"Your Phone Isn’t Spying on You to Show
You Ads (It’s Worse Than That)"
Your iPhone is not eavesdropping on your conversations
to sell you things. It’s actually much worse.
by Stephen Johnson
Excerpt: "Yesterday I asked my wife what she wanted for her birthday. She told me she’d like a cordless Dremel. Later, I was served an advertisement for - you guessed it - a cordless Dremel. Now, we’d never talked about hand-drills before; I have no interest in power tools, I’d never done a search for them or looked at them on Amazon, so the phone must have been listening to what we were saying. It has a microphone right there, so why wouldn’t it be sending our voices to Google headquarters or wherever so they can send me an ad? What other explanation is there? It turns out there is another explanation, and it’s stranger and more insidious than high-tech eavesdropping.
Your phone isn’t listening to you (at least not how you think it is): Your phone is listening to you at all times, sort of. If it wasn’t, personal assistant apps wouldn’t be able to spring into action when you say “Siri” or “Alexa.” But that’s a different kind of listening. Your device is only always listening for a specific word (or the “wake word”). Only after it hears that do the smarter parts of its digital brain light up.
Your conversations are not routinely transmitted to distant advertising companies so they can pick up random words and serve you commercials. This would take a lot of resources, and probably violate wiretapping and other privacy laws. It also just doesn’t make sense: There would be too much noise in listening to everything everyone says, and not enough signal to bother - especially since advertisers already know everything relevant about you without having listen to you prattle on to your dumb friends.
What data your phone is actually collecting: Instead of eavesdropping and storing your voice as many assume, your apps, phone, watch, game system, computer, and probably your oven are greedily collecting every data point they possibly can, including but not limited to your:
• Location information (both through your device’s location settings and IP address)
• Search history
• Browsing history
• Purchase history
• Physical interactions (that is, how you physically use your device)
This information, taken as a whole, is way more valuable and useful than whatever you talk about, and basically anyone who wants to can buy it. Advertising companies don’t, as a rule, connect this data to anything that can specifically identify you (like your name and address). That wouldn’t be hard to do, but there isn’t much in it for advertisers. They know everything you do, 24 hours a day, so what difference does your name make? The process itself is called fingerprinting, and it allows advertisers to track you across sites and apps."
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