Are our phones listening to us?

You are casually scrolling through your Instagram feed, and there you see it – an advertisement for that obscure product you mentioned in a conversation with a friend. You’re confident you didn’t google search it, or even text about it to a friend. While the tech experts claim our phones are incapable of doing it, the internet is convinced that our phones are listening to us.

The industry will claim that complex algorithms can predict what consumers are likely to be thinking or talking about, and the technology used to listen in and wait for verbal cues certainly does exist. However, the industry continue to deny that these devices are listening to us beyond their intended purpose.

In particular Facebook insists that it does not eavesdrop on user conversations in order to target them for advertisements or content. Instead, they claim that ads are showed based on people’s interests and other profile information – not what a consumer is talking about out loud. Facebook advertisers can target users by age, location, interests and behaviours – including device usage. Facebook asserts that the only time a device’s microphone is accessed is when the user has granted its app permission and if ‘you are actively using a specific feature that requires audio’.

https://globalnews.ca/video/rd/573509699785/?jwsource=cl

Have you ever experienced a situation where you think your phone has been listening to you?

And further, how much privacy are you willing to trade for convenience?