this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2024
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Recent versions of Android make it much more difficult for a background app to access the microphone. There will be a notification if any background app is using the mic or camera.
Google's "Now playing" feature constantly listens to what's going on in the background to show you what songs are playing. They claim this is done with a local database of song "fingerprints". The feature does not show the microphone indicator because: "...Now Playing is protected by Android's Private Compute Core..."
I'm not saying that other, non-google, app do this to my knowledge; but the fact that this is a thing is honestly a bit scary.
For what it's worth, I did just test it with airplane mode and it still correctly identified the song playing. So at the very least, it's not lying about using a local database to identify songs, at least when it is offline.
It also uses a cloud fingerprint database apparently according to the second paragraph:
Oh, I didn't notice this, my apologies. Turning on identify songs nearby reveals two new options, notifications and show search button. That show search button option must be new; I had identify nearby music on already since my last phone. Guess they added something new. My bad.