Are Our Phones Listening to Us?

What actually happens after you say something near your phone?

I think everyone has had that experience of saying something to a friend and then seeing an advertisement on your phone for that exact thing. I decided to do an experiment to see if this is something I cold verify.

I started with several things:

I googled: “best laundry detergent”

Searched on Amazon: laptop

Opened Facebook and said: “What is the best kind of lawn mower?”

Said around phone while off “I need some potato chips”

Said around phone while on “I need some cookies”

Said while Instagram is open “I need a new car”

Said while TIkTok is open “I need a new job”

I didn’t just say it once verbatim as listed above, I kind of had a one sided conversation about different cookies, and what not, maybe 7-10 sentences each involving the basic key words.

I got ads on my phone for:

Faucets, pants, cars, lawn furniture, uninterruptable power supplies, a bike or a car (I’m not sure what the ad was for exactly), jewelry, bathroom tile, plumbing.

I got ads on the web for:

Credit Card, Army, Bloomberg, Google Chrome, car insurance, Dark Wizard (A new show coming out)

Now, I feel like one of those detective movies where I have a cork board with tons of pins and strings connecting different phrases and ads. None of the following things are proof as coincidences are possible, but just data.

So saying cars while Instagram was open may have given me the car ad (on Instagram), the bike or car ad.

Searching for laptop on Amazon may have given me the UPS ad.

Saying lawn mower may have gotten me the lawn furniture ad.

Googling: “best laundry detergent”, Saying around phone while off “I need some potato chips, saying around phone while on “I need some cookies” and saying while TIkTok is open “I need a new job” didn’t seem to produce anything noticeable.

Now one thing I need to mention is I didn’t buy new phones and computers that had never been used before, as that is not in my budget, so these are the devices I use on a regular basis and other data is coming through them. Two things to note that I noticed that came from my normal usage and not this experiment was I did go to Google Maps to look up Les Schwab and then went to their website to make an appointment. Now I see Les Schwab ads on specific web sites often. Another thing I did recently was search Amazon for “tile” which was for one of those devices you can buy to keep on your keychain or in your car to locate them in the world with your phone. I think this is probably the cause of the ads for faucets, bathroom tile and plumbing, as tile could easily be confused with the bathroom tile.

I have also been searching on YouTube recently for sewing patterns for pants which could have gotten me the ad for pants.

So if something is listening to us the most likely culprit is Instagram. When no apps were open or the phone was on the lock screen I didn’t see any evidence of any words I said coming back in the form of advertising. What does seem clear is searching Amazon seems to influence ads a good amount. With Les Schwab, I don’t think it was the Google Maps search as much as going to their website. I know from my career in web development that advertisers will put a priority on advertising to you websites you’ve already gone to.

I wanted to go a step further so I installed PCAPdroid which tracks all the connections apps on your phone make. I opened Instagram and spoke some random words. There doesn’t seem to be any connections made by Instagram when I’m not actually in the program, so nothing would be able to be sent back to their server. Similar behavior with the Facebook app. Tik Tok is more of the same. When you exit the app, it keeps a connection open for like a minute, so I suppose theoretically it might be possible to send voice information during that time, but the connections close pretty soon after switching to another app, so if you haven’t used the app in more than a minute, there’s really no possibility it could be sending data to the server collected from your phone.

On top of this the apps aren’t granted permission to use your microphone by Android, so they wouldn’t be able to record anything even when open.

So while it may feel like our phones are listening to us, there isn’t any mechanism in place for this to happen. There definitely is data on us that is being tracked but it’s coming from typing data into websites or apps. So sadly I haven’t uncovered any big conspiracy but I do feel safer talking around my phone. Generally you are pretty safe unless you have some government spy software (*cough* Pegasus) installed on your phone. If you suddenly start getting terrible battery life that might be an indication that something is always running the background that’s not notifying you of it’s existence. If that’s the case you probably have bigger issues than advertisers listening for keywords.