Are our smartphones listening to our conversations?

 Are our smartphones listening to our conversations?

 

The world of technology today is full of surprising and sometimes worrying things. You talk on the phone with a member of your family and tell him that you want to buy a specific commodity, or you sit with a friend to tell him about a product you need, and then you go back to browsing the Internet on your phone after that to be surprised by an ad that displays the same product you told your friend about, or the same item you told someone you wanted to buy.

 

The previous scenario has become common among phone users today after most users around the world have gone through similar situations, which led many of them to believe that their phones are being monitored or their phone calls are being monitored, or even their normal conversations in their daily lives. Some even went so far as to believe that their phones are It includes a specific technique for reading thoughts and then can spy on their thoughts, as they tell about cases in which they saw advertisements for some products as soon as they thought about these products and without ever talking about them or searching for them on search engines? Is this real? Are our smartphones today spying on our conversations and phone calls, and can they read our thoughts? If you are one of those who are bothered by such questions, you will find what you need in the following lines.

 

Are our smartphones eavesdropping on us and recording our calls?

 

So far, our known answer to this question is no. Our smartphones do not listen to or record our conversations and calls. There is no doubt that promotional ads are a major source of profits for many applications and programs that individuals use on a daily basis on their smartphones, and therefore the strong motive for these applications and programs is to spy on their users and violate their privacy to serve the interests of advertisers already exists, but the way in which this espionage process occurs varies A lot about the stereotype that may appear in the minds of some.

 

With the exception of voice assistant applications such as Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant, most other applications do not resort to recording voice conversations and phone calls, then sending them through servers to private parties that analyze them, and then sending personalized ads for us to see on our smartphones. This method, despite its possibility and ease of implementation, is considered a harmful method and has little economic feasibility for the following reasons:

 

It will lead to more pressure on the phone’s resources due to the presence of many applications running in the background in order to send and receive data at the same moment, which will cause the phone’s battery to drain faster and increase data usage rates, which is, of course, undesirable, as the main goal is for the user to keep the application running For as long as possible and see more ads.

The pressure on the servers themselves will be enormous if what is required is to transfer high-quality audio recordings, which are of gigantic size, from thousands of phones at the same time throughout the day in addition to storing and processing all this number of recordings.

Even if these applications were able to record, transfer, store, and process all that huge amount of real-life user calls and conversations throughout the day, only a very small amount of the content of those recordings might be of interest to advertisers while most of it would be insignificant.

The information extracted from recordings of real-life calls and conversations is ultimately misleading, inaccurate, and does not truly reflect the true interests of individuals. Often, people pretend to be interested in a specific product or hobby as a courtesy to their friends in order to avoid embarrassing them.

 

How do personalized ads target their audience?

 

Most well-known applications such as Google, Facebook, and Instagram actually serve the purposes of advertisers and send personalized ads to users through accurate logical guesses that you make based on a list of information that it collects about each user through cookies that are installed on the phone when the application is installed, such as information about its geographical location, gender, age, interests, daily routine, search engine history, internet browsing history, and purchasing habits, through all of this it is possible to derive the quality of services or products that the user may wish to obtain.

 

Machine learning algorithms are also used that observe how the user interacts with ads after they appear, which helps improve the appearance of subsequent ads, and display more related product ads, and therefore no company or electronic market such as Amazon needs to waste time and effort in eavesdropping on users. to deduce their favorite products, which may explain to some the emergence of advertisements for a product that they only thought about without talking about it with others.

 

The tool used here to target ad recipients is not the phone’s microphone, but the information extracted from the records of its sessions and activity on the Internet. Sometimes an ad display program such as Google has deduced your interest in a specific product long before you talk about it with your friends, only to be surprised after it shows you The product advertisement, so you mistakenly believe that talking to friends is what caused the advertisement to appear. It is also possible that the advertisement appeared to you before, but you did not notice its existence until after talking to friends.

 

How to opt out of receiving personalized ads

 

Now that you know how personalized ads find their way to your phone, and that the phone's microphone has no role in this process, it has become clear that blocking applications from accessing the phone's microphone will not prevent personalized ads from appearing on the phone screen, so what is the solution? And is there a way to disable it if we don't want to get this kind of disturbing ad again? In fact, it is difficult until now to completely prevent advertisers from accessing all the data that enables them to target you with their ads, and the data that mobile applications share with advertisers can only be reduced to serve their promotional purposes through a set of measures as follows:

 

Replacing existing phone applications with other applications that provide a higher degree of privacy to its users, such as the "Signal" chat application and the "DuckDuckGo" search engine.

Browsing the Internet using a VPN service to protect the privacy of some data such as geographical location data, activity history, search engine history, and others.

Enable private browsing mode in your internet browser.

 

Although there are very few risks with personalized ads, other than tempting users to spend money to buy more products that they may not actually need, the appearance of personalized ads may make some users concerned about this amount of privacy invasion of their personal data and information. However, you do not have to worry about eavesdropping or recording daily calls or conversations, as so far only spyware programs do that, which can be avoided by installing strong anti-malware programs, and being careful while browsing the Internet or using different devices.

 

Abstract | The applications do not eavesdrop on users’ calls and their real-life conversations or record them, as some believe, due to the low feasibility of this method and its ineffectiveness in extracting useful and accurate information about individuals’ interests and purchasing habits, but they follow another strategy in order to target users with ads tailored to them, which serves the interests of advertisers.

 

These applications, programs, and digital platforms create profiles for users in which a lot of information about the user is collected, such as his geographical location, gender, age, interests, purchasing habits, activity history, searches, and other information, and then analyzed to make accurate estimates of the quality of products or services that he needs. He may be interested in obtaining it, and machine learning algorithms are also used to analyze the user's interaction with ads, which contributes to improving the appearance of subsequent ads.

 

Although there are very few risks with personalized ads, other than tempting users to spend money to buy more products that they may not actually need, the appearance of personalized ads may make some users concerned about this amount of privacy invasion of their personal data and information. Hence, they wish to opt out of displaying such advertisements.

 

Unfortunately, there is no way to completely stop the appearance of these ads, but the application sharing of user personal data with advertisers can be reduced by applying some measures to give more privacy to the data, such as using alternative applications that provide a better degree of privacy for its users, browsing the Internet through a VPN, and activating Private browsing mode in the internet browser used on the phone.