You have probably experienced this before; right after talking with a friend or family member about a certain topic (let’s say the iPhone 12) you almost immediately get an ad on your phone about the iPhone 12 with a nice discount.
I experienced this phenomenom myself before as well. My colleagues were talking about visiting the Dolfinarium (an aquatic zoo in the Netherlands), right after this conversation I checked my weather app and there was an ad about tickets of the Dolfinarium. Experiencing this felt like I was being spied on and I didn’t like it. The internet is full of other people with the same kind of experiences, but is our phone really listening to us in order to provide highly personalized ads?
Many people believe that this is true, but according to the Washington post (Tatum Hunter, 2021) your phone is not listening to you in order to provide personalized ads, Mark Zuckerberg even denied this under oath during his senate hearing in 2018 (Bloomberg, 2018). It appears that the big tech companies are already aware of our interests with the use of our past transactions, search history, and online profiles. It is also possible that after your conversation, you look up the price of the product that your talking about, which gives a reason for the platforms to offer ads about this product (Caitlin Dewey, 2016). But this explanation still doesn’t explain the fact that I received an ad about the Dolfinarium when I wasn’t even interested in going there. In fact, I’ve only been to the Dolfinarium once (when I was eight years old).
WWLTV did an experiment to test if our phones are really listening and eventually came to the same conclusion, it appears that while browsing the internet and using apps on our phone we provide the companies behind those apps a tremendous amount of information on our own interests and for example location data that they can provide these highly personalized ads in real time. In case you would like to watch the YouTube video by WWLTV use the following link: YouTubeVideo.
Do you think that our mobile phones are listening to us?
References
Bloomberg. (2018, April 10). Transcript of Mark Zuckerberg’s senate hearing. Retrieved September 28, 2022, from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/04/10/transcript-of-mark-zuckerbergs-senate-hearing/
Caitlin Dewey. (2016, June 6). No, Facebook doesn’t eavesdrop on your phone. But it does spy on you. Retrieved September 28, 2022, from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2016/06/06/no-facebook-doesnt-eavesdrop-on-your-phone-but-it-does-spy-on-you/
Tatum Hunter. (2021, November 12). Ask Help Desk: No, your phone isn’t listening to your conversations. Seriously. Retrieved September 28, 2022, from https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/11/12/phone-audio-targeting-privacy/
Very interesting text and I bet all of us have wondered about this at some point. I remember experiencing a similar situation that you described in your text and began to investigate it myself. My opinion is that phones do not listen to us. For one, the amount of data these companies would have to collect to do this is incredibly vast. Furthermore, I would believe that this would leave traces and as this practice is illegal, it would have severe consequences for the company. So, I believe that the risk of doing this is simply too high.
What I read about the topic, here is one possible explanation. The algorithms these companies use, match you against people with similar characteristics and against the social groups that you are a part of. Example for the first one: if people in the same category as you are suddenly interested in a product, it could indicate that you are interested in it as well and an ad would be shown to you. In reality, you might actually be very interested in this product, but have not searched for it yet. Example for the second: If your friend has searched for a product online and Facebook has connected you to that friend and determined that you have similar interests, it might provide you with the ad of said product. Here’s an interesting article for further reading: https://www.mcnuttpartners.com/why-we-see-digital-ads-after-talking-about-something/
Hi Thomas,
You have written a nice piece on this subject. Of course I got intrigued because it happens all the time which is annoying and creepy (maybe an idea for Halloween, wearing a suit representing ads since they follow me everywhere). All jokes aside, in the first place I did think ‘they’ were eavesdropping my conversations. I mean, if we look at the current technology with Siri and Alexa the only difference is activating the microphone in a formal way. As I dug into this matter, it is hard to have a right conclusion since AI is also quickly developing. In other words, I have no clue what the relation is between the microphone and AI.
That was an interesting topic Thomas. I experienced the same thing the other day. I kept getting Instagram ads for cabin size luggage because once I searched for luggage some weeks ago. Yesterday, I looked for an office chair on google and visited some websites to find a good item. It was surprising that right after that I opened my Instagram and I saw advertisement for office chairs and since then it frequently displays office chair advertisements. I believe the world is becoming a scary place to live as we are being watched by the companies and our privacy is being invaded. one may say showing targeted advertisement does no harm and it is even beneficial. however, the point is it is just the tip of the iceberg they know much more about us and we don’t even have an idea what they know about us.