• hotcouchguy [he/him]
    ·
    edit-2
    3 months ago

    And what exactly am I looking for in wireshark? A few KB of encrypted text data occasionally sent to who-knows-where? Mixed in among a flood of other tracking bullshit and general wasteful bloat? Yeah lemme go check real quick.

    Computationally, we've had low-quallity speech to text on home PCs for like 30 years, and we've had OK-quality NN implementations for like 15 years. Yes it would be a bit wasteful, but a trimmed-down NN could easily hide among the general bloat of modern software.

    Yes it would be kind of a clunky and impractical way to collect data compared to other methods, but it's definitely plausible that an adtech startup could hack together a semi-functional version of this and then slap it in a slide deck. It would let them say "AI" more times during their pitch.

    • Camdat [none/use name]
      ·
      3 months ago

      You can filter by device. Leave your suspect device connected to your network for a few days, filter by destination and review. Also keep an eye on CPU usage.

      If your devices have a ton of random outgoing network requests you're already being tracked in a myriad of other ways and need to lock your shit down.

      I've done this before, there's not as much network bloat as you might think.