Perhaps because it’s summer; perhaps because we’re deep into the latest cycle of public mistrust of Big Tech; perhaps because we just love a conspiracy theory, however often it’s been debunked. Whatever the reason, one of the hoariest old canards about mobile telephony is doing the rounds again this month: that your phone is spying on you and using what it hears to serve you adverts.
Can we just clear this up? It isn’t.
Look, I get it, I really do. It’s impossible to move in 2026 without being bombarded by – largely true – stories about the extractive evil of modern capitalism, as embodied by companies like Google and Meta.
We’re shown more adverts across more platforms than ever before, served up hundreds of daily messages telling us what we need and (more importantly) want, with a degree of personalisation that can often feel uncanny. Our phones have microphones, they’re with us all the time, why wouldn’t they be telling their Big Evil Techbro Paymasters our deepest secrets, so they can flog us more tat?
In 2023, US marketing company CMG was spotted making boasts about these capabilities on its website, writing: “what would it mean for your business if you could target potential clients who are actively discussing their need for your services in their day-to-day conversations? No, it’s not a Black Mirror episode – it’s Voice Data, and CMG has the capabilities to use it to your business advantage.”
Correlation, though, is not causation. Despite multiple attempts over the years to demonstrate that you are in fact being surveilled by the omnipresent smart device, not a single reputable study has been able to prove the link.
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The most significant primary research was done by Northeastern University in 2018. Over a year, a team looked at over 17,000 popular Android apps, including Meta-owned apps and over 8,000 others that shared data with them. They found no case of an app unexpectedly activating the microphone or transmitting audio unprompted.
While you might not want to believe Mark Zuckerberg about anything, he has twice denied the claim in front of US Congress. Meanwhile, Apple explicitly said last year that it “has never used Siri data to build marketing profiles, never made it available for advertising, and never sold it to anyone for any purpose.”
As for the marketing company, well, as someone who’s worked in similar types of agency I can happily attest to the fact that what these companies claim to be able to do isn’t always in any way connected to what they can actually do.
To give you but one significant example, see Cambridge Analytica. When reporting emerged about its purported abilities, Google, Meta and Amazon all issued strong denials, and in May this year the Federal Trade Commission in the US forced CMG to pay out $1m to customers because, er, none of what it had claimed was in any way true.
If your phone was eavesdropping on all your conversations and sending that information back to shady data harvesters to then sell on, you would be using a lot more data each month. Conservative estimates suggest that streaming continuous audio (even at low quality) would eat up 5GB a month of data, more than most monthly allowances, and the sort of thing which would show up in traffic analysis – it never has.
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Why, though, does it feel like it is? Basically it’s a combination of two factors: selective attention, which makes you more likely to notice something you’ve just learned about; and confirmation bias, which then convinces you there must be a reason it keeps following you around.
The fact is, your phone doesn’t need to listen to you to sell ads to you because it knows a frankly terrifying amount about who you are, where you go, what you do and what you’re into already. Believing that there’s a nefarious conspiracy trying to hide constant audio surveillance ignores all the very real, very active non-audio surveillance which is really going on under the hood.
Take this, for example. It’s a tool developed by Indian developer Kuber Mehta; it uses information available to any web browser to tell you which website you have just come from, the operating system you’re using, your location and which browser extensions you have installed.
It will even, if you type a short sentence, speculate as to your emotional state. These are tools available to every webdev in the world to help target you. Now try this one – it will tell you what languages you speak, it will know when you navigate to another tab, how charged your device is. All without needing to ask you anything at all.
You know all the apps you have on your phone? Did you ever check the permissions on them? Of course you didn’t! Turns out they are able to access a frankly astonishing amount of information about you from your device and what you do on it. (You can use an app called Loupe to see exactly what). In many cases, they sell that information to third parties hungry for data with which to target more ads, more effectively.
Do you live with other people? If you share an IP address with others, then what you look at online and what they look at online will show up as the same, based on that data. This is why your flatmate will tell you about something cool they saw online and then you’ll have it advertised to you later that day. It’s not your phone listening, it’s ad retargeting based on their behaviour.
Experian Marketing Services holds and processes data on 51 million people across the UK. It sells this information onto third-party clients to help them better profile you – and also target you with ads. This is not a system currently struggling with a lack of information about you.
Many years ago I used to advise PR agencies on how they could use Facebook and Instagram ads, and how they could target specific users. One of my party tricks was to take people through the various targeting options Facebook made available to advertisers.
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This was to demonstrate that it was possible to target people based on the platform’s impression of who they were, built up through data acquired from on-platform behaviour, browsers and third-party data acquisition.
Want to target expectant mothers under-30 with a household income of between £40-50k and a specific interest in haberdashery, Taylor Swift and buying a new car in the next 12 months? Easy!
It’s comforting to think that the “Big Evil Techbros” are spying on us without our say-so. The sad truth is that we all signed away our rights to data privacy when we started blithely installing apps without really understanding what they did, when we agreed to exchange information about our weekly shop for cheaper bananas, when we failed to give our regulators the teeth to do anything about how our data is used and by whom. We live in a digital panopticon, but it’s been built with our tacit consent.
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