As soon as we tell our friends that we want to take a trip to Italy, without even searching on Google, suddenly ads for the cheapest flights to Milan and Rome appear on our phone screen. We suggest to our partner that we go to a new restaurant that we heard has opened in the city and, as if by magic, our phone starts suggesting similar presentations to us online.
Then we read that Apple was forced to pay $95 million in damages after a lawsuit alleging that the Siri app recorded users' conversations without their consent to display personalized ads, and we feel that our suspicion that our phone (secretly) listens to our conversations is being confirmed.
But what really happens?
According to a new article in the Washington Post, various apps and technologies, such as chatbots and voice assistants, determine our location, activity, and voice, and sometimes record them without our consent to use them not only for advertising purposes, but also for other purposes that we may not have imagined.
However, Northwestern University professor David Choffnes believes there's "little chance" that the ads that appear on our phones are related to what the device's microphone "heard." He explains that companies collect so much information about each of us, anyway, that they don't need to "wiretap" our conversations.
Even when, for example, we swear we never Googled the name of the restaurant we want to visit, our partner may have done so from the shared home WiFi. Perhaps, too, companies have "judged" that a particular restaurant matches our gastronomic and aesthetic preferences, based on other searches we have done previously, such as on city maps and food ordering platforms.
However, as technology experts explain to the Washington Post, even if companies decide it's worth recording and analyzing our daily conversations, our phone's battery would drain very quickly from the constant operation of the microphone.
On the other hand, as the court case against Apple showed, the way our personal information is collected and processed for advertising purposes is not entirely transparent. Apple and other companies have even admitted that some voice files are monitored, either by software or by their employees, to check the correct functioning of some of their services. Moreover, Choffnes, in a 2020 study, concluded that voice assistants do not always activate exactly when they should. So the idea that they record us at moments when we have not chosen it ourselves is not at all reassuring.
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