We hear it all the time: “I swear my phone is listening to me because I just saw this ad about the exact thing I was just talking about.” Online ads undeniably have a way of promoting the same products and services we talk (and think) about. So is your phone really spying on your conversations?
No, your phone is not recording your conversations and uploading them to some remote server to be analysed for generating ads that are then beamed back to your phone. Yes, it’s hard to believe that’s not happening, considering how creepily relevant some ads can seem.
Ads that seem to know your conversations aren’t due to virtual assistants like Alexa, Siri, or Google Assistant recording audio. Although they do record clips when their wake words are used and some of these clips are reviewed by specialists to improve their responses, background conversations may also be captured. However, these recordings aren’t the source of the targeted ads.
Advertisers Don’t Need to Eavesdrop
Advertisers can easily determine what you discuss without audio recording. By combining current trends with information such as demographics, location, search history, shopping behavior, and daily activities, they can determine what people like you are interested in, as your interests often reflect the topics you talk about.
For example, let’s say you meet up with a friend at a coffee shop. Just beforehand, your friend decided to glance at prices for panini makers on Amazon. Then, somewhere during your conversation, they casually drop the line, “Man, I’ve been really craving a good panini lately.” You ignore the comment and move on, but the next time you go online—bingo—the first ad you’ve ever seen for a panini maker.
Did your smartphone analyze your friend’s comment and decide it should try to sell you a panini maker? No, Google just grabbed a few simple data points and put two-and-two together. It was easy to see from your friend’s browsing history they had paninis on the brain, and geolocation data gathered from both your phones made it obvious you were spending time together. No audio recording was necessary to show you something relevant, just standard data tracking and a bit of logical guesswork. The fact that paninis came up in conversation was just an unsurprising coincidence.
Recording Conversations Is Completely Impractical
Promoting ads that coincide with what you’re thinking and talking about is really that simple, but it’s also just plain efficient. In fact, what ad companies do is far more efficient than snooping on your in-person conversations.
Yes, it is technically possible for software on your phone to record audio and upload it to a remote location at the same time. But all of that work would put a huge strain on your phone’s resources, draining your battery and likely driving your data usage through the roof. Some advanced kinds of spyware might behave like that, but the difficulty and costs of infecting a phone mean you’d need some seriously powerful enemies to have cause for concern.
Another problem is the simple fact that, in terms of bytes, a decent-quality voice recording is gigantic when compared to data points like your most recent search and location history, which are much more compact. Imagine the resources it would take to transfer, store, and process the audio from every smartphone mic at the same time all day long. It’s just not feasible, not even for Google.
Your Conversations Aren’t Really That Valuable
Okay, let’s say big tech companies with their vast resources were hiding a huge underground lab where everyone’s real-life conversations were being stored and analyzed for ad targeting. The problem is that the entire project would be a tremendous waste of time and energy. Why? Because, at the end of the day, for advertisers at least, your chats with friends and family aren’t even worth listening to.
Whatever you’re talking about right now, ad-serving software probably knew you and your friends were interested in a long time ago. Your hot takes and new obsessions are old news for companies like Google. That movie you saw last week and liked so much that you told your coworkers about it? Google probably guessed you were going to see it before you decided to and may have known you enjoyed it by the way you interacted with your phone during and after the showing.
On top of that, people lie and mislead about their interests in conversation all the time. Who hasn’t faked interest in a friend’s boring hobby out of politeness? Any secret eavesdropping lab would quickly have to shut its doors thanks to that low-quality, inaccurate data. But you know what doesn’t lie? Your browsing history.
How to Stop Those Creepy Ads
So if muffling your phone’s microphone closed won’t actually get you any real privacy, what can you do to stop those suspiciously relevant ads from appearing? Unfortunately, not much.
Privacy on the internet is a myth. Your smartphone is a little sponge soaking up every bit of valuable data it can, and anyone asking for that data generally can have it. You can minimize the amount of data being collected and shared with changes like tweaking your Google account’s privacy settings or switching to privacy-centred alternatives to popular services like Brave for search and Signal for messaging. There’s no bulletproof solution, though, data points like nearby Bluetooth and Wi-Fi signals make geolocation tracking difficult to stop.
So instead of worrying about voice recordings, you should really just remember one thing: don’t do anything on your phone or take your phone anywhere you aren’t comfortable with advertisers (and other authorities) knowing about.