Is My Phone Listening to Me? It’s Not That Simple, but the Truth Is Just as Creepy - The Compass Blog | Digital Identity and People Search

It’s no secret that our phones and web browsers gather and monetize a lot of information about us, but how they do that isn’t always obvious. A lot of people believe that cell phones straight-up eavesdrop on their users — 43 percent of us, according to a 2019 poll conducted by “Consumer Reports” — and use that information to serve targeted ads. That may or may not be true, but there are definitely things you can do to protect yourself either way.

The Spy in Your Pocket

As you’d expect, there’s some controversy over the whole question. Some journalists, notably Sam Nichols in a widely shared Vice article from 2016, claim to have tested this personally and demonstrated an undeniable correlation between spoken phrases and the ads that are served.

Writing in “Wired” magazine in 2017, Antonio García Martinez — formerly Facebook’s first ads-targeting manager — argued that actually recording your conversations and parsing that data was more technically challenging, and less useful to Facebook than its existing data-gathering tools. In effect, it’s like mining your own iron ore and coal to hand-forge a shovel when you’ve already got a perfectly good excavator.

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Researchers at Northeastern University and the private security company Wandera were interested enough to put the eavesdropping theory to the test in a laboratory setting. Both teams concluded definitively that phones weren’t stealthily sending audio data back to a third party. So does that mean you should be getting fitted for a tinfoil hat? Not necessarily.

So Is My Phone Listening to Me?

Recording your actual conversations and sending them back to a server somewhere would use up a big chunk of your data and generate unmanageable quantities of information, but that’s not the only way your spoken words can be used. Human “auditors” can and do review a small percentage of interactions with Siri and Google Assistant (and Alexa and Cortana) to help improve their performance.

If you use Siri or Google Assistant your phone legitimately listens for trigger words like “OK, Google,” and any app can have its own trigger words that prompt it to take a selected action or send a predefined message back to its developer or a third party. Even more worrisome, researchers at both Northeastern and Wandera discovered that any app on your phone can record screen captures and keystrokes — including logins, passwords and account numbers — without your knowledge.

Remember those terms of service you agreed to when you started using Apple and Google services and Facebook’s site and apps? Those companies know where you’ve been from your phone’s GPS data and where you’ve logged in, they know the purchases you’ve made and keywords you’ve used in your emails. Many other companies have similar information, either because you use their software and services or because they’ve bought it from someone else.

Really, it would be amazing if the targeted ads you see weren’t scarily accurate.

How to Stop Targeted Ads (or At Least Minimize Them)

You can’t just tape over your phone’s microphone, the way you can with a laptop’s webcam. What you can do is use the settings in iOS or Android to review which apps have permissions to use the mike and your location data, and turn them off on a case-by-case basis. You can leave permissions in place for a few core apps, or just toggle them back on when the apps are in use. This won’t stop deliberately malicious apps, but most legitimate developers won’t risk getting kicked out of the App and Play stores for breaking the rules.

More importantly, you can limit the ways companies track you across the internet. Here are a few easy options:

Turning off your GPS and location settings when you’re not actively using them
Logging into sites individually, instead of using your Facebook or Google credentials
If you use Chrome, routinely logging out while you’re using the browser

You might also want to opt for an alternative browser that’s built around privacy. Firefox’s Focus mobile browser, for example, includes tracker blocking and other privacy measures by default. Ghostery, maker of a popular tracker-blocking browser extension for computers, has a stand-alone privacy-centered browser for Android and iOS. Even the Tor browser, the option of choice for seriously paranoid computer users, is now available for Android. Technical limitations of the iOS platform mean Tor itself won’t run on iPhones, but the company’s Onion Browser provides some of the same functionality for Apple users.

One More Step

Aside from those things, there’s one deceptively simple step to reduce targeted ads, which many users forget: Just ask nicely. Both iOS and Android have settings to cut down the use of targeted advertising.

In iOS go to Settings, then Privacy > Advertising and turn on the self-explanatory Limit Ad Tracking.
To limit Apple’s use of your location data, go back to Privacy and choose Location Services > System Services, then turn off Location-Based Apple Ads.
In Android, Go to Settings and then Google Services. Tap Ads and turn on Opt out of Ads Personalization.

Following these steps won’t eliminate all of the targeted ads you see, but it will reduce the number of targeted ads you see and also increase your overall level of privacy. To get a sense for your broader digital footprint — including the information advertisers are likely to use to send you those personalized ads — use a people information service like Spokeo to look yourself up. You may be surprised at what you find!