Is your phone listening to you? Yeah, but probably not to target ads.
By Shira Ovide
Most of us have felt twinges of paranoia that your phone is eavesdropping.
Maybe you talked with your spouse over dinner about buying new ice skates for your kid, and the next day you see an online ad for skates seemingly out of the blue. Eek. Was your phone listening to show you that ad?
Last week, we got more fuel to stoke those fears when Apple agreed to settle a five-year-old lawsuit that claimed Siri recorded people’s conversations without their knowledge to show them related advertisements. One plaintiff said Siri was responsible for ads they saw for a specific surgical treatment after they discuss edit with a doctor.
Apple said, “Siri data has never been used to build marketing profiles and it has never been sold to anyone for any purpose.”
The theory that your gadgets are listening to your conversations to serve targeted ads probably isn’t true. But the truth may be worse.
Voice assistants, AI chatbots, your car and many websites and apps do log your activity, your location, your voice and videos from inside your home — sometimes without your true consent — and use that information for advertising or other purposes you don’t expect.
Why your devices (probably) aren’t ad-targeting eavesdroppers
For years, Northeastern University professor David Choffnes has helped analyze how often our phone apps and voice assistants capture audio without our knowledge, and whether recordings from gadget microphones are used to tailor advertisements.
While he won’t completely rule out the possibility, Choffnes says, “the odds are slim” that an uncanny ad you see comes from your device microphones listening to what you’ve said.
It’s hard to prove exactly what’s going on, but he said companies collect reams of information and don’t need to overhear you to know all about you.
“They’re getting such a deep picture of us as individuals, more so than listening to any conversations,” Choffnes said.
In the hypothetical dinner conversation, maybe you didn’t search the web for ice skates after your chat, but your spouse did over your shared WiFi network. Perhaps your phone apps have logged the time you’ve spent in or near a skating rink. Advertisers could also have bought information about the age of the children in your household. All that data could be used to show you ads for kids’ skates.
If you’ve ever clicked an offered explanation of why you’re seeing a particular online ad, the information is typically so vague that you have no clue. No wonder you jump to creepy conclusions.
“When they hide this information, you develop ideas of how they got to you,” said Jason Kelley, director of activism for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a consumer advocacy group.
If you still believe your microphone must be the source of creepy ads, maybe this helps: Technical expert shave said that if your phone were listening all the time, you’d notice that your battery was running down quickly, and that companies wouldn’t waste the gobs of money it would cost to constantly listen in.
But companies shouldn’t be trusted
Companies are almost never up-front about how digital advertising works, what they’re doing with all the information they collect about you or when humans are watching and listening in to supposedly automatic systems.
The lawsuit that Apple just agreed to settle kick-started from news reporting more than five years ago that workers were listening to snippets of audio recorded by Siri, Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant and Google Assistant, and from people’s audio chats in Meta’s Messenger app. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)
In some cases, the voice assistants were turning on and recording audio without people summoning them. Apple said this week that it settled the lawsuit “to avoid additional litigation so we can move forward from”what Apple acknowledged in 2019 were human reviews of a small fraction of audio snippets from people’s interactions with Siri.
Apple and other companies have said they may have humans and computers review audio and text transcriptions of your voice assistant interactions to check the accuracy of their technologies. (Read more below on how to exert more control over Siri.)
In research published in 2020, Choffnes and his collaborators found that voice assistants didn’t activate when they shouldn’t most of the time. And when they did, the recordings sent to the tech companies were typically just a few seconds of audio.
Still, it’s unsettling to think about audio being recorded of you, particularly when your voice assistant flips on by mistake. Nor should anyone reasonably expect humans to listen to those audio snippets — or have people watch intimate videos captured by robot vacuums from inside your home.
No wonder you feel paranoid about your gadgets eavesdropping. The companies’ behavior has made us distrustful.
How to exert more control over Siri
To limit Siri accidentally activating, consider changing or turning off the “wake” word that summons the assistant.
Open the Settings app on your Apple device → Siri → Talk to Siri. Choose the option for “Hey, Siri” rather than just “Siri,” which might trigger your assistant if you say a similar-sounding word.
Or choose the option for “Off.” Siri won’t activate with your voice at all. If you still want to use Siri sometimes, some iPhones may show you the option to “Press Side Button for Siri.” You hold the button on the edge of your iPhone for a second to activate Siri.
Choose whether you want humans to potentially review audio snippets from your Siri interactions.
Apple asks for your consent, typically when you first start using Siri, to have workers potentially listen to audio snippets from Siri interactions for accuracy — or what Apple calls “improve Siri and dictation.”
You can change your setting at any time from your Apple device’s Settings app → Privacy & Security →Analytics & Improvements. Choose the option for “Improve Siri & Dictation” until the button flips from green to gray.
“We use Siri data to improve Siri, and we are constantly developing technologies to make Siri even more private,” Apple said.
Read more from EFF about privacy measures you can take, including stopping apps on your phone from accessing the device’s microphone.
And for stronger privacy protections, download the EFF web browser add-on that puts limits on companies keeping tabs on everything you do. Or change your web browser to Firefox, Brave or DuckDuckGo, which have some strong built-in privacy safeguards.
I also need to periodically remind you that consumer privacy advocates say you’d be better protected if there were better (or any) national laws stopping companies from collecting, sharing and using data about you.
Here's How It Works https://www.digitalrightsbytes.org/topics/is-my-phone-listening-to-me
Data brokers are often companies you have never heard of that collect, buy, and sell data primarily for advertising purposes. They use what they can find out about you online—from social media accounts and web pages, for example—with what they can find out about you offline—your age, the type of car you drive, and your address.
These data brokers create detailed profiles with this information, and then advertisers make educated, creepy guesses about the kind of things people with those profiles might buy. You're seeing ads about new bed sheets because some people who visited a certain website that you also visited, or who bought the same mattress you did, have purchased new bed sheets—so advertisers think you might want them, too. Or maybe someone in your home browsed online for bedsheets the night before, and now ad platforms are retargeting you with bedsheet ads.
Much of this data isn’t information that users have explicitly shared. It’s information that’s been actively, and silently, taken from them.
A few specific examples of tracking
When you go to a website on your phone or computer, you might be assigned an identifier through a tracking cookie that follows you as you look and search online. This is one method of tracking which follows your virtual activity.
You can also be tracked physically in the physical world. In order to find nearby Bluetooth devices and WiFi networks, your device is constantly sending out short radio signals that contain your device’s unique identifier. Companies can use devices that silently listen for these identifiers in their vicinity, and then use that data to track the movement of specific devices over time.
Why this needs to change
Allowing this rampant data collection, sharing, and selling hurts everyone. Companies direct risky advertisements to vulnerable people and exclude certain groups from receiving opportunities. Bad actors misuse that data to spy on or harass individuals. Data breaches put that private info out into the world for anyone to buy. And government agencies and law enforcement can purchase the data without getting a warrant first. (There’s a joke that everyone has an “FBI agent” assigned to listen to their phone. That isn’t true, but government agencies do have ways to access data like this that are in need of serious reform.)
Limits on data collection and bans on these types of behavioral ads will help us in a lot of other ways as well. We’ve got a whole list of them here.
So why aren’t there strong laws to protect us from companies collecting our private information in other covert ways? Simply put: there should be, and in some states there are. But right now, there’s a lot of money to be made in data collection and advertising.
What you can do
Download Privacy Badger to Block Invisible Trackers
EFF's Privacy Badger is a browser extension used by over three million people to stop companies from secretly tracking where you go and what pages you look at on the web. To the trackers, it’s like you suddenly disappeared. Download it on your desktop for Chrome, Firefox, Edge, or Opera. Privacy Badger is also available on Firefox for Android.
Check Your Phone’s Settings:
- Change app permissions on your Android phone,
- Control access to information in apps on iPhone,
- Learn about how mobile phones share your data and how to protect your privacy.
Some operating systems and applications do use your phone’s microphone, with your permission, and some malware or spyware can infect your phone and do it covertly as well. But if an app was listening to you without your consent, the company behind it could be violating some very clear laws and have to face huge fines.
Turn Off Data Collection on Smart Home Devices:
Some data can be collected unexpectedly by some smart home devices.
Learn about and Advocate for US Consumer Privacy Laws:
- EFF’s Recommendations for Consumer Privacy Laws.
- Privacy First: A Better Way to Address Online Harms.
EFF has your back
The Electronic Frontier Foundation works to defend your digital privacy. Our non-profit organization of lawyers, technologists, and activists build privacy protecting tools and fight in court, in Congress, and across the country to ensure that your communications are protected from unconstitutional searches, government agency spying, and technical backdoors. Over the last thirty years, we’ve won important protections for your privacy, free speech, and innovation rights.