Do smartphones "eavesdrop" on their owners?

[Brother]

Every user at least once in his life has come across the fact that the smartphone displayed ads directly related to what he recently talked about. Wandera specialists tried to figure out whether such cases are a coincidence, or whether the phones really "eavesdrop" on the conversations of their owners all the time.

In an isolated room, the researchers ran an advertisement for pet food on an iPhone and Samsung Galaxy and looped the playback for 30 minutes. In another room, the researchers left the same smartphones, where a control group of people was for three days for 30 minutes.

During the study, the researchers set out to find out two things: whether the battery consumption changed over time, the use of key background apps and data consumption, and whether feed ads were displayed in the apps after the experiment ended.

After analyzing the data obtained during the experiment, experts did not find any evidence that the smartphone activated its microphone or transmitted data in response to sound. Battery and data consumption is unchanged or only slightly changed. The data consumption of voice assistants Siri and Google Assistant was negligible. If they transferred user conversations to the cloud, the data consumption would be significantly higher. At the end of the experiment, the feed advertisement was not displayed.

According to Wandera, advertisers do not need to eavesdrop on conversations for effective targeting. “They have clever methods for profiling users. Location data, browser activity, IP addresses, pixel tracking and social media pages provide enough information to predict what you're ready to buy, ”the researchers said.

However, even if advertisers do not spy on users, it does not mean that others do not. For example, cybercriminals can eavesdrop on the conversations of their victims using malware like Pegasus.