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

> There is so much time spent “debunking” audio recordings being shared

Not really. 99% of the time it's someone claiming that it happens.

And it's always an anecdote, never clear proof that it happened. Let alone that it happened because of the audio and not web activity. And that the conversation was actually the cause for the ad and not the other way around.

Is it technically possible? Sure. But if so many people are so certain that it definitely happens, why didn't dozens of people already prove it with a fresh Google/Apple account and phone?

Here is an example that just happened today. I talked to my partner about me going to a city directly (via one state) or indirectly (via another state). All I said was "so you want me to go directly to X".

Boom, Illinois tourism ad shows up the next time I hit the internet. Scary thing is I didn't even say the state name, just the destination, and SOMETHING calculated that Illinois is in the middle.

This stuff has now happened far too many times in the last 10 years of my life, it is simply implausible to call it coincidence at this point. You are being listened to by your phone.

Ad firms have no ethical boundaries, and have lied about their data collection over and over.

What is really frightening is that if the ad companies know everything about you, then multiple state actors also know everything about you.

Confirmation bias at its finest

Why would that be even be a good targeted ad? Its simpler and more profitable to show you ads about a place you actually plan to go to..

> You are being listened to by your phone.

This would simply eat the battery immediately, it's simply not feasible and given all the other, cheap tracking it wouldn't even be beneficial.

I observed a clean experiment that showed a friend’s Google Pixel phone listening to us and adjusting news stories on Google app’s home screen.

However:

— IIRC the phone was unlocked,

— this only affected the news feed, and

— this was 5–6 years ago.

We 1) noted how Google app shows some selection of news after opening, 2) talked clearly for a minute about a very random and conspicuous topic in presence of the unlocked phone, and 3) demonstrated that the Google app showing an article relevant to the topic within a few minutes. The article was a few days old, too, so it was clearly boosted out of more recent stories.

The only reason it could be something other than the phone microphone is if I was misled by my friend steering us towards a predefined topic. However, that would require some extensive preparation to rule out the story appearing in the first step and would be very atypical for that person.

I recall seeing an article about Google admitting this and changing their policy to stop, but can’t seem to find it now. I imagine it was bad publicity, though to my friend it was a feature to see personalized content.

> Not really. 99% of the time it's someone claiming that it happens.

It’s never packet captures, reverse engineering of the app, or one of the tens of thousands of employees working for these companies blowing the whistle.

Nobody can even show that their phone app is using background CPU when they talk, utilizing the microphone, or sending packets from that app. All of which are in reach for anyone with Android and some basic skills.

It’s always an anecdote about someone who said something out loud and then saw ad for it later. That’s it. That’s the entire basis for the conspiracy. Yet it persists.

It’s a very good litmus test for people who don’t understand technology as well as they claim to.

This was a coincidence.

That’s why it’s something you observed one time 5-6 years ago, not something that happens repeatedly in a testable way.

Isn’t it more likely it’s not a coincidence though?

How often does someone look at their phone over 5-6 years?

Having one incidence where you’re talking about something and then you also see that something on your phone out of 2000 days of using a phone is definitely more likely to be coincidence.

On the other hand it might point to something more serious, that the level of tracking Facebook and Google use lets them loosely predict what you are going to think about.

So maybe the microphones are safe and pristine, but we should be worried and appalled the same as if they were actually listening.

I like to think about it sorta thermodynamically: consider your behaviour under the blurred lens of interests, what you buy, what you read, how you react to news, etc, in this model humana have, let's say, n bits of entropy; how many of those bits can Facebook decode?

How often do you think this person did experiments? It is a study with n=1 but the unrelated metric of how many times something else happens does not influence the likelihood of a false positive

Not in 2025. I often record long duration meetings and working sessions with iOS voice memos. There’s no noticeable impact.

You could easily record and do a fast voice transcription to gather keywords from a hardware perspective.

Only did it once. The likelihood of coincidence is low, because the topic was specific and unusual.

Here’s something relevant in Google’s current support KB[0], where the combination of the following further supports that the experiment did not have be staged (emphasis mine):

> Web & App Activity saves your searches and activity from other Google services in your Google Account. You may get more personalized experiences, like: <…> Content recommendations

> When Web & App Activity is on, you can include audio recordings from your interactions with Google Search, Assistant, and Maps as part of your activity.

Let’s now go back to the experiment. Given the phone was unlocked, voice activity was enabled, and Google app or search widget was on Google Pixel’s screen (I am certain at least the latter was true) during the experiment, could talking near the phone be counted as “interaction”? If the answer is “yes” then it seems very reasonable for us[1] to expect, per that KB, that the app would listen more actively than what’s required for assistant activation, and that recorded snippets would count as your “activity” designed to affect content recommendations (including the article feed Google app showed to us on its app’s main screen).

No tinfoil hat required.

***

Note that it does not mention ads among personalized experiences[2], and we had not observed any change in the ads either. I didn’t see what exactly counts as “interaction” or whether this blazing-fast content personalization used to include ads previously, but in line with the “move fast” culture of mid-2010s Silicon Valley it could well have been much more lax at some point. If so, I do not envy all the people who have observed it only to be gaslit and mocked by peers and media.

***

As to the article I was vaguely remembering in my original comment, the above makes me think that it was merely about the change of the default to opt-in, which it is as of today:

> This voice and audio activity setting is off unless you choose to turn it on.

[0] https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/54068?hl=en&co=G...

[1] Us tech people; this might not at all align with the intuition of other people.

[2] I rather suspect that ToS and possibly some other KB article would indicate that your activity would, in fact, affect your interest profile and by extension ads, but probably in a much less obvious and more gradual fashion.