Your Phone Is Listening to You: Here’s Why it Happens and How To Stop It

Have you ever been having a conversation with someone and the next thing you know, you're seeing ads for that topic or product that you were discussing in your newsfeed? You're not crazy you're phone is listening to you. But, not the way you think. Let me explain.

Why Your iPhone Listens to You

According to Apple, there are several reasons why your iPhone is listening to you.

• To activate voice assistants. If Siri or Google Assistant is enabled then your phone is listening for the wake-up phrase. Apple says that once this is activated, it may send the audio to severs to process.
• To make apps work. Certain apps like Facebook and TikTok may need access to the microphone in order to record video, send voice messages, make calls, etc. When those features are in use, you're phone is listening.
• Improve voice recognition. Some companies may process voice recordings to better understand speech patterns and accents in order to improve the assistant response. Apple has this feature as optional.

Are Phones Listening so Advertisers Can Target Us?

While there's no evidence that our phones are always actively listening, there is some evidence that audio information collected through our phone microphones have been sent to companies other than Apple or Google.

The Federal Trade Commission found several apps that contained software that could access a phone microphone (while app was running in background), listen for inaudible audio signals in TV commercials, identify which TV programs or ads were playing nearby, and create logs of viewing activity for advertising and analytics.......all through the phone mic. Yikes. This caused the FTC to issue a warning to app developers that users needed to be informed about this type of tracking.

There's no public evidence that social platforms like Facebook routinely record our conversations to target advertisements.

How to Get Your iPhone to Stop Listening to You

To lessen the frequency of ad targeting, and the time the our phones spend listening to us there are some steps we can take.

• Turn off the wake-up phrase listening (aka Siri): Go to Settings➡️Apple Intelligence or Siri➡️Talk and type to Siri➡️Off
• Review your microphone permissions: Settings➡️Privacy & Security➡️Microphone. Turn off access for any apps that don't need it.
• Keep an eye out for the orange dot: The small dot at the top shows when your mic is being used.
• Review app permissions: Be mindful of which apps have access to your mic, camera, and location.

To sum things up, even if our phones aren't necessarily constantly listening and recording our conversations, advertisers still have access to tons of information about us. Things like our behavior, shopping habits, locations, and interests are all accessible. Because of this, things that we'd likely want can be predicted before we even search for it. Creepy!

This is why you may see an ad for something you were just thinking about and didn't even search for. It's not about our phones listening to us, it's about everything else that our phones already know about us.

If we're using the internet and smart devices, we are leaving a digital (and trackable) footprint that's almost impossible to get away from. While that's not ideal, we have some ability to limit the instances in which our information is being shared.