An advertisement pops up on one of our screens after we express interest in a product? Many people are convinced that their phone is listening to them. Is that plausible, asked the rumor detector? Maybe not the way we imagine.
1. Energy intensive
In principle, spying on a user is possible via the phone’s microphone. A recent French law also authorizes police to remotely activate the microphone of a cell phone as part of investigations related to terrorism or organized crime (among others).
But spying on all users 24 hours a day via the phone’s microphone would be extremely ineffective: it would be a huge energy expenditure and would require a lot of data space, even if recent technological advances allow applications to convert speech to text format (which would take up less storage space ).
In addition, a phone listening 100% of the time would put a lot of strain on the battery and consume a lot of data, which would alert its owner…
2. Listening voice assistants
With voice assistants like Siri or Google, our phones are in “listening mode” to pick up keywords that can “wake” them. However, this option can be disabled by the user.
In 2021, German researchers and journalists wanted to see if it was technically possible to create an application that would listen to us without our knowledge. They found that they could continue recording through the microphone beyond the permission given by the user: when the app was running in the background or when the phone was turned off but the app was not closed. However, current versions of Android and iPhone phones notify their users with a small orange or green dot in the right corner of the device when the microphone is active.
Additionally, the Chron tried an experiment in 2023. Using a new Samsung phone, the journalist mentioned several keywords near the device for two days (without using the voice assistant and without writing them) and tried to influence the advertising that appeared there. He wasn’t successful.
3. The phone stops…other devices
Without listening to us, we have known for a long time that electronic devices rely on ultrasound to better send advertising. Television advertisements that contain ultrasound, sounds that are inaudible to the human ear, can be picked up by mobile phones, tablets or computers to “play” an advertisement from the same company.
In 2017, two German researchers identified 234 applications on Android that use this type of technology, and the Federal Trade Commission in the United States ordered developers to stop using SilverPush technology.
4. Rumors but no evidence
The BBC reported in 2019 that IT security company Wandera wanted to test whether phones used the microphone to offer targeted advertising. She concluded that this was not the case. A study by German researchers published in 2019 concluded that despite extensive research efforts over the years, no evidence confirmed the rumor that phones were secretly eavesdropping on us to deliver us targeted advertisements.
5. There are more effective ways to learn more about us
As journalist Jean-François Cliche summarized in 2021, application makers and developers have the technological capacity to listen to us. But that’s not necessary: they know much more about us than we imagine.
Every search we make on the Internet, every page consulted, every video viewed on YouTube or TikTok, all geolocation data, exchanges via messaging, publications on social networks and the content that we have shared, commented on or “liked” there ” are volumes of information that we voluntarily share with tech giants and that end up saying much more about us than random phone conversations.
This does not take into account the exchange between platforms: for example, social networks can acquire information from external sources without our knowledge, allowing us to know our marital status, whether we have already been involved in a legal dispute, or even the information collected through loyalty programs in trade.
In 2018, researchers tested more than 17,000 apps on Android and found that some took screenshots or videos of user actions and sent them to third parties… Ironically, these researchers instead wanted to test whether the apps were recording the conversations (they found). nothing like that).
The technologies that Facebook uses for targeted advertising could also be described as invasive: thanks to Meta Pixel (formerly Facebook Pixel), the social network tracks the activities of its users across millions of websites in order to tailor its advertising (for example, by recognizing that we stop us). on certain pages, that we make a purchase, etc.). Facebook can also detect that we are physically with a friend who has this or that interest and then offer advertisements related to the same things, inferring that what interests our friend also interests us.
6. The Illusion of Frequency
It is also possible that this impression of a The connection between something someone said and an advertisement that then appears is simply the result of what is called frequency illusion. This is also known as the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon and happens, for example, when we hear a new word and then feel like we see it everywhere: our brain perceives it more strongly. Likewise, on a normal day, in all our words, we will only notice the word that was followed by coincidence. Given what GAFA knows about us, it is perhaps inevitable that such coincidences will happen.