No, your phone isn’t listening to you to serve you ads. So what’s going on then?

Hey Wiretap, what’s the weather like today?

Before I go any further, I should point out that phones actually have the technical capacity to listen. This is how voice assistants work. If allowed, they can listen for wake words like “Hey Siri” and “Okay Google” and go from sleep mode to action. This is a feature that you actively agree to have enabled.

What phones aren’t allowed to do is listen actively and secretly to everything we say. They can’t record our conversations to serve us targeted ads based on what they hear through their microphones.

But even without this ability, Meta and Google already know a lot about us – more than most people think. They know our age, our gender and our family situation; they know where we live and what places we visit; they know who we are friends with and what interests them and us; they know what we are looking for, what content we consume, what brands we buy, what topics interest us.

Tech giants are also able to make connections between data points like the ones above. These connections are then used to serve ads that are more interesting to us – ads that people with a profile like ours tend to click on. Add to that a bunch of biases and tendencies that we all have, and the recipe for suspicion begins to brew.

The tricks our brain plays on us

Several years ago, I bought a new car. Soon after, I started noticing how many cars of the same make, model, and even color were driving around the streets. Of course, a bunch of gray Volvos didn’t suddenly appear in town. If anything, my brain was just starting to notice them now that I owned one.

Speaking of noticing things, watch this video before continuing with the article.

It was weird, wasn’t it? Our brain has many defects/characteristics that sometimes play tricks on us. Long story short, our meat computers tend to focus only on what is current, important, and can have an immediate effect. Other stimuli are simply filtered out, as it would be overwhelming to take in everything, from anywhere, at any time. For the curious, there is a book called The invisible gorilla and he covers this phenomenon in detail.

How does this affect the ads we notice?

Studies show that people speak thousands of words per day, and among them are surely keywords that can be related to a product, service or business advertised online. At the same time, the number of ads served to us daily is in the hundreds. Therefore, if our phones were listening to serve us ads, it would be logical to expect unique and suspicious matches to occur much more frequently – multiple times a day, no doubt.

But the problem is that people don’t pay attention to the hundreds of cases where the ads don’t match what they were talking about. On the other hand, people notice the matches, probably because they are already concerned about whatever is in the ad. After all, they discuss it. In fact, it is not impossible that the conversation was unconsciously triggered by the same or a similar ad, which had briefly appeared earlier.

And sometimes it’s just a combination of chance and reading data patterns from Facebook and the like. Remember: Google and Meta already know more about you and your habits than you think. So when an ad for your favorite restaurant pops up right after you mention it, it’s probably because you already go there often at that time of day. This ad was going to appear anyway.

I’m sure this explanation won’t please everyone, but it remains likely until irrefutable evidence emerges that we are being spied on. Do you have scary ads targeting shareable stories? The comments section below is yours!