EN: Is my phone listening to what I say?
You’ve caught yourself thinking:
How can it be?
The sweater. (Duh)
‘I just talked about this with my friends,’ you say to yourself. ‘But did I Google it? I could swear I didn’t Google it’. And yet, you’re seeing an ad on Instagram: the sweater.
How can they know that you wanted that sweater? They have to be listening!
First of all, you’re half right: they do know. You’ve given them several clues that you wanted it. We’ll talk about them in a second.
Second of all, the part you didn’t get right: they're not listening, but they are paying attention. And we’re all making their lives easier.
And third: who are they and why do they care?
Let’s start with the ending: ‘they’ are advertising companies: Google (including YouTube and Gmail), Facebook (including Instagram and Messenger) and others. These companies make money off of showing you ads. But here’s the catch: they need to be good enough that you click through.
And what’s the best way to get people to click on ads? To only show them ads they like 😏
So: you were correct on topics #1 (do they know) and #3 (who and why).
But if they know, how do they know?
They’re not listening.
1. With the right software, you can check what data is coming in and going out of your phone, and Instagram (or the Facebook app, or Messenger, or Chrome, or…) just isn’t sending out audio continuously.
2. There’s one thing everybody hates about their phone: its battery. You take a couple of selfies and lose 5%. You watch a cat video and down it goes… Imagine if different apps on your phone were sending out super heavy audio files non-stop to several destinations. Your phone wouldn’t last two hours.
3. If your phone were to continuously be listening, what would it hear? Over 90% of the time you’re around your phone, it hears only silence. On the other 10% where there’s people talking, the phone can’t be sure that person is you. And if it is you, you’re probably not talking about what you want to buy anyway.
4. They don’t need to listen; they’re watching.
They own your search engine, your social media profile, your email account, your video platform, your online docs platform, your photo album… And what you voluntarily type all day every day into their platforms is a lot easier to check for interests.
This rabbit sells ads online. (Trust me)
“They’re not listening; they’re watching.”
Even outside of Facebook or Google property, tons of sites have ways of checking if you’re logged into the big blue site. Including the store where you found that sweater. And even if you don’t use Facebook, you use Instagram (owned by Facebook), that shares your ID. Facebook and Google both develop analytics tools — installed in 25% and 75% of the world’s million (!) most popular websites respectively — that help businesses understand how potential customers interact with their online stores. In exchange, both companies get to record your data on these websites (for instance, if you added that sweater to your cart but walked away).
The thing we forget is: Google and Facebook don’t just show ads within their domains. The search giant displays ads on over 2 million websites, and Big Blue has around the same number of domains. That’s very likely where you saw the sweater ad that made you go ‘how!? 😬'.
It’s funny how people feel disturbed by the thought of someone listening to everything we say, but they tend to be okay with someone reading everything we write.
Our lives — from what we buy to where we go, who we talk to and who we vote for — are much more valuable than we think.
If you’d like to reach out about this post, drop me an email ☺️