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Comment by cirgue | Hacker News Reader

> Yes which supports all kinds of functionality that people like. Just because you have a processor on or mic listening for wake words doesn’t mean everything is always being transmitted or evil is being done.

No, but it means that I’m losing agency in whether or not those things can happen. That’s not ok and not benign.

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The 'listen for music' feature on pixel phones is optional and off by default.

Yes, I have a Pixel 3 and can confirm that the feature is off by default; I turned it on for a while to experiment and then turned it off again. Also, it appears that if you turn it on, it compares what it hears against a much smaller set of popular songs (probably comparing against a set of feature vectors that's already on the phone); the search for anything obscure tends to work only if the Google Assistant is used.

What is the use case that feature? I get an active "what is this song".

It demoes well at I/O.

But.. What is the use case? That... The phone can give you statistics of what music you've been listening to?

Sort of like a "here is the locations you've been to, because we've been tracking you at every step", but instead "here is the music you've listened to, because we've been eavesdropping at all times"?

for me, its like a soundtrack recorder for my life - sometimes ill remember that there was a cool song playing at the bar and with this feature, its likely that my phone captured the song and tells me what it is - there are 3rd party apps that will give you location based info for when and where you heard the song as well, so it creates a music map and timeline for you. its a very niche feature.

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