Have you ever experienced a magical or shocking scenario where the topic you were discussing over your smartphone pops up as an ad? The recent apology by the renowned global company, Apple, apologized for snooping over the private Siri conversations of their users is an example that strongly raises the question, is the smartphone secretly listening to you?
If you have encountered similar situations then this article will deal with all your doubts related to digital privacy ensuring that you’re not paranoid but are one amongst the crowd with similar concerns.
Smartphone Secretly Listening to You?
Smartphones are an essential solution that every individual owns and lives with. Starting from entertainment to conducting online meetings, smartphones play an important role in every field but as every coin has two sides, these pros come at a cost. We enjoy the global reach at our fingertips but there are several listening to you, even without your knowledge.
In comparison to earlier eras, almost everything nowadays gets registered as well as preserved for succeeding generations. A study concluded that the most prevalent Android applications and other mobile applications keep "recording the smartphone's screen and transferring that data over to third party companies."
To just be reasonable, the likelihood of sound recordings of every verbal exchange individuals have indeed been communicated, compiled in full, and afterwards evaluated by a real person is very narrow. There still are, nevertheless, countless ways for techniques and machine intelligence to "hear" to the individual then use that information to target ad campaigns on them. So, do we control our privacy or is it just a hoax?!
To understand this better, let us take a common example where audio triggering commands such as Hey Siri or Hey Alexa are prevalent. Based upon your voice command these smart devices make searches, pay your bills, fix appointments, etc. but do they forget these data after the task? The answer to this is a clear no. Storing these data are for better responding and future suggestions hence, you are simply giving away your details for free. However, all such vulnerabilities are under the terms and conditions section which almost no one reads.
Does Your Phone Listen to Your Conversations?
Of course, your phone is listening to you. This is true even when you uninstall an application that you had used for a few minutes or days. Even after removing the application, the privacy or security is not improved as they get access to your data the moment you accept all their terms and conditions, before installing the app.
So the phones are listening to us mainly because of our carelessness, as we do not spend time checking its conditions rather we focus on the trends or popularity of the application. Another scenario is that if you think that globally popular applications like Facebook or Instagram are the most secure ones as almost everyone uses them, then you are wrong. The trust over these popular apps is gradually decreasing as they mine data to use them for personalized ad suggestions and marketing.
Is the Smartphone Secretly Listening to You? Tips to Prevent This
You're not paranoid but one among few who are in search of tips to tackle privacy breaches. Follow them to reduce the trace you leave behind while using social media platforms.
Tip 1. Change your social media advertisement settings
If you use social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, etc. then make sure to check out the application’s settings and opt for the ‘Review your ad preferences’ option. Here the option to turn off several features that are listed below is available.
- Ads based on data from partners
- In Facebook, turn off the ‘Ads based on your activity on Facebook Company Products that you see elsewhere
- Ads that include your social actions
After turning them off, use the ‘Your information’ feature and turn off the pieces of information including your relationship status, employment details, job title, education, and other qualifications.
Finally, you can remove the separate categories under the ‘Your categories’ feature by clicking on the remove category option.
Tip 2. Avoid switching on the location-tracking feature
To ensure that the smartphone secretly listens to you stop finding your favorite cafe or frequently visited places, turning off location tracking is the first step. To do the same, browse through your phone’s settings or the manual and turn 'location services' off, under the ‘Privacy settings’. Also, click on individual app settings and turn off your location access.
Tip 3. Don’t allow 'cookies' on your PC browser
If you are using a laptop or PC then you might have noticed, every time you visit a new website, it asks for permission to use cookies. By clicking ‘Allow’ you are agreeing to share the search details with the website which they will use according to their terms and conditions. So, rather than spending time to read the lengthy documentation, simply disallow the ‘Cookies’ usage on your browser.
Disabling cookies in browsers such as Google Chrome, Safari, Mozilla Firefox, etc is a precautionary step to ensure privacy against the particular webpage. Another trick for safe browsing on a PC is using the ‘Incognito mode’ in the Chrome browser.
However, note that these tricks will not stop the advertisements from appearing but the frequency will reduce when compared to the earlier generic contents.
So, on the whole, we can conclude that the concern related to smartphones secretly listening to you is not a hoax and there are few methods to reduce them. However, there isn’t a perfect solution that will defy all your concerns as of today. So, let us keep raising our concerns against privacy breaches until the day when we can use smartphones without the fear that the phones are listening to us. In this article, we have discussed the issues and solutions to tackle the problem of data breaches through our activities on smartphones, which is colloquially being labelled as “smartphone secretly listening to you”. Hope this was useful in understanding the current situation where keeping data safe is a tedious yet important task.
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