Technology

I'm always torn on this topic because, yeah there's hundreds of biases that can be attributed to this phenominon.

IE something becomes a popular topic in your area. Meaning more people in the area start searching the topic in that area, thus advertisers start pushing it to that location.

Obviously ads are also tracking you in 100 ways on what you've searched for, looked at etc... which means it could have a good guess of what you are going to talk about, before you do.

But at the same time, I think everyone can think of a lot of stories of things that just seemed to perfect, to out of the blue. For me the big one was 10 years ago when I walked into an attic, said "man it's fucking dark up here", opened my phone, and a big ad for a flashlight app popped up.

I found indisputable proof of this happening.

We were using Google maps, driving in a production van. We were talking about the song “Gasolina” by daddy yankee. The person whose phone it was did not speak Spanish. Moments later we were being served suggestions to stop at “estaciones de gasolina”

They are absolutely listening. This is very easy to test. Speak around a Google or Amazon or Apple device, and start talking about things you would never buy, never need, have never looked up, and is completely irrelevant for your demographic. You’ll get ads for it anyway by the end of the day or week.

Listen to the Big Tech comments to press and congressional testimony very carefully. They always say something like, ‘Facebook is not spying on your microphone.’ They’re always very carefully wording it as the parent company is not listening to your devices. But they absolutely know either one of their subsidiaries or their partners are listening to your microphone, and feeding the data to them.

Apps listening to your mic to give you targeted ads is an urban legend. There's tools to see which apps listen to you and there isn't any evidence that any of the popular stuff ever open the microphone (unless you're in a call or something). If you're too worried about it, you can always turn off the mic permission for the app.

The ads are actually coming from other ways of tracking you like browser fingerprinting to follow what things you browse and build a profile on what you like/are interested in.

See also EFF's article on it: https://www.digitalrightsbytes.org/topics/is-my-phone-listening-to-me