Are Smartphones Secretly Listening to Our Conversations?
- Admin
- Dec 2, 2019
- 2 min read
Dec. 1, 2019
How much privacy are you willing to trade for convenience?
Coco and Vivian are talking about their picnic plan while they’re waiting for the bus. The bus comes, and Vivian gets on the bus and scrolls through her Instagram stories. An advertisement pops up and shows that picnicking equipment is now on sale! Vivian could not help but wondering “Was my phone listening?”
According to John Pracejus, director of the retail school, University of Alberta, the mobile technology industry will point to algorithms that can predict with amazing accuracy what you are likely to think or talk about.
Yet on the other hand, Pracejus did not deny the assumption that our phones may be spying on us. “Another possibility of course is that they are, in fact, listening to you,” he said.
“Smart TVs listen to you, phones listen to you, all of these voice-activated pods listen to you. It’s unknown how much of that is being recorded and transcribed and stored and used for ad-serving purposes,” said Pracejus.
However, according to an online statement posted in 2016, Facebook insists it does not eavesdrop on users’ conversations in order to target them for advertisements.
“We show ads based on people’s interests and other profile information – not what you’re talking out loud about.”
Google admits that it scans its users’ emails for advertising purposes, though promised to stop doing so. In July 2017, the free email and search engine giant said they would stop reading through their 1.2 billion consumer emails.
“After this update, Gmail content will not be used or checked for any modification of ads,” the company announced.
Moreover, there is, in fact, a research investigation to prove how phones that secretly listen to us are a myth. Cyber security-specialists at Wandera have emulated the online experiments and found no evidence that phones or apps were secretly listening.
They put two phones - one Samsung Android phone and one Apple iPhone into an audio room. Next, they played the sound of cat and dog food ads on loop for 30 minutes.
The security specialists kept apps open with full permissions granted to each platform for Facebook, Instagram, Chrome, SnapChat, YouTube, and Amazon.
They subsequently repeated the experiment for three days and noticed on the “video space” phones no specific pet food commercials and no noticeable increase in data or battery use.
They found no evidence of listening-but they found some relatively small applications sending screenshots and even videos of client phone operation to third parties.
Regardless, the research company co-founder and chief executive Eldar Tuvey is confident that the overall results show that any secret transfer of significant data is not happening.
"I would put my name to the research and say that we found no evidence at all this was happening on the platforms we tested. It might be happening in a way we don't know about - but I would say it's highly unlikely," Mr Tuvey said.
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