Is your cell phone listening to your conversations to show you ads?
3 min read
on an invoice, The GoogleAnd the Facebook And other big tech companies that scan data from their users for digital advertising. Thus, each person receives advertisements targeted to his interests.
But, contrary to what many believe, these companies do not use unauthorized strategies to capture information, such as listening to offline conversations without consent. It’s the opposite: Users themselves often give permission to other connected apps and services to access their camera, microphone, contact list, or GPS. smart phone.
In some cases, authorization is required to properly run certain application functions. For example, if you don’t allow Instagram to use the microphone, the videos taken by Instagram Application It comes out without a sound. That’s it: He has access to your microphone, even in other situations.
There are cases, in fact, in which data is collected illegally. For example, when it is hacked. Many tools have already been discovered, no owner prison cell Find out, take pictures, track the device’s location and even play back the audio recording. They are used not only by cybercriminals, but even by government authorities.
The question was whether apps actually used the cell phone’s microphone to listen to users without their knowledge Northeast University and Boston University.
For a year, a group of computer science experts tested 17,000 of the most popular Android apps, including those from the Meta group, such as Facebook, Instagram, The WhatsApp. They also analyzed whether these services send information to the social network.
conclusion? There is no evidence that these apps use the microphone to record or send audio without the user’s permission.
To investigate the question, the researchers used ten mobile phones equipped with software that automates human interactions. Reproduce conversations about consumer preferences so that devices’ microphones pick them up. At the end of the study, they found no evidence that the recordings had been made.
Retargeting
There is only one certainty while online: some companies will try to figure out what you’re doing. Data scientist Letícia A. Pozza explains that when you show that you like a product or service online, ads about it will start to chase you across different platforms.
Retargeting is a widely used tool in advertising to generate sales for the product you have already shown interest in.
When you click on something connected to this technology, you leave a trace of your digital identity associated with that product.
This tracking is happening very often. Pozza represents:
When you access a website, make a purchase, sign up, like a picture of a cat, drive a car with GPS, comment on your mom’s picture, walk into a place and access wi-fi, pay a bill -Pay a bill… That’s all the information you send.
The scientists from Northeastern University and Boston University were keen to point out that their research is not a definitive answer to this question. They just rule out that cell phone microphones actively listen to what’s being spoken to target ads.
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