Is your Smartphone Listening to You?

I was speaking to my partners brother who was showing me his new headphones on Christmas Eve. They were Bose noise-cancelling ones and sounded fantastic. I asked him what model they were and he told me clearly the make and model. Fine, nothing out of the ordinary there.

Fast forward 24 hours and I open the Amazon App on my phone to check a push notification and what is glaring back at me? An advert for the exact make and model of headphone I had been testing the day before.

I do not and have not searched for headphones online. There is no reason, from my digital habits, for this advert to come up. The only reason I could think of is that the exact make and model was discussed only a day before in clear reach of my mobile phone.

This shocked me. I am aware that mobile phone apps ask for permission to access mics and cameras but I was under the impression that the days of them actually spying on us was years away. It seems the future is now.

On doing some research online, I have found endless pages and forums of anecdotal evidence to support this claim. The main digital companies like Facebook, Amazon, Google etc deny that they use the microphone access to eavesdrop and record peoples conversations (of course) but it begs the question: why wouldn't they?

It is the next level of targeted advertising. It allows the companies to hear what products and interests people have from their conversation rather than their searches or Facebook interests.

If I was in charge of big data at Google and could hear peoples conversation then why wouldn't I develop an algorithm to cherry pick products and interests and sell that information to advertisers?

It also begs the question: what else are they listening to? Do they listen to my private conversations with my girlfriend? Are they accessing my cameras too?

The arguments the digi-corps give to why this phenomena occurs is that it is merely a coincidence. They claim we see hundreds of ads a day and the ones that we notice are the ones we've just been talking about.

One example I read on a forum was of a teenage boy who was advertised pruning scissors after being in a room with his mother discussing them with her friend. Is it a coincidence? Are the thousands of examples all coincidence?

Personally, I doubt it. I have since installed microphone and camera blockers on my phone.

George Orwell got it right, but instead of the government tapping into everything we do, it seems it is the big corps that are the perpetrators.