Are your devices always all ears?
How many times has this happened that you would’ve had a conversation about this particular thing and the next thing you know is all your social media apps and web browsers are displaying advertisements related to it. It almost feels like a nexus. It’s not even an exaggeration when I say sometimes, I am shown ads of things I’ve just thought about in my head. The main question that pops up is whether our so very smartphones are listening to us?
The vulnerability begins with voice assistants always having their ear at us with the “always-on” feature to pick up words like “Hello Siri” or “Alexa” or “Ok Google”. For this to happen the microphone must be active all the time, so of course, your devices are all ears. But this isn’t exactly how advertisements work. For starters, your social media apps can’t listen to you, just simply because they don’t need to. The information like location, interests, age, etc. are already fed to them and are enough to show us related advertisements based on our behavioral patterns and attitudes. The cookies you accept across various websites are just simple tools to transport your demographic information to third parties which later display specific ads related to a target group or audience.
Data can be broadly classified into:
Personal Data: Data that identifies you particularly, for example, your name, gender, your device’s number, etc.
Engagement Data: This refers to the posts you engage with across different platforms. This includes posts liked by you, website clicks, saved posts, and other social interactions.
Attitudinal Data: Usually focuses on quality data pertaining to one’s psychology and traces patterns.
Behavioral Data: This covers your interactions with different sites and includes elements like time spent on a website, product searches, product shares, and products bought.
Out of the above, companies usually tend to focus on relative data in terms of ads and churn out ads that are likely to appeal to you. Companies make use of Algorithms and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to display specific ads at specific timings. The truth is that AI and algorithms simply use data to predict one’s behavioral pattern extremely accurately. Well, the chances of you coming across an ad of something from your previous conversations are equivalent to one in a million! With the odds being so low every time an ad is shown 2500 people will just have been talking about it.
Ways to protect your privacy online include turning off the microphone, using camera covers, making use of encrypted messaging applications, and regulating permissions of various applications on your devices.
