Your phone isn't secretly listening to you, but the truth is more disturbing

>Not only does the system know exactly where you are at every moment, it knows who your friends are, what they are interested in, and who you are spending time with

This actually makes sense of an anecdote a colleague uses to say that he thinks his phone is listening to him.

I am a keen skier. He used to ski a lot, but hasn't been for several years. Around the start of ski season this year, we talked about my plans to go skiing that weekend, and later that day he started seeing skiing-related ads.

He thinks it's because his phone listened into the conversation, but it could just as easily have been that it was spending more time near my phone (I had only recently started at that job) on which I regularly search for skiing-related things like conditions reports and directions to ski areas.

> but it could just as easily have been that it was spending more time near my phone (I had only recently started at that job) on which I regularly search for skiing-related things like conditions reports and directions to ski areas

Bingo! This is most certainly what happened.

I’ve spent time trying to convince my friends that their phone’s microphone is not constantly listening and running sounds through voice recognition software to isolate their voice (so the individual who owns the phone can be advertised to), then through sentiment analysis software (to inform advertisement bids), all without meaningfully affecting battery life. That is usually an uphill battle but explaining location services and the fact they don’t know what I’ve searched gets the point across better. (It is actually creepier.)

Or just ski ads go out when ski season starts and he only noticed that he saw one because you had the conversation.

You were probably in the same place using the same IP address, and both browsed - doesn’t matter which sites you both visited, the trackers have you. You might have shown him where you were going. Ad trackers thought “I’ll serve ski ads to people that were on that IP address because somebody else looked at xyz”.

How do IP addresses work with cell towers? The WiFi where I work doesn't allow personal devices to connect, but there's reasonable 5G.

At my last 3 jobs they've had a public wifi network for staff to use for personal use.