Earphones focused on privacy.
Hey guys! I'm looking fot a new aripod and i just discovered that they collect A LOT of data actually. There is any TWS airpod that don't collect a lot of data? How can i have more privacy with airpods?
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58 replies
Bro, use wired headphones.
Who are you concerned about the data going to? Intercepting a Bluetooth signal is not really a thing anymore. Your phone OS has plenty of ways to know what you're listening to without Bluetooth itself being thr vector. If you use GrapheneOS and Linux, you're good there. The headphones themselves aren't going to have a Sim card that is phoning home.
So then you're left with third party software being the attack vector. For this reason, I would not install headphone apps, and ESPECIALLY not earbuds that require connecting/registering to a third party account like Amazon Echo buds.
This unfortunately means no custom EQ. For my open ear headphones, I tried out my top 4 choices without downloading the app, and picked the best sounding & most comfortable pair. That happened to be the Nothing Ear Open. My over ear Sony XM4 headphones that I already own are amazing but needed EQ badly, so I installed the app on an old Android, tweaked the EQ, and it saved the EQ information to the headphones themselves. Not all headphones can do this, however.
Damn, thnks for the suggestions, gonna check it out the Nothing phones. In fact there is a open source app for headphones, but cany remember now.
You're welcome. If you remember, let me know.
"Wired wired wired"
Meanwhile phones: "3.5mm what now? Never heard of it."
I'm not ditching Graphene to get a phone with more spyware to replace my headphones with wired to avoid the headphone spyware. Seems counterproductive.
There's always the option to get a USB-C headphone adapter.
And put wear and tear on my only charge port, no thank you. If they'd give me two usb-c ports I wouldn't bitch about the lack of 3.5mm as much though, tbf.
Been using the for years on pixels. If you wear and tear your charging port that bad using an adapter your doing something wrong. I've worn the cable adapters out after years of use and never once had a charging port issues. Not even with dirt in it.
There's some adapters that split into headphone and charging. Certainly less clean than just having another port on the phone itself but it's an option if you like wired headphones.
Yeah but my issue isn't charging while listening (though now that you mention it, that too lol) but the undue plugging and unplugging on my sole port, for the dongle to solve that I'd need to leave it connected 24/7 which would be madness lol.
I've seen too many charging ports ruined by being pulled at weird angles. You're making the same choice I am, I just use a crappy DAP now because I am not going back to a spyware phone.
Yeah I'm considering it, but I already carry too much stuff.
You remember those shitty sandisk mp3 players that took an SD card but were pretty small? I Need an updated one but with 1tb microSD.
That is exactly the type I am recommending really. Mine is super gimmicky, but fun. It is shaped like a cassette and can be put into a cassette player and actually work. I have a 256GB sdcard in it, works fine with all my mp3s and flacs.
Get a nice pair of IEM's for audio quality. If you need Bluetooth get a fiio Bluetooth DAC or smtn similar
Get wired headphones then... Plug them into a Bluetooth adaptor? Doesn't that entirely defeat the purpose of the wire for quality?
This is the way
I'm a big fan of Etymotic wired IEMs. They aren't for everyone, but they have a good balanced sound and isolate well and every once in a while you can find them on a very good sale.
Their earbuds are really great, the cables less so.
You got a bunch of replies itt about different alternatives but not a lot dissecting what the problem is and what the feasible extent of the “solutions” are.
You asked for true wireless stereo airpods so I’m gonna assume you’re in the Apple world. If that’s so, I’m a privacy minded person who uses the old g2 airpods and has accepted the tradeoffs involved. When you need replacements the website therightpod.com is a fine place to go.
The airpods themselves arent really a huge vector for data collection, it’s the os that’s doing that. Apple is insane for telemetry because it’s how they find and fix bugs. The idea is to have a separate pathway for technical crash data to get to the qa and development people instead of relying on customer support for that. From the perspective of a developer, a support rep and a customer it’s a much better experience. You can turn a good portion of it off in settings.
True wireless earphones use Bluetooth. Bluetooth was never designed to be secure and has to support a large variety of mechanisms for pairing that are inherently insecure. Bluetooth must also support a truly enormous number of devices whose idea of a hardware shared secret is the Indian certificate authority “4”. Bluetooth cannot be “secure” and therefore cannot be private. The word is in scare quotes because there’s some cool stuff but people are constantly bypassing bt so how cool or safe some new method happens to be is up for analysis.
Don’t have conversations over Bluetooth that would implicate you. Don’t have conversations over a device connected to the known compromised cell network that would implicate you.
Actually i meant earphones. I realized airpods are a Iphone thing, so my bad.
No worries. All the same advice applies with the additional caveat that unless you’re on graphene you should trust an Android handset less than an Apple one.
You can’t get private tws headphones and even going wired isn’t any real solution because you’re sending the unencrypted signal up what amounts to an antenna in order to get it to your ears. And all the data collection is done on device so even if you’re using wired headphones you are still being telemetried.
If there’s a specific thing you’re concerned about or want to avoid, spell it out and I can try to help. I use graphene and ios daily.
I want to deliver minimal data as possible! I'm trying to ditch big tech and their data collection so i am focusing on privacy alternatives to eletronic devices. I am using a computer with Linux, going to buy new motorola with Graphene and now i want to find earphones tws that gives you a little bit of privacy.
If you’re worried about data collection your first step needs to be to get on either ios or graphene. You are already moving towards graphene so that’s good.
The problem you’re gonna run into with tws earbuds is the app. Each earbud has a whole ass little dsp in it which it needs because the sound is beamed to it as data and translated into analog audio before being sent to an amp and then to the little speaker in the earbud which excites your eardrum.
But in order to keep the timing right if you happen to have both in, they need to also communicate what frame of the mpeg audio stream they’re on and synchronize their output so you don’t have a very disorienting experience.
Now when you have the kind of muscle that lets you decode and synchronize playback between two speakers in real time you also have the computing power to apply the kind of “not just an eq” needed to get really quite nice sound quality out of a package the size of half a pinky finger.
Which is a huge deal because things the size of an earbud sounded like garbage 30 years ago for reasons of the laws of physics. The two ways to resolve that problem are using much more expensive designs and materials or throwing the equivalent of a pentium 4 at it. Take a wild guess which avenue the designers of the sort of tws earbuds you and I can afford went down.
If the maintainer of your phones os is the same as the manufacturer of the earbuds, they probably work great together and you probably don’t need any special software. If they’re not the same then the bespoke set of transforms applied to make the earbuds sound acceptable (or do noise cancelling, voice isolation, room tone compensation and a whole host of other stuff that headphones just fucking do nowadays) won’t be present unless you install the manufacturers special app.
Used to be you only had to worry about how much data your phones os is sending off, now you gotta worry about the middleware that makes your headphones work right too.
The problem with just not using the apps is everything is gonna sound like shit and you’re no longer able to trust what you see in reviews or other people’s experiences on the non review parts of the internet because they’re all using the app. So you can’t even trust other people when they say that some brand/product is good across whatever parameters define goodness for you and them.
You just gotta see what works for you and what can sound okay on graphene without some proprietary app and despite what probably everyone itt is saying, no one can help you make that choice in the slightest. If the shitty $20 Walmart ones work fine without the app and sound okay to you then accept a huge win and stop worrying about it.
If you want to be 100% sure no data is being collected by your headphones your nest bet is going to be going back to wired. I assume that is not an answer you want but anything that uses a Bluetooth connection can be used as a vector to collect data on you. The only thing I can think of is either having your data off while using them, but that's probably just postponing the data collection. Do you have a source on what data is being collected? Would be much easier to find places you can help reduce the amount of data being collected.
From what i read they collect data based on their app, and the problem is that many earphones manufacturers oblige you to download it!
Fairly sure graphene OS wouldn't be doing it.
Are there any particular apps that are going to harvest this data?
I use pipepipe for YouTube / SoundCloud.
Poweramp for local files and it's never asked for network permission.
AirPods have data collection built into the OS. Only thing you can do is to use different headphones.
If you're shopping for Bluetooth ones, skip the app. It's guaranteed to have a bunch of data collection. But most of them will work fine with just a Bluetooth connection and you're guaranteed safe. The apps are completely unnecessary.
i don't use these kinds of earphones, how does that even work when it's an audio connection through bluetooth. legit curious on this one.
I'm not sure I understand the question. Are you asking how Bluetooth audio works?
i'm asking how apple is doing this. how exactly are they exfiltrating information through their earphones?
do they have an app that downloads whatever it listens to from the charger pod thing? do they use a "tethered" bluetooth connection through my phone i could sniff for on my router? is this something that could potentially be on their (already liberal) terms of service?
They're not. They're doing it through the OS.
what are they sending though? if it's something like "the os potentially listens to you, except through headsets too" then it's not really news that wouldn't apply to most phones or headsets sold. a wired earphone could do that.
"Most phones or headsets sold" need a third party app to gather any information. The point here is that Apple doesn't require that because all of those communications are built into the operating system.
not mine or most of the ones i've seen around.
Often a specific protocol over Bluetooth isn’t part of the subset of Bluetooth the host device natively supports or the functions offered by the headset are not natively supported by the host device.
The new FairPods? Heard something like that coming out soon
I agree with what @[email protected] said. Fortunately a friend of mine introduced me to IEMs when I was thinking of buying new audio gear and I ended up buying a pair for about €80 (Letshuoer S12).
Since the day I got them I’ve used them daily, the audio quality is amazing, they sound better than my airpods 2 and I also don’t have to deal with Bluetooth shenanigans.
Maybe [email protected] or [email protected] can help you decide what to get if you’re interested. My advice would be not to go crazy with the price if it’s your first pair so you can get an idea of what you do and don’t like.
Hell yeah IEM's are the best
Someone gave me some Anker Soundcore, then Tue changed the app to require network access to use the features and a cloud sign in, plus AI garbage to record voice. Thankfully there is an OpenSource app for it that works without network
I have Anker headphones as well. You don't need the app at all.
How do you set the noise cancelling adjustments without the app, or how do you set the equalizer options, or how do you alter the button options, or how do you toggle which devices to connect to from your dual connect list...if you have no app?
You don't, presumably.
Use an EQ on your device?
You don't.
This is usually handled by the OS.
So you lose functionality without an app.
The soundcore open source app allows you to pre-pair a bunch of devices, they then show as a list and you can pick two with the toggles to swap your earbuds to different decives on the fly. It skips the repairing steps. I.e. I have multiple computers at home (work system and home system), and a work phone and home phone. It is handy to swap from meeting, music, or phone calls
I just meant they're still functional
Ah. I wouldn't buy soundcore if all you wanted was playback with no features.
Why's that?
Really? I have the same ones and the app update is disappointing. Do you have a link to the open source version? Edit: a quick search brings up https://github.com/Oppzippy/OpenSCQ30
Yep, I think that's the one I downloaded. You can block network access in permissions, and just leave nearby devices on. And everything works. Even managing dual connections with toggles so you can have several pairing and decide which two to connect with.
I have a pair of $5 wired iem's and they're fine. Besides privacy, there's also fewer things to go wrong with pairing, less audio latency, less batteries to keep charged and to fail, etc. And they're cheap. No idea what an airpod is but if you mean those ones with a separate radio and rechargeable battery for each ear, with the additional carrying case with its own rechargeable battery, I'd just stay away.