For years now, people believe that their smartphones are listening to their conversations through their microphones, all the time, even when the microphone is clearly not activated. Targeted advertising lies at the root of this conviction; when you just had a conversation with a friend about buying a pink didgeridoo and a flanel ukelele, and you then get ads for pink didgeridoos and flanel ukeleles, it makes intuitive sense to assume your phone was listening to you. How else would Google, Amazon, Facebook, or whatever, know your deepest didgeridoo desires and untapped ukelele urges?
The truth is that targeted advertising using cross-site cookies and profile building is far more effective than people think, and on top of that, people often forget what they did on their phone or laptop ten minutes ago, let alone yesterday or last week. Smartphones are not secretly listening to you, and it’s not through covert microphone activation that it knows about your musical interests.
But then.
Media conglomerate Cox Media Group has been pitching tech companies on a new targeted advertising tool that uses audio recordings culled from smart home devices. The existence of this program was revealed late last year. Now, however, 404 Media has also gotten its hands on additional details about the program through a leaked pitch deck. The contents of the deck are creepy, to say the least.
Cox’s tool is creepily called “Active Listening” and the deck claims that it works by using smart devices, which can “capture real-time intent data by listening to our conversations.” After the data is captured, advertisers can “pair this voice-data with behavioral data to target in-market consumers,” the deck says. The vague use of artificial intelligence to collect data about consumers’ online behavior is also mentioned, with the deck noting that consumers “leave a data trail based on their conversations and online behavior” and that the AI-fueled tool can collect and analyze said “behavioral and voice data from 470+ sources.”
↫ Lucas Ropek at Gizmodo
Looking at the pitch deck in question, you can argue that it’s not even referring to smartphones, and that it is incredibly vague – probably on purpose – what “active listening” and “conversations” are really referring to. It might as well be simply referring to the various conversations on unencrypted messaging platforms, directly with companies, or stuff like that. “Smart devices” is also intentionally vague, and could be anything from one of those smart fridges to your smartphone.
But you could also argue that yes, this seems to be pretty much referring to “listening to our conversations” in the most literal sense, by somehow – we have no idea how – turning on our smartphone microphones, in secret, without iOS or Android, or Apple or Google, knowing about it? It seems far-fetched, but at the same time, a lot of corporate and government programs and efforts seemed far-fetched until some whisteblower spilled the beans.
The feeling that your phones are listening to you without your consent, in secret, will never go away. Even if some irrefutable evidence came up that it isn’t possible, it’s just too plausible to be cast aside.