[HN Gopher] New Apple Study Shows LLMs Can Tell What You're Doin...
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New Apple Study Shows LLMs Can Tell What You're Doing from Audio
and Motion Data
Author : andrewrn
Score : 63 points
Date : 2025-11-22 15:45 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (9to5mac.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (9to5mac.com)
| chasing0entropy wrote:
| If you're interested in this concept, it's not new and the alarm
| has been sounded since the android Facebook app required motion
| sensor permissions in android 4.
|
| https://par.nsf.gov/servlets/purl/10028982
|
| https://arxiv.org/pdf/2109.13834.pdf
| thewebguyd wrote:
| > alarm has been sounded since the android Facebook app
| required motion sensor permissions in android 4.
|
| Serves as a useful reminder that just because someone may not
| care if these companies collect this data _now,_ they are
| storing it, sometimes indefinitely, and as technology advances,
| will be able to make more use of it than they were at the time
| you agreed to share it with them.
|
| It's like all the ransomware gangs hoarding the encrypted data
| they stole, waiting for a quantum computing breakthrough to be
| able to decrypt it.
|
| Not sure what to do about it, if anything, but the average
| person is severely under-equipped and undereducated to deal
| with this and protect themselves from the levels of
| surveillance that are soon to come.
| skybrian wrote:
| There are exceptions, but for the most part, I'm not sure
| that knowing specifically what I was doing five years ago has
| much value to me or anyone else?
|
| I was probably sitting in front of a computer.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| You are not always the target, but leaking data like this
| empowers those that may use it against someone else. I mean
| to say, you are providing training data. People who move-
| like-this-at-these-times _also_ have these other
| tendencies... It 's like fusion sensing.
|
| Same with secure messaging. You might not care that [insert
| boogeyman here] know what you're doing all day, but people
| you interact with may be harmed by you being leaky.
|
| Anyway, the whole point is your lack of imagination is not
| a good reason to embrace surveillance. Rejecting
| surveillance on principal slows down our descent into a
| panopticonical hellscape.
| globalnode wrote:
| Firstly, I looked up panopticon, and it does indeed seem
| like that is how modern societies are being structured
| now, and secondly... It is true that people generally
| seem to display a lack of imagination regarding all of
| this. The whole "ive got nothing to hide so what do i
| care if they surveil me" attitude comes across as selfish
| and naive in this light.
|
| I wonder what ad-tech or whatever org would do if we got
| to a state where they just couldnt track or id people.
| Would we still have free entertainment on the net? would
| the net even still be mainstream?
| fsflover wrote:
| If only activists and journalists hide, while everybody
| else provides all data to the government/Facebook, then it
| becomes easy to track them.
| hexbin010 wrote:
| I tried denying the Sensor perm to most apps and my battery
| tanked. My guess is there are a few that sit in a busy loop
| trying to get the data with no handling of the permission not
| being granted, because it's expected on 99.99999% of devices
| andrewrn wrote:
| Something to note here that annoys me about the title is that the
| LLMs aren't taking in the raw data (LLM's are for text, after
| all). The raw data is fed through audio and motion models that
| then produce natural language descriptions, that are then fed to
| the LLM.
|
| Unrelated: yeah, this article is a little creepy, but damn is it
| interesting technically.
| palmotea wrote:
| AI will finally allow us to bring 1984's Telescreens into
| existence, at scale.
| godelski wrote:
| Doesn't the smartphone already far surpass the Telescreen's
| capabilities and presence? It does more and we carry them in
| our pockets.
|
| Do people not realize we're beyond 1984? In 1984 the tech
| wasn't always listening, rather it had the capacity to. Much of
| it was about how not knowing meant you'd act as if you were
| just in case. It was making reference to totalitarian states
| where you don't know if you can freely talk to your neighbor or
| if they'd turn you in, where people end up creating a double
| speak
| pramsey wrote:
| In 1984 the idea was there were not enough people to listen
| to everyone, all the time, but the mere possibility was
| enough. Of course, for us with AI, things are considerable
| worse. Also, tele screens were mandatory. We are not there
| with cell phones in a de jure sense, but certainly there in a
| de facto sense. Of course, if enough people carry phones, it
| doesn't matter if a few stragglers don't, they will get
| caught in the net unless they live as hermits, in which case
| who cares about them. All the pieces are in place, there is
| no reason we cannot have a global North Korea.
| gizajob wrote:
| Time to ditch the Apple Watch then
| macintux wrote:
| One more positive interpretation of Apple's research interests
| here is that devices like the Watch can better differentiate
| between "the wearer just fell and we should call 911" and "the
| wearer is playing with their kids".
| bigyabai wrote:
| "Can" does not necessarily mean "will", especially for Apple.
| I wouldn't be surprised if you're describing a feature slated
| for release in 2037.
| astrange wrote:
| https://support.apple.com/en-us/108896
| b00ty4breakfast wrote:
| nuclear power generation is pretty beneficial, but that
| doesn't justify the existence of nuclear weapons.
| rckt wrote:
| Why do you need LLM to interpret patterns?
| drdaeman wrote:
| > The researchers ran the audio and motion data through smaller
| models that generated text captions and class predictions, then
| fed those outputs into different LLMs (Gemini-2.5-pro and
| Qwen-32B) to see how well they could identify the activity.
|
| Maybe I'm not understanding it, but as I get it, LLMs weren't
| really important: all they did was further interpreting outputs
| of a fronting audio-to-text classifier model.
| Lerc wrote:
| The same reason you need transistors to make computers.
|
| You don't need them, but they are one way to do it that people
| know how to implement.
|
| Identifying patterns is fairly amenable to analytic approaches,
| interpreting them, less so.
| nrhrjrjrjtntbt wrote:
| A better analogy is: same reason you need FPGAs to run x86
| code. You dont, but if FPGAs are hot and good for your career
| you gonna use them.
| bigyabai wrote:
| To ensure you drank your Verification Can of Mountain Dew, of
| course.
| skavi wrote:
| Maybe the 2026 Apple Watch will be able to auto detect running as
| reliably as my 2015 Samsung Gear S2. My 2022 Series 8 is
| certainly not there yet.
| frizlab wrote:
| That's weird, I have perfect running detection on an old(er)
| (Apple) watch. Detection does start late (but is retroactive,
| so it's not an issue).
| mh- wrote:
| And that's by design, because it waits for a larger window of
| data to gain confidence. Notice how you ~never get false
| positives on it starting an exercise session.
|
| I see comments like GP's often enough that I think Apple just
| does a bad job explaining how/why it works.
| disambiguation wrote:
| https://abc7.com/post/student-handcuffed-doritos-bag-mistake...
| TZubiri wrote:
| The tinfoil interpretatio that LLMs can spy on you is
| shortsighted and a bit paranoid, it would require LLM providers
| to actually run a prompt asking what you are doing.
|
| However, any system with a mic, like your cellphone listening for
| a "Hey Siri" prompt, or your fridge, could theoretically be
| coupled with an llm on an adhoc basis to get a fuller picture of
| what's going on.
|
| Pretty cool, if an attacker or govt force with a warrant can get
| an audio stream they can get some clues although of course not
| probatory evidence.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| we'll inevitably have universal tracking for everything like this
| (good luck privacy), it's essentially machine learning around a
| bunch of vibration patterns... ideal for a device that hundreds
| of millions of people are carrying everywhere daily
| eth0up wrote:
| In about:config (Firefox) would
|
| _device.sensors.enabled = false_
|
| have any effect for browser based access, or is this strictly the
| app?
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(page generated 2025-11-22 23:01 UTC)