Do Our Phones Listen to Us?

It’s happened to many of us: You’re walking down the street, talking on the phone with a friend or a family member about “the best [insert item of clothing or fashion here]” you’ve ever seen. You want it, but you’re not sure if you’re going to buy it just yet.

You hang up. You open Facebook or Instagram. And there’s an ad for it, right in front of your face.

Your natural conclusion (along with 43% of Americans): Your phone is “listening” to your conversation, feeding your conversation to a marketer somewhere in a back room, and that marketer is targeting you with an ad as a result.

But are our phones actually listening to us? Consumer Reports recently did some digging on this years-old theory (or maybe “concern” is a better word), and the short answer is: No.

They looked at a study that analyzed more than 17,000 popular apps on Android devices, and “…did not find a single instance where an app activated a phone’s microphone and leaked audio data.” Further, Consumer Reports says, Michael Covington, a vice president at the unified cloud security solution company Wandera, oversaw a similar study of “…high-profile apps known for large-scale data collection, including Amazon, Chrome, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.” Wandera also found no evidence of apps recording audio. The two studies concluded, in short, that “…recording audio just isn’t a very practical way to gather market intelligence, because accurately translating that audio into text for analysis would require massive amounts of computing power, especially if done on a large scale.”

So perhaps this theory/concern/rumor can be put to rest. But that doesn’t mean that those with concerns about their privacy online can relax just yet. After all, this type of targeting feels eerily immediate; if they aren’t listening to our conversations, it would only make sense that brands are figuring us out in other ways.

And it turns out they are: Consumer Reports shares in this same article that researchers “…found that 9,000 Android apps were secretly taking screenshots or recording videos of smartphone activity and sending them to third parties. In one case, a food-delivery app recorded video of the user’s activity and shared it with a data-analytics firm.” So, it wasn’t necessarily your conversation about that pair of shoes or that great jacket that led to the ad you’re seeing right after you talked about it – it may have been the fact that you were browsing for that merchandise in your favorite shopping app not too long before you had that conversation, and that app may have already captured your interest to buy before you thought to chat about it over the phone.

Regardless of exactly how brands are capturing consumer interests, targeted ads with this level of specificity can feel downright creepy. As business leaders, we might want to keep this in mind if we hope to build trust with our customers and avoid freaking them out as we market our products or services. And as consumers, perhaps we can find peace of mind in the idea that our phones probably aren’t listening to us after all. (Though, I did just get an ad for Zabar's right after I was talking about buying bagels this weekend!)