“Who” is “Listening” to our conversation?

Since the pandemic started last year, people stayed at home and everything must be done at home as well. Most people played on phones all the time and talked to families or friends without the avoidance of phones. The situation created a circumstance that your phone is “listening” to your talking. Later on, people started to notice that it is true that your phone is “listening” because when you always talk about a product, the ad will appear on your social media platforms. So, from now on there is a question arise that who is “listening” to our conversation?

I also found the phenomena last year after I went back to China during the pandemic. I wanted to rent an apartment in the city and my family always had a conversation related to apartment rental. Then, 2–3 days later, agencies’ ads started to pop up on social media that I always use. I found that was interesting but I did not do any research on it at the time because I have heard some discussions about the phenomena. However, now, when I choose the topic about privacy issues regarding social platforms, the question appears again in my mind.

Articles and Studies

There are certain media that ask the question to social media’s top levels about whether the phone is “listening” to users, all of the executives offer a negative answer. Also, BBC issued an article about the phenomenon “Why phones that secretly listen to us are a myth”, and the article talked about two experiments that were done separately by Wandera and Northeastern University. Both experiments show there is no evidence that social media is “listening” to our conversation.

There is another article on Marketplace illustrates a very interesting point that is a frequent illusion or the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon. It is a psychological problem that once you pay attention to something, you will notice it everywhere. Isn’t it interesting?

Currently, indeed we do not have enough evidence to show that social media platforms monitoring our conversation but there are AI services on our phones, like “Siri” or “Alexa”. How we can ensure these AIs are not secretly collecting our conversation. The privacy problem is always a hotspot in the social media industry and everyone cares about it because no one wants to be a “naked” person on the internet.