Is Your Phone Listening to You? Unveiling the Truth About Device Surveillance
TL;DR
Explore the intriguing question of whether smartphones are listening to our conversations. This article delves into recent controversies, expert insights, and the underlying technology behind targeted advertising. Learn about the latest in corporate surveillance and how to protect your privacy.
Main Content
This week on the Lock and Code podcast…
You’ve probably experienced it before. You and a friend are talking—not texting, not DMing, not FaceTiming—but physically face-to-face about an upcoming vacation, a new music festival, or a job offer you just received.
Later that week, you start noticing eerily specific ads. There’s the Instagram ad about carry-on luggage, the TikTok ad about earplugs, and countless ads about laptop bags as you scroll through the internet.
And so you wonder, “Is my phone listening to me?”
This question has been around for years, and today, it’s far from a conspiracy theory. Modern smartphones can and do listen to users for voice searches, smart assistant integration, and obviously, phone calls. It’s not too outlandish to believe, then, that the microphones on smartphones could be used to listen to other conversations without users knowing about it.
Recent news stories don’t help, either.
In January, Apple agreed to pay $95 million to settle a lawsuit alleging that the company had eavesdropped on users’ conversations through its smart assistant Siri and shared the recorded conversations with marketers for ad targeting. The lead plaintiff in the case specifically claimed that she and her daughter were recorded without their consent, which resulted in them receiving multiple ads for Air Jordans[^1].
In agreeing to pay the settlement, though, Apple denied any wrongdoing, with a spokesperson telling the BBC:
“Siri data has never been used to build marketing profiles and it has never been sold to anyone for any purpose.”
But statements like this have done little to ease public anxiety. Tech companies have been caught in multiple lies in the past, privacy invasions happen thousands of times a day, and ad targeting feels extreme entirely because it is.
Where, then, does the truth lie?
Today, on the Lock and Code podcast with David Ruiz, we speak with Electronic Frontier Foundation Staff Technologist Lena Cohen about the most mind-boggling forms of corporate surveillance—including an experimental ad-tracking technology that emitted ultrasonic sound waves—specific audience segments that marketing companies make when targeting people with ads, and, of course, whether our phones are really listening to us.
“Companies are collecting so much information about us and in such covert ways that it really feels like they’re listening to us.”
Tune in today to listen to the full conversation.
Show notes and credits:
Intro Music: “Spellbound” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Outro Music: “Good God” by Wowa (unminus.com)
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Conclusion
The intriguing question of whether our phones are listening to us remains a hot topic. While tech companies deny any wrongdoing, public anxiety persists due to past privacy invasions and the pervasiveness of targeted advertising. Stay informed and protect your privacy by understanding the latest in corporate surveillance and ad-tracking technologies.