A lot of people have had a very creepy experience with their phones. One woman told Misryoum that “Sometimes when I talk about something with my friends, then I’ll, like, look on TikTok 30 minutes later – and the same thing will show up.” Another visitor to New York said that after talking about a trip before arriving, their Instagram reel was full of New York content “for weeks.”
So, is your phone listening to you? Misryoum spoke with Ari Paparo, an ad industry veteran, consultant and author, who is pretty direct about it: “It is not,” he said. Paparo says he’s been asked about this “a million times,” and that he can “guarantee” phones aren’t passively listening for advertising purposes.
Why does it feel that way, then? Paparo argues the math of targeted advertising doesn’t require grabbing audio from your day. Advertisers can tailor ads to what they infer from the websites you visit and the apps you use. “They can infer or deduce things about you, like where you live, and your age, and probably what you’re interested in, based on what’s websites you went to or what apps you’ve used,” Paparo said. Put simply: the phone may not be eavesdropping, but your digital trail can be loud.
There’s also the “someone else in the room” factor. Paparo told Misryoum that if you live with someone who searched for a product online, ad systems may connect the dots across the household internet connection. “Your wife could have looked for a peeler, and then the ad company couldn’t really tell the difference between her and you, because you’re using the same internet in the same household,” he said. “That happens a lot.” And yes, this is the kind of moment where you might swear you said it out loud—especially if you’re standing in your kitchen, kettle quietly steaming, and then the exact ad shows up when you open an app.
Misryoum also spoke with David Choffnes, a professor of Computer Science at Northeastern University, who wanted to test whether smartphones are spying on people by recording audio. He and his team conducted a study with thousands of apps on an Android device, watching what happened “as you interact with these apps” and asking whether they record audio and send it off. “We didn’t see any surreptitious recording of information,” Choffnes said, though he stressed that the broader picture is still unsettling: these companies are “very good at watching everything you’re doing online.”
In fact, Choffnes set up a fake apartment packed with connected devices—smart appliances, cameras, smart speakers—to see how much data they send. “We try to identify, are they sending data to places we’re not comfortable with?” he said. Advertisers may not know your name or address, but they do know categories you fit into, and in many states, data collection companies have to provide data to you on request. Choffnes said he obtained a report “more than 300 pages” long, filled with “inferences about me.” It also wasn’t perfect—his report included an Xbox that he says he doesn’t have, and it claimed he’s extremely likely to go on a cruise, which he called “interesting, ’cause I never want to go on a cruise!”
If you want to limit what you feed advertisers, Misryoum reports Choffnes suggests pushing lawmakers for consumer-friendly rules, not protections that only benefit the businesses collecting data. Paparo adds that your browser choice matters too: “The Safari browser doesn’t allow a lot of this,” he said, noting that advertisers are “not big fans” of Apple and Safari. And for the record, Paparo doesn’t believe smartphones are overhearing you—he’s also certain of another thing: “I’m positive that no one will believe me!”
Vivo X300 FE brings big zoom with extender support