Why It Feels Like Your Phone Is Listening to You
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Okay, I have to tell you, I was just looking on ebay where I go for all kinds of things I love. And there.

IT, was that hologram trading card. One of the rare is the last one I needed for my set, shiny, like the designer handbag of my dreams.

one of a kind. Ebay had IT. Now everyone's .

asking, just beautiful.

Whatever you love, find IT on ebay. Ebay, things people love. So the other night i've made dinner, IT was a recipe I D made before, so I didn't need to look at the ingredients or anything.

My husband, I talked about the recipe, though we're considering swapping out the broccoli for regular brockley. I then the next day IT happened, I got an instagram story's ad for that specific recipe IT onest ly felt pretty creepy. Why was I getting this add when i'd never seen before? Now of all times, it's a familiar feeling.

If you spend enough time on the internet, you talk about something in the real world, and then IT appears on your device as an add hours later. In moments like these, it's hard not to feel like our phones might be listening to us even when we're just talking about broccoli. I this is actually one of the most persistent internet t maths that we are being listened to through the microphones on our phones or alexa speaker or computers.

And that's how online advertisers know to serve us ads that are sometimes so relevant. It's uncanny. So are they listening?

Turns out researchers have actually studied this question. I called up David chavez, who is an associate professor of computer science at northeastern university. David done a ton of a research into data privacy.

And what happens to a personal information on mine? He's got the skinny on whether your phone is listening to this podcast with you and what you can do to protect your personal information. I'm clear, duffy, and this is terms of service. They've talked to me about why you decided to research this question of whether our phones are listening to us and how to do set up that study.

Yeah, so IT ends up a fear privacy researcher. It's one of the first things people ask you about. It's just so jarring to feel like someone's listening to you when they shouldn't.

I also saw this behavior. I'm also curious and bothered by IT, and I just happen to be equipped actually investigated. So together with my colleagues, we decided to actually see whether this kind of behavior was happening by running real mobile apps and seen what they were doing.

And so the question here is, is my phone listening to me through the microphone? right? Like that was the big question that you set out to ask exactly.

And we went a little bit further. We also wanted to know, is that spying on me with our cameras as well is a really any kind of recording of us is, you know, humans or what we're doing on our device was interesting to us, and we just decided to look at all of them at once.

And how did you do that? What were you looking at when you look to these different apps? How many different apps to look at?

right? So we started about seven thousand popular and free apps, just pretty much anything we can get our hands on that. A reasonably large number of people with .

use from there, David and his colleagues called the down to about nine thousand apps that fit their research criteria.

And basically, we use the computer program that tapped and swiped and enter data into the just to come interact with them and see what they do. And then we check to see, are they uploading any audio recordings, video recordings or text transcripts of the .

environment. What did you find? Our our phones. Listening to us.

our mind is we didn't find any evidence that companies are recording from the microphone or camera when they couldn't.

That's right. David says they're not listening.

As far as we know, we're not seeing IT David .

experiment took place in twenty seventeen. Since then, most experts have basically agreed that our phones aren't listening to us because they don't need to. We give up a whole lot of personal information that's useful for targeting ads just by using the internet every day, often without realizing IT. Yeah.

it's kind of crazy how much company is know about us. And when you start thinking about IT, IT becomes a lot clear. So think about when you're using the web, you're visiting a bunch of websites are entering searches.

That behavior alone is revealing some of our most intimate in our thoughts or desires, what we're interested in. And almost every one of those websites, there is little code that sends data to the companies that track us and they learn what we're interested in. Or if it's google where we type of search, they know what we're searching.

If it's facebook, they know who our friends are, they know who our family are, they know when they're with us and they know what they are interested in in addition to us. So in a sense, these companies know more about us than even our conversations for feel. So when you're having that conversation with someone about taking a trip to a ruber, even though you didn't search for a ruber, maybe your friend did, maybe someone in your household did. And so that's why you're being targeted and not because they're listening to you.

You're probably familiar with some of these companies that collect a lot of our data like facebook, google and amazon, but they are only ones.

Then there's these other companies that are what we call third parties. They are also often referred to as data brokers. So it's companies that are just in the business of collecting data about individuals and then selling that data to others, usually for targeted advertising, but sometimes for other purposes.

What kinds of data specifically are these platforms collecting?

It's almost the question. What aren't they collecting? It's an incredibly wide range. The things that worry me the most are our geo locations. So where we are over time, I mentioned also, of course, they're able to track um what websites are visiting. And then there are other things that most of us don't think about, like acceleration data.

And we've seen this being used by car insurance companies, right? Some of you may have heard of these apps where you know the insurance company will say, hey, installed apps will give you a discount. Well, now they're able to tell if you have hard stops or other behavior that they don't like and then they can in turn, change your current translates as a result.

okay. So I wanted to ask you about that, whether there are other devices that might play into our data profile beyond what i'm doing on my phone or my computer. So is IT like they can access the data from your connected car, connected speaker? Is those kinds of things too?

absolutely. So it's different company is getting access to data depending on what device were talking about. Smart speakers are fairly pervasive in our homes.

These are devices with always on microphones. And there's just so many other kinds of devices, video, door bells, security cameras, even something as simple as our fridges. We found devices in our lab that half cameras are now doing automatic food recognition.

So they're checking out what's in your fridge. And yeah, you might say, what why are they doing that? How can they use that data? So we like to think about the worst. Unfortunately, we are very depressing people that help to privacy experts. But imagine them, I want that to your health insurance company and say, no, no IT seems like you're not eating healthy food or of course, they also know when you're home and you're not how often you open the fridge.

all kind of data like that or even imagine in the grocery for milk as soon as asher about to run out of milk like that's crazy to .

think about yeah, there is a level of creeps. Ss, I did not expect and .

you maintain this stupid on the location piece of IT your devices and these platforms is being able to know where you are. Does that happen? Even if you have your location turned off on your phone, can they still track you?

The short answer is that depends. But there's many ways the companies can figure out what your location is even if you've turned off those services. So for example, just the fact that i'm here northeast n university in boston, companies can look at my APP address that can essentially figure out where i'm connected to the internet. And based on that, they can have a pretty good idea of where i'm located. And that applies for any wifi x point that you go to when you're out in about in the world.

Now look, this isn't necessarily all bad. Some people would rather get ads that feel relevant to them than ones that don't or they're okay with their insurance company tracking their driving if IT means cheaper payments. But all this data collection can start to feel a bit unnerving. So you did your study back in twenty seventeen, eighteen. This is still a question that I feel like comes up all the time.

Is my phone listening to me? Is a instagram listening to me? Why do you think this is such a persistent myth, such a compelling narrative that our phones might be listening to us, even though, as you said, there is an evidence that they're listening to us in order target ads?

I think the main reason is all this tracking have been talking about is invisible to us. We can see here or sense when these companies are gathering data about us, it's like this hidden trickle of information about us going to companies. And so when we do to see something that super free, like an ad about that thing that you just talked about in real life, well, we're going to blame me on what we do, see and know and what we see.

No, where the conversations were happen. And of course, as human beings, when we see something like that, we also tend not to focus on the fact that the vast majority of the time they were having conversations, we don't get creepy targeted at. But it's the coincident, it's the notion that no way that they knew to talk me with this ad unless they were listening to me. And in the meantime, because we're so shot by IT, we forget about how much else we've revealed or our friends or a family have revealed when they're using the internet.

So we know that these platforms and these advertisers have all of these other data about us that makes us so that they don't necessarily need to hack our microphones in order to listen to us, target us with ads. But do we know for sure that they're not also doing that?

Um the short answer is no. We don't know for sure. Um is a scientist. I can't tell you that it's never the case that this behavior happens.

What I can do is try to find a representative sample of mobile apps or devices, interact with them as best we can, and then report what we find. And so the bottom line is that we haven't found any of this kind of recording of our voices seraphine ously. And we also kind of look at this from a practical perspective. Now over the years, voice transcription has done much Better than I used to be. But I can tell you, and i'm sure many of us remember in twenty seventeen, these things were not great, recognizing our voice commands. And so the idea that companies would try to use this data, it's not really good because it's hard for them to you know understand what was said when your devices in a pocket or purse in a tear ans and muffled audio compared to be able to get this really fine grain view into what you're clicking on, what you're browsing is you're screw wing through social media. What you decided to look at a little bit longer, all these signals to what you're doing in real life, I think they're much more valuable than a recording of your conversation.

That was a big question for me because with our official intelligence, we know that our phones are getting a lot Better at actually understanding human speech. Do you think it's possible that this changes that our phones actually maybe do start listening to us in the way they are not really doing now because that technology is getting Better?

I'd say it's certainly possible. The one thing that's working in our favor is that at least the way IT works. Now if you're on I O S, here you are on android.

You know, first the amp has to ask you and you have to grant permission to your microphone. And then if IT is using IT, you'll get one of those lights that lights up on the screen telling you that you or microphone is active. So we kind hard for companies to do this and never be caught even by an average consumer.

What where is me more is all of the other devices that aren't the ones that we own that have microphones. I mentioned before a video doorbells, which of course, can also record audio. And just increasingly, we're finding devices that have microphones that don't really need them. That smart fridge I mentioned before also .

has a microphone. yeah. Why does fridge need the microphone?

crazy. Great question. IT. In this case, it's also a voice assistance. I think companies are trying to get as creative as possible is to have to add a lot of smart technology that then gives them access to more information about consumers, which presumably later on, they can monodist. That's, of course, the cyc and me. But that also tends to bear out when you look at how data is eventually used.

So data brokers are collecting and selling our information online, and they don't need to tap your phones microphones to do that, even though IT can certainly feel like that's what's happening. But is this a problem? And is there anything we can do to Better protect our privacy that's after the break?

Hi everyone, it's microcar I director of consumer tech and culture at wired here with my colleagues, senior writer laun good hi and wired contributor zi shifter, everyone. We're here to tell you about our new podcast, uncanny valley, a show about the people, power and influence of silicon valley.

Every week, we get together to talk about how technology and culture from the valley is influencing our everyday lives. We did get to questions like, ever get our privacy back is OpenAI for real and how are silly valley billionaires impacting U. S.

elections? The first episode of uncanned valley comes out on october thirty first. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. What does IT mean for all of us as individuals that these big companies have such huge collections of personal information about us?

Um i'd say it's a disaster waited to happen. The fact is that this data that's collected about us eventually gets out whether companies sell IT to other parties because they are data brokers and that's having money, or whether that data is hacked and these data breaches then lead to these harms.

And of course, what kind of harms am I talking about? We just talked about how insurance companies can change the Price that we pay for things that just yesterday, I got an email from a colleague who was worried about a scam where they were claiming to do harm to the individual. And that email contained their name.

Of course, they had the email address, they had their street location, they had a street view picture of, my god, that person's house, and they have their phone number. And you might ask yourself, well, how did someone get all of this information to make IT seem like they're someone actually get to stock? No, otherwise trying to do ARM.

What ends up that data probably came out through a data bridge or someone bought the data because lots of companies have this kind of data about us. And the one thing that i'll say when I talk about companies and data collection and how they shouldn't collect as much data is that the data you don't have can't be breached. That's why it's really, really important that we move to environment where companies aren't collecting so much about us so that we're not at risk of not only targeting with advertizing, but targeting with scams and other militias behavior.

no. Ah I think even the targeting with advertising, I mean, it's not as directive of harm but disability to constantly put in front of people exactly what they were just thinking about and encourage them to spend more money if you feel like there's a harm in that way too, even if it's smaller than .

a sm is almost like in one sense, there's conditioning that we're all going under where we're getting used. The fact that we're being tracked and that we're being targeted. And for a lot of us, that can be beni, like one of the examples I point to is that say one partner shopping for an engagement ring.

Of course, whenever you look at jew online, guess what you get targeted with its ads for more jewelry and so your partner might start seeing the same ads um because there you know in the same home that essentially have the same I P address which is one way people attract and so that might ruin a surprise engagement and so that seems like oh you know too bad but kind of not much harm done. But then you just start thinking about targeting based on religion, politics, sexual orientation, income, any number of other sensitive categories. And now you are talking about potentially much greater harms that can happen from that .

information being shared. What kind of power does all of this data afford to these companies, the platforms or the data brokers?

I say the number one power is is a money they get to sell IT. Um so the companies that have the data make money by selling IT. The company is that want to target you with ads make money of variable to target successfully. And so ultimately, we have an industry that's profiting to the tune of many billions of dollars off of consumers who are essentially either giving IT away for free, free or you know, not even aware that they're giving IT away.

Are there conversations among lawmakers or regulators about cracking down on this kind of behavior?

absolutely. So in the united states, we do not have a comprehend of federal privacy law. The best we have at the federal level is the federal trade commission.

So in the F, T, C, act, there is a prohibition against unfair and deceptive business practices. So if a company is taking your data and they don't tell you or they tell you they're doing something else, that is both unfair and deceptive. And so the federal trade commission is gone after a number of companies under this law.

But it's not perfect. It's not something that applies to all cases where our privacy is violated. There is also state level laws, but the panel line is we need a Better comprehensive federal privacy law to protect us. So as a regular .

person using the internet IT almost feels like the conclusion here is maybe more concerning than if my phone were just listening to me, like that would be an obvious and I put my phone in the other room. But instead, it's that these companies are sort of subtitle ously gathering all of this other data about us. Is there anything that people can do if they're uncomfortable with their personal data being collected and packaged and sold? Advertisers in this way.

there is sort of different levels of advice, right? You mentioned putting the phone in the other broom. Of course you can go extreme. You could put on your tin foil, head your devices in a river, go live life as a herman in the mountain.

I think about that sometimes.

yeah. I mean, I think, yes, unfortunately, the more you learn about this self, the more you feel like this might also be the practical option. But it's not for most people, including myself. So in terms of practical advice, some things I can say that you know most privacy advocates would also say is, you know try to engage more privacy protecting settings on your devices, you know don't share locations with an APP when it's not needed. If you have to share a location, usually of the option to share an approximate one, instead of the one that says exactly where you are within a few feet, generally installed only the APP you need, give them the least information possible. Maybe that flash light APP that's asking for your location is not the best thing to use.

And for users of the big platforms, the facebooks, the google like, is that perhaps where you recommend starting start with those big platforms and look at your settings there and then work backwards because as you said, there are so many different places where we're sharing this information. But for people who are just learning about this, is that where they should start?

It's not a bad place to start for sure. Mata, google, amazon, these are all companies that collect a lot of data. There are what we call first party data collectors, so we interact them directly.

So they see a lot of what we're doing on mind. They don't sell that dated others, but because they're so big, they are, of course, also advertisers. So they enable the kind of targeted advertisement that creeps us out and makes us think that they're listening to our conversations.

So you can turn off some of that stuff. But I think one of the big chAllenges of courses that sets are often hard to find. They're kind of complicated and boto line is it's certainly Better than nothing.

But I do want to put IT out there that know for your average consumer of this feels overwhelming. I get IT like I also feel that way when I have to deal with these privacy settings. So it's sort of do the best you can. But you know ultimately understand that this is not you're fault and we're in a position where we're kind of all doomed to fail at some point of letting some data collection happen. But that said, I mean, there's plenty of people who can learn to think in terms of policy.

We talked to about the smart speakers and the refrigerators are their settings that people can turn off on those devices? Or do you just recommend the people try to opt not to use them?

It's gonna a little a little bit of colum me, a little bit of a colum bees. So you can turn off certain things like, for example, and smart speakers. There's a hardware new button that just means that there's a button new push.

It'll light up saying that you know like a microphone with a line through IT. And that means that those devices aren't no longer recording both in my own lab experiments and other researchers have showing that those buttons work. They're not line.

They're not made out of software. IT is hardware. IT is something companies can't stop from happening.

So that's a good example of a privacy control that someone can use when IT comes. The T, V, is you can turn off automatic content recognition and they will stop watching. You're watching.

You can also just not connect the devices to the internet just because you're fridge or your microwave. Your TV can connect to wifi. IT doesn't mean you have to connect them to wifi. And if they can talk to the internet, then that's gonna really limit any kind of tracking that they can do.

awesome. Well, dave, thank you so much for doing this. This is really terrifying, but really interesting.

And thank you for having me.

Thanks again to David chose ness for joining us will link to his research in the show notes. Now here's a quick reminder of some practical tips. If you'd like to keep your personal data more private and reduce the likelihood that you'll be crept out by online ads, first, pay attention to what apps and online services you're using and check your privacy settings.

In many cases, you can turn off access to things like your location or the history of what ads you've clicked on to make IT a little harder for those services to track you next, when IT comes to the connected devices in your home, like your fridge or oven, think about whether they really need to be connected to the internet, and if they don't, time from the wifi. Finally, if you're worried about all of this, David recommends calling your representatives to let them know that you care about privacy legislation. And as for that weird instagram recipe ad I got the day after making IT, I came up with a theory based on my conversation with David.

So I called him back to run, to buy him. Hey, David, hello. okay. So I got all the ingredients at half foods.

The night that I cooked this recipe, I scanned my amazon code at whole foods because sometimes there are deals for amazon members. And i'm wondering if it's possible that meta might somehow have access to that amazon data. And knew that I had all the perfect ingredient flying around for this recipe. And that's why IT showed me this add .

d so general, that's a good theory. In practice, amazon doesn't sell its data or share its data because they don't have to already have some information about individuals and the same with meta, so they don't usually talk to each other. There's other possible reasons.

One is you make this recipe a lot and maybe they just know that and there was coincidence that you just happen to see and add for that recipe because maybe you looked at IT before and they decided you hadn't looked at IT recently enough. And so they're showing that too, to do IT again, the new york times, this place in the ad, they know that you ve looked at the recipe and so they could be target you based on that. interesting.

And that would make sense, right? Like I hadn't made in a while. That's why I made IT.

So I guess that would make sense. I would wanted show that to me again. But I appreciate you playing ball with my, with my theory, izzy thing here, everything.

Well, I guess I may never know exactly why I got that recipe at, but I do feel pretty confident now that my phone wasn't listening to my conversation. So at least there's that. Thanks again to David and thanks to you for listening.

I'm clear duffy talk to next time. Terms of service is a CNN audio and golt radio production. This show is produced and hosted by me, clare duffy at go radio. The lead producer is rebeca deal, and the executive producers are magan, adult ski and ian. And right at CNN healey Thomas is our senior producer and dann zuela is our technical director. Steve lic tii is the executive producer of CNN audio, with support from Emily Williams, Taylor phillips, David ryan, dan bloom, robber methods, jams, Andreas numero, alex mineral land steiner, john ana and special thanks to kati handmill and windy branch. Thank you for listening.