>
Your smartphone doesn’t listen to you around the clock, but it collects so much information that it doesn’t even need to.
It has long been speculated that Apple, Google, Samsung and other popular phone manufacturers are recording users 24/7 to collect information for advertising purposes.
Most of us have seemingly randomly promoted an ad for a product that we could have sworn was only being talked about in private.
To test this, we set up a fresh factory reset Samsung phone with a new Google account on the Android device.
We spent days trying to say slogans for advertisements to a phone
We created a fictional character named Robin, 22, and created a fake Facebook account for him to use.
After several days of trying to lure the device into giving us ads for European holidays and floor sealant, the device didn’t respond to our buzzwords.
Jordan Schroeder, who manages network security at Barrier Networks, told DailyMail.com that these devices don’t even need to record you because they collect all the information they need in a different way anyway.
After two days of saying the names of products near the phone — without typing them in or entering them through the device’s voice assistant — it was clear it wasn’t taking me up to use for advertising.
Despite my best efforts, I was unable to generate ads for vacations or home improvement items.
This is because the cost of secretly recording millions of people to hear what they are talking about would be enormous, Schroeder said.
The data would also be worthless, he added, especially with the sheer amount that companies like Google already know about you.
In 2022, Google’s advertising revenue was $224.47 billion.
But Mr Schroeder said voice assistants on phones have made matters more complicated – because they are constantly listening so they can hear the ‘wake words’ such as ‘OK Google’ or ‘Hey Siri’.
He continued, “Yes, Google, Apple and Amazon are listening to you all the time if you have enabled the virtual assistant to listen for ‘keywords’.
Sound samples are regularly sent to their servers for analysis to improve their algorithms. And sometimes those samples first go to people to better classify the sounds before they are sent to an algorithm for analysis.’
But Google, Apple, and Amazon have removed these samples (although there was an incident in 2019 where 1,000 private conversations were leaked).
Google is very transparent about its “surveillance capitalism” and offers a page where you can see everything it records about you (we tested with a Google account on an Android phone, both made by Google).
Your page is accessible hereand if you sign in with your Google account, you’ll see what the search giant knows about you.
The data collected includes what you do in apps that use Google ads, YouTube videos viewed, search queries performed, what you click on, and what you say to Google’s voice assistance feature.
On that page, there is no sign of recording the phone’s microphone.
But the sheer amount of other data from apps, the phone, and PC shows just how much Google (and other companies like Facebook) can know about you.
In his book The Industries of the Future, Alec Ross suggests that companies trade 75,000 data points of every US consumer – but this is now probably a gross underestimate, as the book was written in 2016.
So after several days of saying things on the phone, there are no personalized ads anywhere in ‘Robin’s’ internet experience (we tested by visiting web pages with ads).
That changes as soon as ‘Robin’ searches for ‘luxury car’ and ‘expensive bed’ via Google voice assistant and Google search.
From that moment on, advertisements for bed companies and expensive cars appear everywhere.
With a few more searches, Google created a page listing brands that “Robin” might be interested in.
You can see yours here. It’s worth noting that you can adjust this by disabling app tracking, website tracking, or even disabling personalized ads altogether.
The real risk comes from rogue apps that users may have downloaded, Schroeder said.
He said, “Phones have implemented controls to prevent apps from accessing microphones and cameras. They have to ask the user for permission first.
‘But therein lies the problem. This permission is requested upon download, and perhaps for legitimate reasons, but any subsequent use of the microphone may be for any reason.’
Phone companies have taken steps to stop such “rogue” apps, Schroeder said, such as removing permissions from apps that haven’t been used in a while.
He said, “A determined app maker would still have time to do whatever they wanted with the permissions they were given.”
Even then, it’s unlikely that an app maker would attempt to capture the general public – and it’s much more likely that such “rogue” apps would be used in targeted attacks against individuals.
Using Google Assistant feeds Google with data. Just talking in front of your microphone won’t work
This is an example of the minute-by-minute data Google stores about you (Google)
After a few searches for beds and Warhammer figures, ‘Robin’s page looked like this (Google)
He said, “Recording and transmitting all that recorded audio from millions and millions of random people is not a trivial task and the cost is high to do it.
Since much of the information would be completely useless to anyone, it’s very unlikely that anyone would create or modify an app to record audio from the public’s phones and all the other devices that everyone is slowly accumulating.
“The real risk is when individuals are targeted for a specific purpose.
If there is value in knowing everything an individual does, then this type of targeted surveillance makes more economic and technical sense.
Pegasus spyware – which can listen to calls, track location and ‘view’ app activity – has been used to attack human rights activists, journalists and politicians in several countries.
Mr Schroeder said: ‘If someone is a government official or a member of the military, the risks of being personally attacked are also much higher.
But that’s why governments and militaries have strict cybersecurity controls on how devices should be configured and what kind of use is acceptable on a personal device.”
He said the broader issue is how much data is collected about all of us – from where we go, to the buttons we press in apps, to what we say to personal assistants.
IDC predicts that the world will generate 175 zettabytes of data (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes) by 2025.
The danger of this is not for individuals, but for society as a whole, Schroeder said.