{"id":60118,"date":"2015-06-29T12:00:31","date_gmt":"2015-06-29T11:00:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=60118"},"modified":"2015-06-23T17:08:33","modified_gmt":"2015-06-23T16:08:33","slug":"google-chrome-listening-in-to-your-room-shows-the-importance-of-privacy-defense-in-depth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2015\/06\/google-chrome-listening-in-to-your-room-shows-the-importance-of-privacy-defense-in-depth\/","title":{"rendered":"Google Chrome Listening in to Your Room Shows the Importance of Privacy Defense in Depth"},"content":{"rendered":"

18 Jun 2015 – Yesterday, news broke that Google has been stealth downloading audio listeners onto every computer that runs Chrome, and transmits audio data back to Google. Effectively, this means that Google had taken itself the right to listen to every conversation in every room that runs Chrome somewhere, without any kind of consent from the people eavesdropped on. In official statements, Google shrugged off the practice with what amounts to \u201cwe can do that\u201d.<\/em><\/p>\n

It looked like just another bug report<\/a>. “When I start Chromium, it downloads something.” Followed by strange status information that notably included the lines “Microphone: Yes” and “Audio Capture Allowed: Yes”.<\/p>\n

\"Without<\/a>Without consent, Google\u2019s code had downloaded a black box of code that \u2013 according to itself \u2013 had turned on the microphone and was actively listening to your room.<\/p>\n

A brief explanation of the Open-source \/ Free-software philosophy is needed here. When you\u2019re installing a version of GNU\/Linux like Debian or Ubuntu onto a fresh computer, thousands of really smart people have analyzed every line of human-readable source code before that operating system was built into computer-executable binary code, to make it common and open knowledge what the machine actually<\/em> does instead of trusting corporate statements on what it\u2019s supposed<\/em> to be doing. Therefore, you don\u2019t install black boxes onto a Debian or Ubuntu system; you use software repositories that have gone through this source-code audit-then-build process. Maintainers of operating systems like Debian and Ubuntu use many so-called \u201cupstreams\u201d of source code to build the final product.<\/p>\n

Chromium, the open-source version of Google Chrome, had abused its position as trusted upstream to insert lines of source code that bypassed<\/em> this audit-then-build process, and which downloaded and installed a black box of unverifiable executable code directly onto computers, essentially rendering them compromised. We don\u2019t know and can\u2019t know what this black box does. But we see reports that the microphone has been activated, and that Chromium considers audio capture permitted.<\/p>\n

This was supposedly to enable the \u201cOk, Google\u201d behavior \u2013 that when you say certain words, a search function is activated. Certainly a useful feature. Certainly something that enables eavesdropping of every conversation in the entire room, too.<\/p>\n

Obviously, your own computer isn\u2019t the one to analyze the actual search command. Google\u2019s servers do. Which means that your computer had been stealth configured to send what was being said in your room to somebody else, to a private company in another country, without your consent or knowledge, an audio transmission triggered by\u2026 an unknown and unverifiable set of conditions.<\/p>\n

Google had two responses to this. The first<\/a> was to introduce a practically-undocumented switch to opt out of this behavior, which is not a fix: the default install will still wiretap your room without your consent, unless you opt out, and more importantly, know that you need<\/em> to opt out, which is nowhere a reasonable requirement. But the second<\/a> was more of an official statement following technical discussions on Hacker News and other places. That official statement<\/a> amounted to three parts (paraphrased, of course):<\/p>\n