Is my phone listening to me?

Chris Adams

• 2 min read

As a lover of technology, I’m often asked by people whether their phone is listening to them. They might’ve been talking about something and then seen an ad for it.
First let’s get this straight: your phone isn’t listening to you. But the likely truth is as mundane as it is frightening.
First issue is the technology. Most voice assistants can barely understand your clearly articulated speech even when heard through dedicated hardware with multiple microphones. And that’s with only one person talking.

  • Apart from an odd bug Facebook owned up to where they appeared to be keeping the Messenger app running longer than it should by playing long stretches of silent audio, your phone isn’t listening to you.
  • Mum wanted to take Dad to Hamilton Island
  • Saw ads
  • Many overlapping effects
  • You see 1000s of ads a day
  • Hard to remember all of them
  • You most likely don’t remember all the things you saw, but the ads work their way into your brain
  • Ads don’t work that way - ads modify the environment around you, but they require you to absorb what you’ve seen and every so slightly modify what you consider “cool” - which happens beneath your conscious awareness and thus beneath your awareness that you’re forming memories - probably independent of memory, but unsure.
  • Sheer numbers and the birthday paradox ensure one of them is bound to match something you’ve been thinking about lately
  • The ad campaign for Hamilton Island was probably the trigger!
  • We are more predictable than we’d like
  • Summer’s coming, wonder where I should go for holiday
  • We need to sell these excess tickets to Hamilton Island, demographic research suggests XYZ types of people will buy them if shown them
  • “But it’s so creepy, how does it know what I said?”
  • You probably saw that ad before having a conversation about something related to it
  • Remember ad campaigns run for potentially weeks
  • Technologically speaking, apps on your phone can’t be running and tuned into the microphone. With the exception of a weird iOS bug being exploited by Facebook Messenger.
  • Coincidence is more common than we think
  • Just got an email about a startup opp in strategic planning while working on a proposal to do some strategic planning
  • Frequency illusion
  • Campaigns run for weeks, and run many ads, and there’s also retargeting; you might talk about something more once you get freaked out which combined with frequency illusion means you think you’re being listened to talking about it as well