is beyond my ability in many cases.
Seems to me that the baseline assumption should be if you spend more, net, on the wireless (or wired) headphones, the environmental impact is probably greater. A million reasons can be given why the cost isn't exactly proportional to the environmental impact, but any time someone starts by assuming it's unrelated, I think they are probably not making good decisions.
Well duh. Obviously if you buy cheap headphones and constantly replace them that's bad for the environment. The grandparents point was that if you buy good wired headphones and use them for the same amount of time you'd use wireless ones it's far better for the environment.
There is an even easier analysis. If you were designing your own headphones just for your own use, would you have them collect personal data? If your answer is no, then choosing headphones that do not collect data is a logical choice.
The author cites some idea of "trading" ongoing collection of personal data^1 for features but I can't see how that applies here, assuming the user has already paid for the product, e.g., he has already paid for the headphpones.
1. This does not appear to be a one-time, voluntary submission of data by the purchaser. For example, submitting one's name and a product serial number in order to register for a warranty.
I'd put it a bit differently. If I were designing headphones for my own use, would I have them collect personal data and then give that data to somebody else. I like collecting statistics about myself, because they are interesting. For example, tracking exactly when I go to sleep, start my commute (pre-corona, that is), go on errands. But that is data that is for my use, and not something that I would trust in somebody else's hands.
For headphones, I could see tracking the usage by day, and by time of day. I could see tracking the average volume, the dynamic range, the frequency ranges used. How often do I spend listening to music, to conference presentations, to movies? Those would be fun data to have, but not something that I'd want under the control of a different party for privacy reasons.
Usually depends on who controls that remotely accessible shared computer. If it is under my control, or under the control of somebody I personally trust, then yes. If it is under the control of somebody else, then no.
Partly, that is because I've been coming to the conclusion that the privacy promises of a company are rather meaningless. In the case of bankruptcy, collected data is treated as an asset, rather than as a liability to be disposed of properly. In the case of acquisition, the database gets transferred to a parent company. For example, with Google buying Fitbit, they will have have access to all data collected by Fitbit. Though (as of yesterday), Google is stating that they don't intend to use this for advertising, I don't trust that not to be "accidentally" merged with google tracking ids in the future.
Indeed, I do not mean to suggest that shared computing is necessarily a net negative. Sharing a remotely accessible computer among trusted friends/family has always been an interesting idea to me because it would allow such easy communication. The way I see it, this is the core idea that underlies "e-mail" on UNIX. A group of people sharing accounts on a computer. UNIX allows easy messaging between accounts. Another group doing the same thing on another computer. Connect the two computers over a telephone line and now we have messaging to people in another group. Today, if you and I can both connect to the same computer, where we both have accounts, that is still an easy way to do messaging, in my opinion. Computers are no longer prohibitively expensive. There is no requirement that the computer belong to a third party. The ongoing problem however is that there needs to be someone who can administer the computer. It is not easy enough for anyone to do. It seems the "sysadmin" is still needed as much today as in the past.
Me, too! I use the $1 ones from Dollar Tree. They are easy to replace, come with microphones if desired, and work just as well on calls as expensive solutions. They don't always last as long, but purchasing 10 at a time fixes that.
Also, for phone calls and conferencing, wired headsets have neglible latency, compared to bluetooth, which is likely at least 100ms. In itself, this isn't terrible, but add the other latencies in (e.g. wifi, inter-city network). Our brains do a great job of compensating, but I'm starting to think that this compensating comes at a cost (headaches, tiredness), especially if you're on conferences all day as many are in remote work.
For now, Bose QuietComforts appear to pair just fine with Bluetooth without requiring the Bose Connect app, so that's how I've been using them. I'm afraid that non-smart headphones will soon go the way of non-smart TVs.
Even though I get your point and I am convinced you're using "simple" aptly, I will nitpick the obvious: passive headphones can be deceptively simple or a marvel of engineering.
If you didn't get the chance to listen to some music through proper audiophile headphones, I do recommend to spend some time at the closest audio retailer and live the experience.
One port, singular -- there's not enough knee real estate for multiple devices.
Open the laundry chute, it's in there along with a Thinkpad brick, both wired up from the basement. Ends have magnets that captivate them to the chute door for safe keeping.
From the many people I have asked this question, I think the disconnect between toilet phone users and us is the availability of "Alone time".
Specifically no matter what you do in your house/work for some there is always low key chance of someone bothering you. This is not the case when you appear to be using the toilet.
most phone support USB-C to ethernet. Always remember their are weirdos out there who are so into mobile games they have docked phones attached to cooling systems.
A joke about "ports" or "drops" in the bathroom is trying to form itself in my mind, but I am actively suppressing it to protect myself and the community.
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[ 197 ms ] story [ 2171 ms ] threadIt’s reasonable to assume that if you can’t audit and review the code of the app and the OS, you can trust neither and need safeguards at lower levels of the stack.
[1] https://www.tjoe.org/pub/direct-radio-introspection/release/...
I’ve never felt better about connecting “dumb” headphones.
While speakers are often wired directly to a one-way DAC, that's not always the case. Sometimes the analog lines are all fed into a multiplexer and it can be routed to a ADC. Sometimes it's wired to a general purpose IO pin.
In such cases, reprogramming could turn that speaker into a microphone. I wonder if anyone has exploited this in the wild yet.
My personal favorite is the laser attack that turns any shiny surface into a microphone. When it's not on it literally isn't there.
If you are a hacker who removed microphones from your computer but is worrying about this exploit, fortunately, a simple mitigation is possible - just put an audio amplifier or unity-gain buffer between the speaker and the audio output port, so the audio signal cannot travel back to the audio chip. Any "Hi-Fi" headphone amplifier can be used, but a $0.5 opamp is enough - a daughterboard can be tiny enough to fit inside a laptop.
Anyway, seeing the same comment over and over again reduces its value. It was a cool observation the first time, boring the second, redundant after that.
[1] https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/
one for on/off, hold to pair, hold long to reset bluetooth
one for noise cancellation
one for assistant
in addition it has the transport controls / battery response touch controls on the right earcup
The newer Bose 700's do have all that you have listed.
Not just Bose, the Sony WH* series is also guilty of this. Great cans, awful app.
[1] Circa 2018, I switched to Bose after that...
I didn't allow it to get my location and I can still get firmware updates and can use it to confirm the codec in use (that's the main reason I have it installed).
https://electronics.howstuffworks.com/bluetooth-surveillance...
https://www.soundguys.com/bose-allegedly-tracks-your-informa...
Or that people will see that as valuable?
Or that people have different preferences in their products than you?
You can still buy dumb headphones without Bluetooth or noise cancellation of you don't like smart devices.
You don't have to update any firmware if you don't want to. It doesn't mean the product is unfinished. In the past, improvements to firmware would have just been kept for the next revision of a hardware product, requiring you to pay for a whole new physical product just to get that new software.
Noise cancellation is great for those of us that have to work in noisy environments, or for neurodivergent people that need a break from information overload, or for long haul flights... or any number of scenarios you have not considered, as if nothing outside your little bubble matters. And let me guess, your "sardine in public transport" remark is just rubbing in that you don't have to rely on such either, isn't it?
Besides the point that noise cancellation can be turned off at any time, I have a perfectly fine pair of ATH-M50x's for use at home.
This comments reeks of ugly elitism and a severe lack of capacity for empathy. Maybe sometimes you should just not write whatever comes to your mind.
Bluetooth stacks constantly get broken with new revisions, the burden is unfortunately placed on individual device makers to update to work with whatever has broken recently.
Edit: Bose also had a nice big opt-out button in the app, and asks during setup.
They still included a dongle to give you a standard headphone jack.
While Apple could likely have gotten their water resistance even with the headphone jack, they couldn’t have made the phones as thin. People may disagree with the product choice, but I don’t see any reason to think that those weren’t the real reasons.
https://i-cdn.phonearena.com/images/articles/301929-image/iP...
No. They didn't.
iPhone 5: 7.6 mm thin, 6: 7 mm
iPhone 7: 7.1 mm
> While Apple could likely have gotten their water resistance even with the headphone jack, they couldn’t have made the phones as thin.
Except that's a pretty obvious lie. Not just that the phones did not get thinner (or lighter), they stayed around the same thickness (+- 0.5 mm), while getting larger, much heavier and much more expensive. But also the thinnest Android phone with a 3.5 mm jack is just 5.1 mm thick, for example. Sony even made a waterproof phone that's 6.5 mm thin and still has a 3.5 mm jack, which is thinner than any iPhone ever.
Everything about this argumentation is wrong or an outright lie. The only reason they did this is because they could moneygrab through accessoires better when they eliminate standardized I/O.
It looks like the reason most cited, in hindsight, for Apple removing it was to pave the way for a design without bezels and with more speakers
https://screenrant.com/why-apple-removed-the-headphone/ https://bgr.com/2017/10/06/pixel-2-headphone-jack-iphone-x-d...
Which is, indeed, a very different reason.
It’s almost as if “every argument I make about frugalness and standards is maybe leading me to ignore other considerations.”
“Pros” continue to make use of their wired kit, and it changes the math of recurring waste problem; I’ve thrown away many fewer pairs of $30 earbuds since iPhone 7. Saved money and generated less consumer waste over the long run. Now scale that up to the iPhone user base.
You seem to believe human agency must be functionally fixed on how we used to do things. Or at least how you have been lead to believe we did. Turns out iterating away through new invention is how we do things. Or do you have your wax cylinders ready?
And for people that want a wire a 2” dongle is available. Given all else they get with a life that affords an iPhone, oofda what a stretch.
Let’s get to the back of the line with our first world sour grapes a bit. I can see how broader utility was enabled in a variety of ways.
Sorry you haven’t been able to cope with, really, such a trivial change in 5 years.
Despite being aware of this, you went on to create a posting that's largely assumptions, projections and some salty ad-hominem.
> Sorry you haven’t been able to cope with, really, such a trivial change in 5 years.
I haven't upgraded my phone in a number of years, so it actually still has a headphone jack, which I virtually never use since I don't listen to music on the go.
I don't know who started the thinness-jack meme, I suspect it was an explanation made up by people other than Apple, since Apple is usually more into omitting things instead of lying.
When at my desk, I plug in through a Mont Blanc FiiO for my Beyerdynamic headphones. Makes a big difference with some audio. Wireless buds are obviously already a step down from wired, and one step further from amplified cans. And yeah, I'm an outlier and want to be.
So yes, the previous poster could conceivably be doing the thing that they said they were doing.
[1 PDF] https://www.innerfidelity.com/images/SennheiserHD600.pdf
What became of it?
But at lowish volumes (used most of the time, don't destroy your ears!) then yes, phones tend to have reasonable headphone amps in them. With decent power output and lowish output impedance. Unlike most computer motherboards, which have excessive output impedance and out power is so low I'd call anemic, when not flawed in other ways (noise due to poor isolation, or non-flat frequency reproduction due to shit implementations of aliasing filters).
I mostly connect the headphones to the phone to play rhythm games like Love Live sif, allstars or idolm@ster deresute, mirishita. My phone (chinese and a few years old) does very successfully drive the HD600 to a pleasant output while playing these games.
As an aside, I absolutely recommend Sennheiser HD600 to anyone who wants a durable (plus tool-free modular with good availability of parts, and compatibility with HD580/58x/650(aka 6xx),660S parts, thus effectively forever) all-rounder open back headphone with a focus on accuracy that's cost efficient and extremely comfortable. Plus they've been around for a good two decades, thus there's no shortage of reviews to base a purchase decision on.
[0]: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/r...
[1]: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/m...
Most headphones do sound colored relative to the HD600, but the key word is 'offensively'.
What happened to the world?
People are used to the government being there to prevent companies from doing bad/dangerous stuff. It’s why you can buy any food at any supermarket and be reasonably confident it won’t poison you or be full of cyanide.
People expect the same when it comes to technology companies, and I once did too - I expected that big companies would’ve already got in trouble if they did something bad so it must be safe. The problem is that is far from the truth.
Re: Bose collecting all that stuff
I can see "why" they would want all that, in order to optimize their sound output of their buds to the kind of music and environments for which they are used. That should, of course, be opt-in, but I don't think it is evil.
Do I necessarily like the latter example? No. I believe, like the "cookie policies" that exist on many websites, there should be "Needed permissions" and "Please thank you" permissions, and they should incentivize the consumer to help them out. Amazon does this on their Kindles: $20 off if you let them run ads on the lock screen.
But if all the manufacturers do this, then what competition is there to push them to change?
I can't see why they would need so many samples. Wouldn't using the data from (say) 100 Bose employees be sufficient to cover most noisy environments these buds are used in?
I believe it was iOS 10 or 11 developer betas that would, on each beta update, run a trial APFS conversion process against the phone's internal filesystem, check the result for consistency, and then discard the replica and report success/failure w/ logs — so that Apple could find the issues that they couldn't find at 'one hundred users' scale.
https://community.bose.com/t5/Around-On-Ear-Headphones/Bose-...
I bought headphones, I did not sign up for a research project.
We went from paying for software to getting it for free in return for our data and now we're apparently giving over our data even for physical devices that we pay top dollar for.
This is the thing that really bugs me. I don't like the user is the product aspect but I can at least understand it in a free setting. In a high case luxury setting where you aren't even getting a discount? That's just absurd. All they've done is increase their bottom end, give you no choice and no discount.
Seems pretty clear it is advertised to do more than play audio.
... Which makes total sense from a market efficiency point of view, at least as long consumers doesn't have perfect information and the time to stay informed about almost everything. Which isn't true, and people won't be, especially since the most basic decision theory that we can derive from our behavior would go almost entirely counter this.
... Which isn't strange at all as the number of new or changing facts that could affect our living situation probably didn't change as much from 150000 years ago, as changed last week alone.
Sometimes I think one of, or maybe the most damaging lie of our century is that we are generally capable of individual, rational thought for everyday decisions. We really are not, not to any significant fraction.
Almost all our decision are derived from observation of very few instances, judging based on survival instincts, and social cost/benefits.
In contrast much of rules regarding eg advertising and much of economic theory seems predicates that everyone has the time and energy to figure out which toothpaste company also are not totally exploiting some workers in some country five shell companies and thousands of miles away. But I digress.
Everyone knows their customers are highly susceptible to marketing, it would be a gold mine.
If people want to give their personal information out, that's up to them. I personally limit what information I share, and I get annoyed when devices or apps try to sneakily get more information than I'm willing to intentionally provide, but this article is silly.
The younger generation has grown up without a sense of personal privacy, and they're largely ok with it. They will happily give away personal details in exchange for a "free" app or product, and they bend over backwards to expose their entire lives via images and videos on social media. There's always mock outrage when someone "discovers" that the reason the Internet is free is because someone is selling personal data to drive advertising, but everyone knows that. Most people just don't care.
People care. They have no choice.
This is not an option for everyone. Don't poor people deserve privacy too?
And I know how it is because I was once affected by this. All these "but the poor people" folks disappear when the poor actually ask for help. It's like this:
Poor people: Hey, can we get the right to work for a living in a dignified way and use the same services as everyone else?
The Privileged Protectors: Okay, how about I make it so you can't work for more than 20 hrs and umm... I'll throw in some privacy
Poor people:...
You can't eat privacy.
Like this is the only option... We already see a lot of services that sell multiple tiers of their products, with power users or larger companies paying significantly more.
So eager to remove choices from someone else.
Oh people can't afford a car if it has seatbelts? Poor people should be able to buy unsafe cars! It's their choice!
We're talking about a companion app for one of the most expensive consumer headphones you can get ( $350 ).
I don't think this is about money, this is about using dark patterns and morally questionable behavior to get user data.
Yes, if you're older and wiser you can work around these, disable the app location data, etc. But a lot of people are oblivious to this, not because they don't care but because they are being purposefully deceived.
And if you weren't in America with money, you could barely do anything online.
Hotels, air travel? So expensive. Way cheaper now. TVs? So cheap now. And where I lived you couldn't even book your own flights at the time. You needed a travel agent. Up costs. Nightmare.
Yes, certain things have gotten more affordable. But is affordable noise cancelling headphones and cheap air travel really the result of apps and websites crawling up our backsides with a microscope and shuffling that data to some unknown other?
Air travel in the 1990s was much cheaper than, say, in the 1950s, much like computers, TV:s and headphones. In fact, the price of air travel dropped by roughly 1/3 between 1980 and 1995[0].
Evidence suggests that happened completely without constant digital surveillance.
[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/02/how-air...
Today, you can buy a $200 55" TV. That is truly amazing. That took data selling as one part of the metrics. I'm not saying it's the sole cause, because I don't believe that. But it drives down the price, just as it does for everything else in a competitive market.
Off to a great start there, champ.
> Huge TV
Just like with air travel, TV:s have gotten larger and cheaper for a long, long time before data harvesting even existed as a factor. Yes, the price of TV:s are continuing to drop. Mostly because of cheaper panels. Of course manufacturers claim that TV:s would be unsellably expensive without telemetry, but then again, they make lots of money off it and "cheap" is a neat way to justify that.
Current prices might've taken a bit longer to reach without telemetry - although the latest most significant price drops occurred a decade ago or more, well before spy TV:s were baseline models.
Today, you can buy a 32" monitor for $200, and they've not yet begun spying on us. For pure screen real estate, yes, it costs more than a 55" model. But is it "expensive"? Heck, would it be "expensive" if it was a 28" CRT, like the one my current LCD TV replaced a decade ago?
Sacrificing privacy for constant upgrades to something bigger and ostensibly better is, to reply in kind, if anything a kind of wealth blindness: What could possibly go wrong to anyone who owns a 55 inch TV?
Yes, dude, $200 is expensive. See, don't have to assume anything about you. You wear it on your sleeve. "Is it really expensive? It's only $200"
Being able to spend privacy for upgrades is freedom.
Not sure if this was intentional, but it made me chuckle.
Ask yourself (as the article does): why would they even need this data? (menstrual cycle?? Really!?!)
https://konsole.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/217592967-Thir...
https://www.oag.ca.gov/data-brokers
I worked for one for a brief time ~15 years ago (at the time it wasn't obvious what they were doing).
It's the kind of people that would have sent mass mail junk 60 years ago (and probably still send it today!).
Heck, you can see them even on this site, check for some marketing optimization technique articles that sometimes pop up here.
Even a good chunk of our fellow HNers are spammers.
I signed up for a free trial (and I did send a photo of my ears), but I couldn't tell the difference and the HD library was so small it didn't seem worth paying monthly for it.
I've come to believe that this can only be fixed with legislation and regulation. There are no technical fixes that could practically be deployed as there is far too much "attack surface" and anyway there is zero incentive to deploy them.
In the meantime: install as few apps as possible on phones, be careful about IoT and personal assistance devices, and use Apple or Linux (not Android) based systems as they seem to have the best record for security and privacy.
For some activities like running having no cables to deal with is a great experience (that you should try at least once)
With music playing the removal of external noise is enough for me. They do well enough blocking distracting noise used as simple ear plugs too. At least the ~£20 Sennheiser ones I use do.
For older QC35 headphones there's a 'based-connect' repo on github that lets you configure the headphones; unfortunately the newer models such as the NC700 have encrypted firmware update files so I couldn't easily reverse engineer the protocol to get all the BT commands to configure all the options you can change in the app. Actually the app didn't even work on my Android phone without GApps, so I couldn't sniff the connection either...
That the headphones does not have electronics and batteries means they will last longer and thus be be better for the environment.
This isn’t necessarily true.
My wireless headphones have been with me for years. My wired earbuds are cheap enough that I can lose or damage them without care. The former are far better for the environment.
These aren’t independent variables. Most consumers I know will pay more for wireless headphones. They’re more convenient, and they’re anchored at a higher price point.
As such, I’ve watched lots of friends go from buying cheap earbuds monthly to having a pair of AirPods for years.
There is a lot of moralising around wired versus wireless. I’m pushing back against that fad.
10 years of that is a heavy thing to survive. In fact I know hardly any object that would have survived this long.
Well-built wireless headphones have a lifespan of a few years; well-built wired headphones have a lifespan of ∞, as long as they are designed so that the wear parts can be replaced (earcups, headband cushion, cable).
For my Sennheiser MB 660 I just replaced the ear cushions after about 3 years, but I am still 'worried' that some day the built-in battery will give up. Not because I can't afford new ones, but because I hate if a product dies due to an old battery.
I own a few wired headphones/headsets, but there is none I used as much as my RS180 and when I think about it, I doubt that the cable would have survived the usage. Actually, I had to repair one of the wired headset once. The MB 660 can be used with a (removable) cable, but I use it only on airplanes or when the device I want to use has neither USB (dongle) nor Bluetooth.
While I am privacy savvy person, my bigger concern is about health. Having an active unit all day in such proximity to my brain, makes me wonder if they are actually that safe to use.
The Sennheiser RS180, for example, had rechargeable and replaceable batteries inside. Ironically, mine died a few months ago, but I am still not sure what the cause was.
I actually bought a couple spare HDR 185 headsets a few weeks ago, which I'm hoping last me for several decades.
The author cites some idea of "trading" ongoing collection of personal data^1 for features but I can't see how that applies here, assuming the user has already paid for the product, e.g., he has already paid for the headphpones.
1. This does not appear to be a one-time, voluntary submission of data by the purchaser. For example, submitting one's name and a product serial number in order to register for a warranty.
For headphones, I could see tracking the usage by day, and by time of day. I could see tracking the average volume, the dynamic range, the frequency ranges used. How often do I spend listening to music, to conference presentations, to movies? Those would be fun data to have, but not something that I'd want under the control of a different party for privacy reasons.
Partly, that is because I've been coming to the conclusion that the privacy promises of a company are rather meaningless. In the case of bankruptcy, collected data is treated as an asset, rather than as a liability to be disposed of properly. In the case of acquisition, the database gets transferred to a parent company. For example, with Google buying Fitbit, they will have have access to all data collected by Fitbit. Though (as of yesterday), Google is stating that they don't intend to use this for advertising, I don't trust that not to be "accidentally" merged with google tracking ids in the future.
These little earbuds are commodity items.
Even though I get your point and I am convinced you're using "simple" aptly, I will nitpick the obvious: passive headphones can be deceptively simple or a marvel of engineering.
If you didn't get the chance to listen to some music through proper audiophile headphones, I do recommend to spend some time at the closest audio retailer and live the experience.
Open the laundry chute, it's in there along with a Thinkpad brick, both wired up from the basement. Ends have magnets that captivate them to the chute door for safe keeping.
Specifically no matter what you do in your house/work for some there is always low key chance of someone bothering you. This is not the case when you appear to be using the toilet.
Still seems weird to me though.
Also: https://en.rockcontent.com/blog/ipad-usage/
USB-C to Ethernet